IIDA Perspective - Summer 2018 - 48

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48

perspective

iida.org/perspective

PERSPECTIVE: What is the
hierarchy of your firm, and how
does that influence your DNA
and how you work?
HIERLINGER: There is not a major

hierarchy in our company, meaning
that we're giving everyone a chance to
be bold-if someone has an idea, let's
bring it forward. If a teammate wants
to run with something, let's educate
and push them in the right direction
and give it a try. We try to limit
hierarchy as we find increased levels a
little bit daunting to navigate and that
they sometimes can slow the progress.
When you have to be agile, you need
to remain quick on your feet, and
we've found that too much hierarchy
does not allow you to do that.
It's the ability to quickly become aware of-and adapt
to-potential new strengths. You're always changing,
and if one of those changes means that you're becoming
strong in something new, you can't let that be unknown or
overlooked. We have a statement: "You can be bold, you can
do this."
GALULLO: We're trying to build teams that are selfcleaning, self-policing, if you will, meaning they don't have
to wait for approval from above. As long as they're operating
within the game rules that we've set out and as long as
they're operating with the client as a team member, they
don't need to ask for permission to break the rules. I think
that's important. I had a client one time, many years ago, say
to me, "I'm building an organization that fails fast," which
is something we aspire to. Failure needs to be part of the
process. You don't try to avoid failure, you just try to fail as
fast as you can, so you can get on to the next idea and see if it
works. And so we are allowed to fail; it's actually welcomed
and a meaningful part of the creative process. Because
of this philosophy and because teams and individuals are
empowered to fail and learn-and ultimately succeed-
natural leaders start to emerge.
If you have a strong DNA-if everybody agrees on the
direction you're headed, where the North Star is and what's
important to the organization-you can allow leaders to
emerge within that. That doesn't just rely on the founder of
the organization to spread seeds around. And that has been
working for us. We've had natural leaders that have grown up
in the organization. And some, you look around, are younger
than they might otherwise be if the rules were different. But
a leader is a leader, and you give them the tools they need to
help spread the word. n

Photo by: Westend61/Getty Images

front of the rest of the
office to share what they
learned from their last project.
We look at how we can
improve our work processes
and templates for various
things. Everything is always
open to improvement. By
doing that, I'm setting the
expectation that everyone
in the office should be part
of this process of constant
experimentation, collaboration,
and improvement.
HIERLINGER: As we're all
aware, there's a great deal of
hard work that goes into winning
project work; thus, we felt that
it seemed anticlimactic to not
take a moment to celebrate. In our Minneapolis office,
for example, we created something called Saber, where on
a quarterly basis we saber a bottle of Prosecco [a process
where the bottle is sliced open with a blade]
for each client or project win. We've
learned how to saber-very safely
mind you, with human resource
approval. We then bring the
FAILURE NEEDS TO BE A
clients in, the brokerage
PART OF THE PROCESS.
firms involved, as well as
YOU DON'T TRY TO AVOID
everyone who played a role
FAILURE, YOU JUST TRY
of the initial process on
all sides prior to award,
TO FAIL AS FAST AS YOU
so that, depending on the
CAN, SO YOU CAN GET
number of won projects,
ON TO THE NEXT IDEA
there are upwards of maybe
AND SEE IF IT WORKS.
125 people at this event.
This creates an energy that is
-DAVID GALULLO,
special and something you don't
LEED AP
just see a lot in the industry. We're
trying to instill that idea across all the
NELSON offices-the freedom to celebrate and to say
congratulations.
TIMMONS-BEUTNER: If everyone has had a
tough week with a bunch of deadlines, I'll treat everyone
to lunch, or we'll open a bottle of wine and just relax a
little bit at the end of the day. It's a fine line to walk
between being encouraging and relaxed and also pushing
us to excel. But my team also knows my expectations
are high, and I'll push them-as in, 'That's great, but
what if we just did this one little tweak to make it a
bit better?'

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