Building High-Performing, Resilient, Proactive Teams in Architecture Firms | 697

0:00A good leader is somebody who creates other leaders. Hello, Architect Nation, and welcome back. This is the right place for you if you run an architectural practice. On today's episode, you will discover why being the most experienced person in the room can quietly turn you into the bottleneck, and what it takes to get decisions off your desk without chaos. The real trade-off most firm owners miss when they hire cheaper junior help, and how to build a team that actually multiplies your capacity instead of adding more supervision. And finally, a practical way to spot whether your firm is truly high performing using one number, the 200 Club, and what to change first if this number makes you wince.

0:38What you're about to hear is a talk I delivered for the CIAD Wessex CPD 43 series on building high performing resilient proactive teams. It was a wonderful invitation and opportunity. And I thank very much the organizers for allowing me to talk on that. And so hope you enjoy.

0:58Rion Willard: And now a word from today's sponsor. A while ago, we began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company World Teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. We were intrigued by another business that are addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively. to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly and also being very sensitive about labor costs.

1:31Rion Willard: World Teams is built to address these issues. World Teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high-performing remote teams quickly, beneficently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing underqualified candidates. World Teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near-native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration, and World Teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that's so important to a practice.

2:12Rion Willard: To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice, go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. That's one word, businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. As a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. Today I'm going to be talking about building high performance, resilient, proactive teams. Let me just introduce myself. That's me on the right and that's my business partner Enoch on the left.

2:49I'm a retired architect. I used to work at Grimshaw Rogers practice in London and I've also spent the best part of a decade running my own practice, though these days it's very rare that I do any architecture unless it's a project that I own myself. Over the last 10-12 years or so, I've worked with over 200 architecture firms worldwide as a business consultant, helping them largely do a number of things from systems to winning new work and ultimately building teams. Some of you might be familiar with the Business of Architecture podcast that Enoch and I host. I personally have done about 400 interviews, there's probably about a thousand up there now with industry leaders and various firm owners.

3:42Enoch and myself have co-founded Business of Architecture, which is now a consulting agency. We've got over 120 active clients in the US and in the UK. So I spend my time split between London and New York. And we're very proud. We've built our own team, which we're just, you know, for me, our own team is just an, it's such an amazing thing to be working with these brilliant, brilliant people. We're very, very blessed and we've got there's eight of us now we've grown quite a bit and we're a multiple seven-figure business and Enoch and myself also authored the smart practice program which is basically an operating system for architecture firms to increase their profits and efficiency my own experience in leadership and communication Enoch and myself we invest a lot of money into our own training.

4:39We've invested hundreds of thousands. I've been trained in conflict resolution, in ontological coaching, which is a type of communication. We've participated in a number of extreme leadership challenges, so sort of SAS-styled training with men in the dark on beaches and doing all sorts of things that involve being extremely cold. We've trained hundreds of leaders of firms and also we sometimes go into businesses and actually train their teams as well and of course as I mentioned we've built our own high-performing team at Business of Architecture as well. So the problem that many business owners find themselves facing is ineffective leadership creates bottlenecks, overwhelm and stress.

5:29So overwhelm and being stressed out probably the most common thing that I see with architecture practices people come talk to us about being stretched thin every single decision that the team needs to make has to go through them it's not uncommon that architects and designers leads at these firms they end up building a business where they're at the center of it and they're the one with the most experience and expertise which inherently becomes quite problematic because every question at some point needs to go through them and if there's ever a problem then the business leader is going to get sucked into it by virtue of having built a team uh typically of inexperience around them and it's often a bit of a reactive thing why that happens sometimes it's it's i'll give people the benefit of the doubt and say that it's not all ego but there is part of that and and not to underestimate that as well because actually building a high performing team requires a lot of humility, like a surprising amount of humility that we might not actually expect.

6:32And when we're building our own business, we tend to instinctively or reactively fill the team up with people who are less experienced than ourselves. This is in part, as I said, a bit of ego. And also more practically, the way that we're thinking about finance means that we're a little bit more defensive and concerned and worried so we hire inexperienced people. This means that we see team members not able to take accountability and responsibility. This is a complaint that I hear more and more these days of team members being unable to take criticism, not instinctively taking accountability for themselves and not really wanting to take on the burden of responsibility.

7:17Now that's quite a complex one to unpack or the reasons why but we are seeing that more and more and I'm going to put it into the hands of the leaders that that's on us okay that this is our responsibility to create an environment where team members are able to to handle criticism and have more robust conversations it takes something though it takes something the leader often does not want to hold the team accountable for performance. There's a conflict resolution avoidance, okay, so being overly agreeable, saying yes to everything, no boundaries with clients, and the team then becomes unmotivated, producing mediocre results, and then we get the same mistakes happening over and over and over again, which just leads to more burnout and exhaustion.

8:15The cost of this problem, well, decreased productivity equals lower revenue. So it's going to hurt our bottom line. When we've got an increased employee turnover, this becomes extremely expensive. So not uncommon that we'll be talking to practices and they've got, you know, it's the third person that's left them this year and they're kind of looking at themselves why is this happening this is this happened having things to do with me we all know it's expensive even to be using recruitment officers or just the time and energy expended into hiring new people really can take its toll on a business.

9:00We often see team owners actually lacking in confidence when their team isn't really knocking out the park and this kind of goes both ways that the business owner starts doubting themselves and then they start creating low aspirations and there's a culture of complaint, poor results and of course low fees. Okay so I think low fees is probably you know if anyone's ever in denial about all the sorts of problems that's happening in the business then we can look at low fees and low fees is the is the real symptom of all of this and again those repeated mistakes over and over so the possibility well what are we trying to create here powerful leadership creates a network of collaboration and we'll talk a little bit more about what a networked business actually looks like imagine our team where our team members are able to take accountability and responsibility for themselves they're proactive they're happily leading themselves and each other and the leader of the firm is actually able to inspire accountability it's not always this horrible heavy conversation people getting upset team member the team leader not enjoying having to do it or the team leader just just avoiding it at all cost and not doing it at all or it becomes into some kind of ugly fight and when we've got a highly motivated team and everybody is tapping into their potential the beauty the joy of working with teams is that when everyone is working together you get something that kind of cliche if you get something greater than the sum of the parts and it's really true we often talk about teams or bringing people on as being more like multipliers as opposed to like a linear addition.

10:52Okay, what I mean by that is that when there's two or three people, it's like it's nine times as effective, right? Because it's, things start bouncing off each other. And when it works, it's amazing. And one of my criticisms of the architectural industry in the whole is, when I look at the statistics, I see things like, You know, it's sort of 80 % of all architects are working in a firm which is under five people in a micro practice. And there's some benefits to that. And there's an enormous amount, maybe 60 % of people who are just working as sole practitioners. And I mean, that's why architecture is hard.

11:33That's really, you know, a big part of why running a business is so hard. When you're doing it alone, it's very, very, very difficult. It's very exhausting. And so not building a team, not having people to help is a fatal flaw for many businesses. So when we're in possibility and we're running a team like that, obviously increased productivity, we get better revenue, higher employee retention, which is just all around effective. Your expertise starts to really deepen. Institutional knowledge starts to build up. and it can be a much more sort of powerful results generating engine in your business.

12:16Obviously, team leaders, when you've got an amazing team, you feel confident. And this allows the team leaders, the owners to aim high, have high aspirations and go into sales conversations knowing that they are the dogs and they will start demanding, asking, negotiating, being more sophisticated in their requests around fees and winning. And of course, we have this lovely scenario of the autonomous team, i.e. you as the business owner can go off on holiday for a few weeks, come back, and the business is running calmer than ever before. So some principles. I'm going to flick through this very quickly.

13:00This is a great book called The Three Laws of Performance. I highly recommend it. and I'm going to surmise these three laws very quickly how people perform correlates to how situations occur to them how a situation occurs arises in language future-based language transforms situations how situations occur for people in short the language and the vision of your practice is the culture it is the space within which every other activity takes place and the language with which you're talking about the future to the rest of your business is probably the single most important thing that is determining their performance.

