Libsyn Directory

Prioritization Beats Productivity: Autonomy, Appreciation, and Culture

Release Date: 10/21/2026

Prioritization Beats Productivity: Autonomy, Appreciation, and Culture

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

Firms promote their strongest technical people into leadership and then give them almost no training. When a team struggles, leaders often blame the team. Amanda Van Der Heiden has seen this play out across dozens of organizations, and she argues the problem usually starts with how people are being led. Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make core values stick after the launch. They cover how to adapt your leadership style without losing yourself, and what has to be in place before a leader can hand over real autonomy. Amanda explains...

Nobody at Work Is Your Friend: Relationships, Boundaries, and the Right Fit

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

Every career advice list says to protect your relationships. Almost nobody explains what that looks like day to day. Julia Hurley has built a real estate business, a political career, and an athlete management company on relationships, so she knows the how. Julia and Bryce compare matchmaking in real estate and recruiting, and why buyers and candidates are both getting choosier. Julia explains how she teaches college athletes to be the CEO of their own lives by separating the people who support them from the people who manage their money and careers. She shares her rule of thumb for rental...

Leadership Is a Craft: High-Agency Leadership in AEC

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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...

The Leaky Bucket: Why Women Leave HVACR and What Leadership Can Actually Fix

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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...

The Four Rungs on the Ladder: Why AEC Firms Hire Women and Lose Them Anyway

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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...

Architecture as a Society-Making Tool, Told From a War Zone

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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...

Burned Out and Anxious? What Your Food Has to Do with It and all the Food Recalls

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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.

Valerie’s transformative

Super-Architect: Craft, AI, and the Future of the Profession

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

Architects have been losing ground for years, and the industry keeps explaining it away with fee pressure, schedule pressure, and software. Beau [Last Name] has a less comfortable answer. He says the profession's own craft has declined, and that decline is exactly why architects keep getting moved further from the decisions that matter. His case runs like this. When drawings are incomplete and coordination is loose, somebody has to fill that gap, and lately that somebody is the builder. The builder absorbs the risk, then reasonably takes the authority that comes with it. Beau and Bryce get...

Stop Playing Small: How a Clear Vision Unlocks Your Career and Life

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

Designing Care, Not Just Buildings: Healthcare Design and AI

Women in AEC: Wine After Work

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...

More Episodes

Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make core values stick after the launch. They cover how to adapt your leadership style without losing yourself, and what has to be in place before a leader can hand over real autonomy. Amanda explains appreciation styles and the platinum rule. She makes the case for prioritization over time management, and she shares how a 75-person company with no budget got a big initiative done anyway.

This episode is for new managers, firm owners, and anyone who has been promoted for their technical skills and now leads people.

About Amanda Van Der Heiden:
Amanda Van Der Heiden partners with organizations on strategic learning, leadership development, and culture transformation. She has 20+ years of experience across people, project, and process management, and has led enterprise rollouts for 40+ companies in 15+ countries and 12+ industries. She's an award-winning speaker, consultant, coach, and author, with a master's in industrial/organizational psychology, CPTM certification, and credentials from ATD, SHRM, and McKinsey. She started her career in early childhood development and education, and today she's a working mom of two who blocks off 8 a.m. for the school and daycare run.

What We Cover:

Introduction and Amanda's background across 40 clients, 15 countries, and 12 industries
What to do when someone says "this isn't for me anymore"
Why a high performer going quiet should get leadership's attention
Getting 3,000 people in five countries to live the same five core values
Why a values poster on the wall doesn't change behavior
The three stages of leadership: yourself, individuals, then teams
Adapting your communication style for engineers, techies, and salespeople
Why your C players might just need a different leader
What has to be true before you hand over autonomy
Appreciation styles and the platinum rule
Why prioritization matters more than time management
The Eisenhower matrix and the "one thing" question
What a people-first culture actually takes
The biggest mistake leaders make with culture change
Boundaries, working in global markets, and parenting two small kids
The career advice Amanda would retire for good
Where to find Amanda and her free goal workbook + closing thoughts

Key Takeaways:

Before labeling someone a C player, check three things. Are they in the right role? Do they have processes that set them up to succeed? Do they have the support and tools they need?
Autonomy needs structure first. Give people a clear picture of what good looks like, a plan with the right amount of management, and regular evaluation. High performers still want feedback on what to do better.
Use the platinum rule when you give praise. Treat people the way they want to be treated. Public praise can make an introvert want to hide, while a quiet email can make an extrovert feel overlooked.
Adapting your style isn't being fake. Amanda lowers her voice, shortens her sentences, and leads with data when she presents to technical audiences, because the goal is to be understood.
Ask what one thing would make everything else on your list easier or unnecessary. If a task is neither important nor time-sensitive, take it off the list.

Resources + Links:

Amanda's free goal development workbook: GoGTDS.com
Amanda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandavanderheiden/
The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White
The Eisenhower Matrix
The ONE Thing by Gary Keller (source of the "one thing" question Amanda references)

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