Post by Brian Maksymetz

Is fighting a forest fire on the edge of town similar to managing an engineering and construction project? No, it's not, although some days it may feel like a crisis situation like fire fighting. There is a great new essay on leadership in crisis situations written by University of Alberta alumni Richard Ireland. Richard is the Mayor of the Town of Jasper, Alberta, and his essay appears in the latest New Trail Magazine of the University of Alberta Alumni Department. These key points of leadership in stressful situtions stood out for me from Richard's essay as best practices for more successful engineering and construction projects: -Trust between people needs to be established well in advance so that people can rely on each others' abilities and on the pre-established trust between them. -Leaders should be trained in how to embody the behaviours they expect from others on the team. i.e. culture management is a key role for leaders on a project. -The "project system" needs to be robust so it can be relied upon by the project team. Weakness in the Owner's project system has been identified by John Hollmann and the researchers he references as one of the key reasons projects fail. Here is a link to Richard's article: https://lnkd.in/gDxfNMqf The Jasper photograph below is looking south at Mount Edith Cavell from atop Old Fort Point near the townsite. The Athabasca River is on the right.