Track 4: Leadership and Management
Leadership and Management (Track 4)
Address the challenges and priorities relevant to firm owners and management through topics that identify potential opportunities for marketing professionals to add value and create greater impact within their firms.
Think Like a Strategist
Date: Tuesday, 12:45 PM - 2:00 PM
What Business Are We Really In? Building Influence Across Disciplines
Date: Tuesday, 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM
Marketing and business development professionals are often asked to help technical teams build client relationships, position expertise, pursue opportunities, and drive firm growth. But what happens when technical professionals step into marketing, business development, and growth roles themselves?
This panel features two accomplished technical leaders who spent meaningful portions of their careers working in marketing, business development, and growth-focused roles before returning to senior firm leadership modeled around strategic growth. Their experiences created a leadership laboratory: a place to learn how firms grow, how clients buy, how strategy becomes opportunity, and how influence is built across disciplines.
This panel features two accomplished technical leaders who spent meaningful portions of their careers working in marketing, business development, and growth-focused roles before returning to senior firm leadership modeled around strategic growth. Their experiences created a leadership laboratory: a place to learn how firms grow, how clients buy, how strategy becomes opportunity, and how influence is built across disciplines.
Learning Outcomes
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Position marketing and business development initiatives around the business drivers, priorities, and decision-making processes of technical leaders.
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Build credibility, trust, and stronger collaborative relationships with technical professionals, seller-doers, and firm leadership.
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Apply a broader understanding of firm operations, client decision-making, and growth strategy to increase their influence in daily work.
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Communicate the value of marketing and business development in language that resonates with technical professionals, firm leadership, and executive decision-makers.
Paula D. Raymond Stamp, PhD, MBA, FSMSP, CPSM
Dr. Paula Raymond Stamp is an executive coach, business strategist, and founder of Geaux Consulting Group. She works with leaders and professional services firms to strengthen leadership capacity, improve organizational effectiveness, and align strategy with growth. Her facilitation and speaking experience includes leadership, marketing, business development, career growth, and organizational strategy topics for professional associations and business audiences.
Donna Clandening
Donna Clandening is a senior A/E/C leader and mentor with a technical background and extensive experience spanning growth strategy, marketing, business development, and technical leadership. As Vice President and Regional Director of Growth at AECOM, she brings a cross-disciplinary perspective (and often a direct engineering approach) on client development, positioning, technical credibility, and firm growth. Her diverse background allows her to speak directly to the intersection of technical excellence and growth leadership, to effectively deliver connected strategies to her clients and community.
Leslie Young, Assoc AIA, LEED AP
Leslie Young is a senior architectural leader and Managing Director at Bergmeyer, with 30 years of experience spanning technical practice, marketing, business development, strategic partnerships, and office leadership. This blend of technical and growth-focused responsibilities gives her a distinct perspective on how marketing and business development shape leadership, client relationships, team development, and the way technical expertise is positioned and delivered. She is an active leader within the Southern California design community, currently serving on multiple professional boards and councils both locally and nationally across the industry.
Ignite Your Creativity: Brainstorming Like a Comedy Writers' Room
Date: Tuesday, 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
We’ve all been in a brainstorm that rained nothing but crickets. Does your team shy away from contributing ideas and taking creative risks? Are you looking to build confidence as a brainstormer yourself? Congratulations! You just got staffed as a writer on a comedy tv series. (Your agent has already bought a boat.) In this fun, practical, interactive session, you will experience, hands-on, one of the most effective brainstorming machines the world has ever known: a comedy writers’ room.
With the enthusiastic, compassionate guidance of presenter Becky Ellison from Middle of Six, a seasoned comedy writer as well as Middle of Six’s Senior Creative Strategist, you’ll learn how ideas are formulated into tactics and campaigns, you’ll practice pitching to a group in a SAFE, POSITIVE environment that builds confidence and excitement–and best of all, you can take these techniques, experiences, and ideas home and apply them with your team.
Learning Outcomes
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Learn how a comedy writers' room brainstorms collaboratively and will be able to immediately apply these techniques within their firms.
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Brainstorm usable ideas during the session that they can take home and expand on in their campaign planning.
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Practice pitching, heightening, and collaborative editing in a safe environment that will encourage them to become confident, prolific brainstormers.
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Experience a truly interactive, repeatable idea generation process that will give them the tools to empower their people with confidence and safety, creating an environment for increased creativity at their firms.
Becky Ellison
Middle of Six’s Becky Ellison is a seasoned comedy writer & graphic designer with 16 years of AEC marketing experience, an InDesign expert, and your new best friend. Her decade spent working in-house for a large general contractor led to the creation of the hilarious and relatable The Wildcards, which won Best Brand Awareness Campaign and Best of Show at Amplify AEC in 2024. Passionate about unconventional problem-solving, brainstorming and psychological safety, Becky hosts The Short(er) List, a spinoff of the award-winning The Shortlist podcast, and facilitates creative brainstorms, client discoveries & focus groups, as well as workshops on proposal design, InDesign best practices, tips, and tricks.