13:46And as a leader, we want to get interested in how language impacts our team members and be stewards of a visionary way of talking in our businesses. when we've got a clear vision in a business this is where we can start to enroll the rest of the team in a unified direction and a clear vision should include things such as how much money do you want to be make what kind of projects do you want how big do you want the office um we should have some idea of a of a plan or how long it's going to take i don't care even if sometimes the plan is ridiculous or it's just ridiculously ambitious. If it's done well and there's what we call a completion with the past, okay, so that's quite an emotional thing I haven't got the time to go into in this conversation, but getting complete with the past results and enrolling the team into your vision of the future and there's a time frame attached to it, there's clear, objective, measurable results.

14:53Fantastic. This is the beginnings of unifying an organization and a team into productivity and excitement and fulfillment. And really, as a leader of a business, you have to be investing the time in planning for the future and visioning. If you don't do this, this is one of the most crucial roles that you have as a CEO, as a business operator that is being neglected and the impacts of it are pretty bad. So I'm just going to do a case study of one of our clients. This is Taizo. And Taizo runs actually a larger practice. And I know a lot of people here are probably going to be in the small business realm.

15:40But I like this example because it's quite clear and the size of his business allows us to see lots of different things that he's implemented very effectively. And he's been dealing with the same sorts of issues and problems that we see on a smaller scale. So this is Taizo. He's based in Vancouver. He's been a client of ours since 2022 and he's quite an incredible person, very talented architect, can draw just some of the most beautiful drawings you can imagine. This is the sort of work that he does. So it's multi-family housing, mixed-use developments, and there's a splattering of single residential dwellings all in the beautiful landscape of Vancouver as you can see those amazing blue skies there that they seem to have all the time.

16:46The business was doing pretty well. They've got a staff of over 30 people, 50 projects in the office, a lot of repeat clients, team was kind of moving forward but there was a lot of problems. Some of the issues, he was working crazy long hours, 60 hour plus weeks, often seven days a week. You can imagine what kind of toll that takes on the person. And unfortunately, not an uncommon story. Constant frustration, stress, bringing work home. As I was saying earlier about junior staff, so the team had been built up, a lot of junior people helping him up front, but just not experienced enough to take projects on and run them by themselves and this ends up drawing so much resource from a business again I know as a profession whether it's whether we're technologists or we're architects there's a something nice about a profession where we love to give back to the next generation or are involved in the nurturing of the next generation and that's an important kind of part of office culture however we're not schools our businesses are not education centers and we have to earn the right to be able to train people and do it properly and actually to not have earned that right and try and you know create an environment where we're endangering the business through employing lots of inexperienced people and now we're having to invest so much time training them it's not fair on either the business or that person and what we often see happen is this cycle of bringing in younger team members they can't really do a lot you train them they get good they're fed up with the whole process and they leave and you start again another one of ties those pains was being too accessible to clients so not having those clear boundaries put into place not being selective in the work being brought in.

18:51Okay, so this is often another reason for why we might be suffering with low fees. After we've been, and we're still working with Taizo now, so this is still very much a working process. But now in 2025, he's started to work normal hours, he's had free time to pursue other life goals, he had a book published in last autumn of all of his beautiful hand-drawn sketches, they've got consistency running through all their projects and they're now able to go after bigger larger tower blocks that they've been wanting to do their company is built on what is being said no to so there's a good clear structure for when Taizou puts his hand up and says nope not doing that or even just being able to protect his own time from other people in in the office and there's a communication structure now so that he can protect his own time in the office so that he's not disturbed, not distracted.

19:53They've got communication structure, there's financial visibility on the projects, and they share, they're transparent, okay, or they're beginning this journey of becoming transparent with the rest of the team about how the business works. And I can't stress how important that is. And they're starting to see team members now becoming mentors becoming highly proactive they share their vision and Taizo is now able to go off to Japan and enjoy the firm as it's running by himself so I run through the steps that Taizo implemented here as us kind of assisting him with this but the first thing is creating a compelling vision with a plan.

20:40Taizo draws beautifully and I'm going to use a lot of his little sketches of how he's actually taken this idea of design to actually bring about the future of his firm. Inside of the red box here was the existing architecture practice and he had a lot of aspirations at the top there. You can see the word profit and we had a lot of conversations about the importance of being a profit focused business and what that allows so you can see these two arms coming out of profit and they're feeding this non a kind of non-profit type of work that they want to be doing and being able to do other sorts of more social causes there's a whole load of different sectors they wanted to get into for municipality work universities and then on the right hand side he started to design what he wanted to be doing more of in his personal life.

