southern continent and in fact, ice crushed the Endurance.

It took a long and painful journey to rescue the crew. The
interesting story here is that unlike many icy expeditions in
that era, everyone survived.

The key to survival, it seems, was the team, who were
recruited with a simple classified ad in the London Times:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages,
bitter cold, long months of complete darkness,
constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and
recognition in case of success.”
Sineck writes:
“The only people who applied for the job were those who
read the ad and though it sounded great. They loved
insurmountable odds. The only people who applied for the
job were survivors. Shackelton hired only people who
believed what he believed. Their ability to survive was
guaranteed. When employees belong, they will guarantee
your success. And they won’t be working hard and looking
for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it (for)
themselves.” Passion and vision
Mission statements and corporate visions are common
cliches “which have been hijacked through the corporate
realization process,” writes Brad Thurman, principal and
CMO at Wallace Engineering, and a past SMPS national
president. “It becomes a matter of course for companies...

something you are supposed to do instead of want to do.”
Thurman describes how the late John Kennedy outlined
a goal in a speech to congress on May 25, 1961, “that was
unlike anything his predecessors had set.”
Kennedy said: “I believe that this nation should commit
itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of
landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to
Earth.” Of course, at that point, the United States hadn’t even
put a man in orbit. “But here was the president telling the
world that we’d travel the 480,000-mile round trip to the
moon in the next 3,200 days,” Thurman wrote.

“Thirty months later, on Nov. 22, 1963, President Kennedy
was assassinated. The entire space race effort could have
fallen apart. People could have used Kennedy’s death as a
reason to defund the program and change the country’s
goals. But Kennedy did more than just establish a goal –
he’d given passion a voice and that passion was heard and
felt by everyone with the Apollo program. And on July 20,
1969, with only 14 days left in the decade, Apollo 11
became the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon.”
“Churchill, Gandhi, King, Kennedy – history is full of
leaders who were more than simply eloquent at stating a
vision; they were passionate about seeing those visions
achieved. If you think about people who have inspired you
the most, I expect it was the passion that they brought to
their beliefs that defined them.”
Vulnerability However, Thurston goes on to say that “passion comes
with a price: vulnerability.”
“Vulnerability is an under appreciated characteristic of
leadership... in business and in life. To truly lay out what you
believe and how passionately you believe it, you have to
make yourself vulnerable. You have to understand that there
will be criticism and apathy and even derision. You have to
accept there will be people who can’t or won’t accept it, and
you have to have the will to move forward anyway.”
Listening Craig Galatti, the current SMPS president and a principal
of LGA, an architectural firm in Las Vegas, expresses this
idea succinctly. “To effectively lead, one must have a pulse
on the organization,” he writes. “Listening skills both verbal
and non-verbal are essential to the process.”
Galati describes where these listening skills served him
most dramatically – in helping his architectural practice
survive through the recent financial crisis and recession.

“The lessons I learned during that time will stick with me
forever,” he writes. “I learned that one must learn to use
multiple leadership styles and that leadership is not ‘one
size fits all.’ In times of crisis the spotlight is placed directly
on leadership and those in your charge look to you to guide
you through the issue.”
Strategic inclusiveness
Dana Birks, vice president business strategies at
Crossland Construction Company, Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
says she believes strategic inclusiveness is the single most
effective quality for effective leadership.

6 – Summer 2017 — The Canadian Design and Construction Report