The firms that truly put people first pair high standards with genuine support instead of empty promises.
Every few years, the AEC industry finds a new phrase to rally around. For a while it was “core values.” Firms would publish lists of the things they stood for, hang them on lobby walls, and print them on the back of business cards. Then everyone jumped on the bandwagon, and the values conversation became so predictable and so performative that the word lost most of its meaning.
So, the industry moved on to “culture.” Culture this, culture that – until that word got so overused, it started to feel like dusty furniture. The current favorite is "people first." And I’ll admit, I knew it had crossed into the buzzword danger zone the moment I started seeing it in the marketing materials of firms I knew firsthand to be anything but. The phrase might have been adopted, but the practice definitely had not.
Full disclosure: Sanbell uses people-first language too. In fact, our purpose statement says we exist to "grow a world class team of cool, smart, talented people." The intent is to communicate that our foundational belief is that people are in fact the unifying and explicit reason our firm exists. So, I am not writing this from a position of superiority, rather, I am focusing on this because I have thought hard about what separates the firms that mean it from the ones that do not, and I think the distinction is worth making clearly.
The risk of saying it without meaning it
The first risk is obvious; when you claim to be people first and then behave otherwise, it’s glaringly obvious and people notice immediately. The cynicism that follows is corrosive in a way that is much harder to recover from than if you had never made the claim at all.
The second risk is subtler and, in my experience, more dangerous. If you do not define what “people first” actually means, and what it does not mean, the phrase can be turned against you. Some will interpret it to mean that anything uncomfortable is somehow a violation of the culture and suddenly accountability feels punitive. Anyone who has ever tried to build strength in a gym knows that growth does not feel comfortable at first. But discomfort’s not the problem, it’s sometimes necessary and actually often the whole point. So, I’ve come to the realization that a genuinely people-first culture holds people to high standards precisely because it believes in their capacity to meet them and takes people's growth seriously.
The daily work of meaning it
In practice, being people-first demands more of leadership, not less, and I think it requires a solid framework built around:
- Clarity about expectations, because people cannot perform at a high level without knowing what high performance looks like. (To put it in its simplest terms, vague standards are just not kind.)
- Honest, timely feedback, because letting problems fester while smiling and saying everything is OK is honestly nothing more than conflict avoidance with passable branding.
- Real investment in development, because saying you believe in your people and then providing no structure for their growth is a contradiction. At Sanbell, we are particularly focused on this with programs like Sanbell U and UpNext, our emerging leader development experience, and in a career framework that makes room for technical depth, people leadership, and business development as equally valid (and valuable) paths.
- Transparency in the hard moments, because people-first cultures do not pretend difficult things are not happening. For instance, when markets shift, when tough decisions have to be made, the people-first response is to communicate honestly and illustrate that you trust your team can handle the truth.
- Creating healthy, flexible, supportive work environments, allowing people to do their best work and live full lives, where we support and celebrate the whole person, not just the professional.
People first, beyond the tagline
Being people first is a leadership practice, and like any practice, it only means something when you live it consistently, especially when it is inconvenient, under pressure, and maybe most importantly, when no one is watching.
The firms that get this right are not the ones with the most polished language around it, but where the gap between what leadership says and what people experience is nearly undetectable. Where high standards and genuine care exist in the same sentence without contradiction, and where people feel challenged and supported at the same time, which, if you have experienced it, is one of the best feelings a workplace can produce.
The firms worth working for know this. For the rest, it’s literally and figuratively just “the writing on the wall.”
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Michael Sanderson is CEO at Sanbell. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |