Leadership Is a Craft: High-Agency Leadership in AEC
Release Date: 10/07/2026
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Leadership Is a Craft: High-Agency Leadership in AEC
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Most AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft. Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a 20-person firm and sold it after 12 years. He explains why leading highly technical experts calls for high-agency leadership instead of command-and-control. He walks through the five levels of his...
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Bryce just got back from Women in HVACR in Indianapolis, where she spoke to a room full of owners and managers about a number that should keep them up at night: women are leaving the trades at roughly three times the rate they are getting hired into them. Every job fair booth, every high school program, every recruiting push is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. This is not a DEI session. There is no slide arguing that diversity is good for business. This is a retention conversation built for the owner who has one woman on a crew of nine and cannot figure out why she is...
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Barb Allen spent 20 years on commercial job sites, starting as a carpenter apprentice in 1997 and working her way up to superintendent. She was the first woman her company had ever hired out of college for that track. She left the built environment in 2022 after a meeting where leadership told her she was "difficult to work with," then admitted nobody could say how. That meeting became a book. In OneLadder to Leadership, Barb names four gender specific challenges as rungs on an unsafe ladder: missing, broken, sticky, and slippery. In this conversation she breaks down all four, tells the story...
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Architecture is usually discussed as a service. A client has a need, a firm delivers a building, everyone moves on to the next project. Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni makes a harder argument. She says the built environment is one of the strongest forces shaping whether people in a place trust each other, and that the consequences of getting it wrong can take generations to show up. She would know. Marwa is an architect based in Homs, Syria, who stayed through the war and wrote about what she was watching in real time. In this episode she and Bryce talk about how decades of zoning and redevelopment...
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Episode Summary:In this enlightening episode, we welcome Valerie Hawkins, a dedicated nutritionist and self-concept coach specializing in helping women tackle anxiety, burnout, and overwhelm. Drawing from her extensive background as a working mom and former engineer, Valerie shares her personal journey through the challenges of anxiety and burnout, offering valuable insights into how nutrition can significantly impact mental health and overall well-being.
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Great healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operational efficiency with genuine, patient-centered care. We get into the human details and the hard tradeoffs. Why she starts every project by leaving her ego at the door. How ESa levels the room so the...
info_outlineMost AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft.
Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a 20-person firm and sold it after 12 years. He explains why leading highly technical experts calls for high-agency leadership instead of command-and-control. He walks through the five levels of his Mountain of Why and why emotional intelligence is only one leg of the stool. He gives principals a concrete exercise to try this week, and he lays out the ROI math on developing your leaders.
This episode is for firm owners, principals, studio leads, and any technical professional who just got handed a team.
About Zack Tomlin:
Zack Tomlin, PE, is a mechanical engineer and 20+ year AEC industry veteran. He founded Maple Engineering and led it for 12 years, growing it to about 20 people through a successful acquisition. He is the national award-winning author of Craft: The Expedition of Business and founder of Your Craft Your Climb (YC2), a leadership development practice working exclusively with engineers, architects, construction managers, and other AEC professionals. His wife is an architect, so the industry follows him home.
Website: yourcraftyourclimb.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zack-tomlin
What We Cover:
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Introduction and Zack's background, from the Raleigh public library to Maple Engineering
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The shift from "an engineer with support staff" to a real organization at six to eight people
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Why designing an organization is human-centered design, like designing a building
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The Mountain of Why: five levels of decision-making, from copying others to first principles
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High-agency leadership and why sports and military analogies can stifle technical experts
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The leader's job: clarity in the face of external confusion, order in the face of internal chaos
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Why every firm needs a compelling story, and how that creates cohesion across offices
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Why emotional intelligence is only a third of effective leadership
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The staff experience journey, and the project folder that wasted everyone's time
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The ROI of leadership development for small and mid-size firms
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How engineers, architects, and construction managers tend to lead differently
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The leadership advice Zack thinks is wrong: "hire people smarter than you"
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Where to find Zack and his book, plus closing thoughts
Key Takeaways:
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In AEC, your team often knows more about their piece of the work than you do. Your job is to create the conditions for them to make good calls on their own, not to direct every move.
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Leaders owe their teams two things: clarity about where you're going, and order around standards and accountability. Think traffic lights. Everyone knows the rules and what happens when you run one.
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Emotional intelligence is the price of admission. You also need a stronger mental model of people and organizations, and an understanding of how people prefer to work and solve problems.
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Walk your staff's workday like a customer journey this week. Open the files, find the SOP, wait on the software, and fix one point of friction. You're paying for very expensive brains.
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A studio lead running six or seven people oversees $700K to $1M in payroll. A $2,000 to $5,000 investment in that person needs well under a 1 to 2 percent improvement to pay off.
Resources + Links:
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Your Craft Your Climb: yourcraftyourclimb.com
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Zack on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zack-tomlin (subscribe to his biweekly newsletter on high-agency leadership)
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Craft: The Expedition of Business by Zack Tomlin: free copy at yourcraftyourclimb.com, you just pay shipping. Reach out to Zack directly for a signed copy.