The Human Connection in Human Resources

Patrick McGowan believes  the highest performing executives in the AEC industry have mastered a crucial skill: people management.  

McGowan has been responsible for overseeing hiring, training, and leadership development for the general contracting firm W.E. O’Neil Construction for nearly 25 years. Drawing on lessons learned from his career, McGowan teaches the Human Resource Management class in Northwestern Engineering’s Master of Science in Executive Management for Design and Construction (EMDC) program.  

McGowan recognizes the employees of an AEC firm are its strongest asset and most importantinvestment. His curriculum helps EMDC students be successful firm leaders by focusing on the attraction, retention, development, and motivation of employees. Companies with a focus on developing their people tend to have lower turnover, higher margins, and more satisfied customers, he said.  

“There are a lot of things that extremely accomplished and capable people are just completely unaware of because they have not spent much time thinking about it or being trained in it or coached in it,” McGowan said. “This class recognizes that a senior executive has to be able to do a lot more than run projects in order to run an organization.” 

McGowan describes best practices in organizational development and human resources that students can leverage throughout their career. He also shares specific skills to develop and execute an organization's human capital strategies in topics such as: 

• Staffing and hiring 
• Compensation 
• Performance management 
• Training and development 
• Talent management and team building 
• Employment law 

“My goal with the class is not to turn students into HR professionals,” he said. “My aim is to arm them with the knowledge and the skills necessary from an organizational and HR perspective to be effective in an executive role in any organization.”  

Developing employees to be effective people managers can be a challenge for AEC firms, which tend to be leaner than firms of similar value in other industries. McGowan pointed to his own company, which is one of the top 100 contractors in the country in revenue but has just 450 employees.  

“We don’t have the scale a large corporate entity would have for in-house training and education,” he said. “Our firms don’t have the resources to teach a manager the whole people side of the business as they’re growing in their responsibilities.”  

Mastering that “people side” centers on capabilities such as knowing how to better interview prospective candidates, how to choose the right candidate after those interviews, and how to grow the entire employee roster to be more effective as a team.  

“Some people might view organizations in the AEC industry as if they are selling a building to a customer. That’s not true at all,” he said. “We’re managing a complex process for our customers, and we are professional service providers. What we have to give to our customers are the abilities of our people. That’s the way we can create more value.”