Claim Your Impact: When "We" Erases "Me"
Date: Wednesday, 9:15 AM - 10:30 PM
Collaboration is AEC currency. We learn to make the whole visible, often before naming our own contributions. Social conditioning reinforces it: claim too much and risk being judged; claim too little and become difficult to see. We soften our contributions, self-select out of recognition & advancement, carry the same expectations into who we advance, & believe in.
AI mirrors the pattern. Its responses reflect bias embedded in a historical record shaped by dominant voices, which mirror the self-edit/social edit that already sounds normal to us. This session sits w/senior leadership because leaders teach the pattern across teams and firms, and the edit lands hardest on senior voices. Through lived examples, published research, and an interactive exercise, attendees recognize all three editors: ourselves, society, and AI. Skill belongs to every level. The sooner you see it, the better you collaborate, and the more accurately you name your impact.
Learning Outcomes
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Recognize the three editors that shape personal impact: the ways we edit ourselves, the expectations society places on us, and the bias AI has learned from the historical data on which it was trained.
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Identify how softened ownership, qualified authority, and anticipated disbelief shape how we describe our contributions and self-select into or out of recognition and advancement.
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Examine the pattern in their own language and in how they interpret the contributions, credibility, and leadership readiness of others.
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Practice naming and interrupting the pattern in AI-supported work and human conversations without blame or defensiveness.
Cynthia A. Remine, FSMPS, CPSM
“Helping professionals step into leadership before titles require it.” Cynthia ReMine, FSMPS, CPSM, helps A/E/C marketers make the judgment behind their work visible before leadership decisions are made. Across 30 years in architecture, construction, and engineering, she has seen talented professionals remain outside strategic conversations not because they lack insight, but because their contributions are still described as their outputs.
When Capital Reshapes the Firm: What VC and PE Mean for AEC Firms
Date: Wednesday, 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Client Relationships
Date: Wednesday, 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Aristotle taught it. So did Confucius. Marcus Aurelius. The Hebrew wisdom writers. The Buddha. Separated by centuries and continents, the world's wisest thinkers kept returning to the same four skills: listen before answering. Speak truth with care. Behave in ways that earn trust. Strengthen the people around you.
These are also the four behaviors that decide whether your clients stay, refer, and grow.
Technical professionals rarely learn them in school. Most have never been formally coached in any of them.
This interactive session gives marketing, BD, and client experience leaders a practical train-the-trainer framework for developing these skills across their organizations. Participants practice each skill in real time and leave with Ancient Wisdom for Modern Relationships, a AEC-Specific field guide with four coaching frameworks and ready-to-use workshop handouts.
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the four relationship behaviors that the world's oldest wisdom traditions and modern behavioral science agree are most essential to human trust and loyalty, and recognize where gaps exist in their technical staff today.
- Coach technical professionals to listen for facts, feelings, and underlying needs before offering solutions, using the Three Levels of Listening framework and the Listening Audit.
- Apply the CARE framework (Clarify intent, Address behavior, Reveal impact, Extend partnership) to develop practical approaches for difficult conversations and candid client communication within project teams.
- Deploy the Four Trust Deposits and SEE frameworks in their firms through a ready-to-use, four-month coaching model that builds relationship skills as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time training event.
Ryan Suydam
Ryan Suydam co-founded Client Savvy, now part of ClearlyRated, in 2004, to help firms create fierce client loyalty by designing, implementing, and measuring client experiences. He has coached over 650 organizations and over 30,000 professionals on the skills required to be “client savvy.” His clients are twice as likely to be recommended by their clients, three times as likely to realize above-average financial returns, and consistently attract and retain better employees. Ryan also founded and emcee’s the annual CX in Professional Services conference, bringing together hundreds of CX leaders across legal, accounting, AEC, and other professional services firms.
How to Have Hard Conversations
Date: Wednesday, 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
In this interactive session, you will learn a clear, repeatable way to argue better without getting messy. You’ll learn a 5-step communication loop to lower defensiveness, name constraints, and leave conversations with real agreements (owner, deadline, definition of done, next check-in). Expect practical scripts, A/E/C-specific scenarios, and tools you can use the same day to build shared ownership and protect relationships while still getting the work done.
- Learn a practical framework for navigating difficult conversations and driving alignment during high-pressure situations.
- Practice a proven five-step conversation technique for resolving disagreements and building consensus.
- Discover simple communication tools to manage urgency, defensiveness, and tension without escalating conflict.
- Receive ready-to-use scripts and meeting-close templates that clarify ownership, deadlines, and expectations.
Dr. Jamie G. Raygoza
Dr. Jaime G. Raygoza (he/him/él) is the founder of Rainbow Career Coaching and an organizational psychologist who helps LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and allied professionals grow careers they’re proud of without burning out. He holds a PsyD in Human & Organizational Psychology, an ICF Associate Certified Coach Accreditation and is a Laughter Yoga Teacher. Jaime blends evidence-based, trauma-informed coaching with practical tools for communication, boundaries, and sustainable high performance. He supports clients and teams with career transitions, leadership development, and job search strategy, translating complex psychology into clear, usable frameworks audiences can apply immediately.