21:36So being able to have his art exhibition and publish his book, that was one of his kind of most important goals and wanted to be involved in furniture design. So when we're looking at designing a firm, we always want to be looking, number one, at the financial future so that we start getting clear on what our net operating revenue is. What's the vision for our revenue? What's the vision for our profit? What's the vision for my salary and the team's salary? And we have this metric called, I call it the 200 club. It's a benchmarking performance measure, which is your net operating revenue divided by the amount of full time equivalent employees that you have in a firm.

22:16Now, we have as a benchmark$200 ,000, that's US dollars per full-time equivalent employee. It's about 160 ,000 pounds per full-time equivalent employee. If you're bringing out that much amount of revenue and the ratio is working out to be that, that's the benchmark, the hallmark of a high performance business. It's not easy. It's not easy. But if you're there, there's a lot of things working well in the business. Okay. In the UK, I would say, yeah, 160, 140 to 160 is kind of equivalent there. The US market tends to be, the US economy is a lot more buoyant than the UK's. But we still see architecture firms in the UK doing very well.

23:07I know some of the larger practices are up at around£400 ,000 per full-time equivalent employees. I've looked through the AJ100 and looked at some of those businesses. So our financial future is very, very critical. We also want to get an idea of our lifestyle. What do we want to be doing? You know, money in and of itself. Most of us don't like to just adore money for money's sake, but money is the great facilitator. it's an index of agency of what we want to be able to do so being able to have a vision for how we're going to be using our money and the ways that we can be benefiting others and our lifestyle that's very important and every time i speak to architects and designers about what they want to do with all of all of their profit and their money i'm always inspired and impressed because i really do think architects and architectural technologists and designers should be wealthy and have a lot of money because they spend their money well and they buy beautiful things and they do good things to the to the planet and they and they invest in interesting projects so there's a responsibility for our financial stewardship some more drawings here this one was indicating taizo's expansion into different sectors we also use a thing called the a summit map which effectively is a visual representation of the next five years of your firm on the left hand side is a very simple diagram of a kind of mountain peak and you might you might just put each of those boxes those base camps might be a different year and then you would plot about where the business is going to be what are the results of the business going to be at the end of each of those years just so that you start to get a shape of where the business is going and what growth looks like over a time period.

24:58Taizo did a very kind of beautiful set of graphics, which you can see here on the right, where he was actually starting to model how the business would transition over from less profitable projects to more profitable projects. So they kind of plotted out the life cycle of a lot of the projects that they had on the books. And you can start to see the kind of graph that's flipped upside down on the bottom going to the right that's the beginning of these newer bigger projects that they wanted to be taken on so a really nice diagram you could spend a lot of time just kind of getting into but a good visual representation of the growth of the firm he then co-created this vision so he had his team involved in it they had a thing called a vision day where they all got together as as a group and shared ideas and in part of that it was important for the individual team owners to have a vision for their career trajectories where they wanted to go so we worked with Taizo to establish this kind of strata or this ladder of career progression inside of the office so people could start to see a future for themselves this is really important of kind of aligning individual vision with the vision of the office.

26:21And of course, this vision must be tracked, measured and planned and this is an iterative process which has got to be a discipline in the business. The next thing that resilient teams is organization. This is what we don't want, which is the bottleneck, which is you're at the center, all the decisions are coming through to you, this is the cause of overwhelm and stress. Usually it looks something like this in a firm, the principal at the top and then you've got this flat hierarchy. I absolutely hate it when businesses tell me that they've got a flat hierarchy. Lots of designers say this with a lot of pride and I know that usually it just means it's going to be chaos and craziness.

27:02I appreciate though however in the context of being creative yes having everybody in the team sat around a table and churning out ideas great okay but in terms of accountability and how people are held accountable there's got to be a hierarchy there's got to be a hierarchy when I worked at RSHP they used to very proudly say that they were flat it was a flat office they were not they were very well structured in terms of a very clear hierarchy but when I hear architects talking about it being flat I'm assuming really they mean that's how the conversation about design works okay so this was taizo's diagram of his practice this is where we want to be going which is a network um if you imagine jeff bezos um they've got over a million and a half employees at amazon he doesn't he doesn't talk to a million and a half employees every day there's probably a leadership team of about 10 and those 10 people then have 10 under them and so on and so on and so on so that's what we call a networked model for a small firm it might look something like this where you've got a senior designer you've got the principal at the top and then there's a team of more experienced people underneath that senior person and then we can start building that out into a larger firm so this was what uh taizo started to design in his firm and basically was moving away from the flat hierarchy he appointed three studio unit leaders of his top three people.

28:35He basically kind of created three small businesses with inside of the one large firm. He's got his vision day up. He's got routines and disciplines being put into place on how to communicate. And the team suddenly becomes way more well-structured. This one thing, doing this, this took about six months to kind of implement and enroll everyone to do it properly but it would really freed up Taizo's time and also put people into a position of leadership which they started to thrive in and finally a proactive team needs a leader and a good leader is somebody who creates other leaders okay so what Taizo was doing there was he was creating other leaders he was identifying leadership possibilities and positions he had to let go of some of the things that he enjoyed doing.

29:29This is where I mean there's a humility involved in all of this. He had to let go and allow other people to step up to the plate and have them powerfully enrolled. He was able to create a context for a new possibility, so that's what the vision was doing. Here's where we're going. This is what it looks like. Here's the new promised land, kind of like, you know, the sort of story of the classic story of Exodus, right, Moses leading the Israelites out into the desert. There's this kind of, there's got to be some sort of vision that's taking people out to follow you. And this idea of completing the past, okay, so sometimes firms have had a really rocky past and it needs a mature leader to acknowledge what hasn't been working, okay, and there might be a bit of vulnerability here.

30:18This is a kind of complex topic but getting complete with the past and making sure that the rest of the team has you've listened to the team their complaints their gripes um what they've what you where you've let them down there's a kind of honesty that happens with this but that could be incredibly powerful and can you know bring the team back into alignment so as i was saying taizo's business they've now got three studios um these are some of the other things that they're they're working on as i said the before 60 hours pain now we've got him working to normal hours consistency food projects communication structure etc if hiring feels like roulette and you're stuck babysitting underperformers or worse burning out because there's no one good out there your firm isn't just stressed it's stuck the rockstar hiring guide helps you stop wasting time on the wrong people and start attracting a players who elevate your firm learn how to recruit vet and lead like a pro with tools built for architecture firms get it free at business of architecture.com forward slash rockstar thank you to all our recent listeners who left reviews on the podcast for itunes your reviews help others find this podcast so the rising tide raises all boats to be acknowledged on the show open up the podcast app on your phone search for business of architecture and after clicking on the show, scroll all the way to the bottom and leave a review.

31:43Rion Willard: A while ago, we began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company World Teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. We were intrigued by another business that are addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World Teams is built to address these issues.

32:17Rion Willard: World Teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high-performing remote teams quickly, beneficently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing underqualified candidates. World Teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near-native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration, and World Teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that's so important to a practice.

32:54Rion Willard: To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice, go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. That's one word, businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. As a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to businessofarchitecture.com forward slash world teams. Today's episode of the Business of Architecture show is sponsored by Smart Practice, the world's leading step-by-step solution for architectural practice owners that want to structure their existing practice so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of the architecture.

33:32because you see it likely isn't your architecture skills that hold you back. It's the business aspects of running practice, managing projects and people, dealing with clients, contractors and money. If you're ready to quit being a glorified administrator and get back to architecture again, go to smartpracticemethod.com to discover the proven, simple and easy to implement smart practice method that is revolutionizing firm management for owners and teams. Free advice is like Google Maps. It shows the general direction but personalized advice, that's your turn-by-turn navigation. That's how you actually arrive.

34:03Hey, Ryan Willard here, and I want to thank you for joining us today and remind you that the views expressed on the show by our guests do not represent those of the host, and we make no representation, promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond, or commitment, except to help you do your best work and be handsomely paid for it. Carpe diem.