Women in AEC: Wine After Work

Firms promote their strongest technical people into leadership and then give them almost no training. When a team struggles, leaders often blame the team. Amanda Van Der Heiden has seen this play out across dozens of organizations, and she argues the problem usually starts with how people are being led.

Amanda and Bryce talk about how to get to the real reason someone wants out, and how to make core values stick after the launch. They cover how to adapt your leadership style without losing yourself, and what has to be in place before a leader can hand over real autonomy. Amanda explains appreciation styles and the platinum rule. She makes the case for prioritization over time management, and she shares how a 75-person company with no budget got a big initiative done anyway.

This episode is for new managers, firm owners, and anyone who has been promoted for their technical skills and now leads people.

About Amanda Van Der Heiden: Amanda Van Der Heiden partners with organizations on strategic learning, leadership development, and culture transformation. She has 20+ years of experience across people, project, and process management, and has led enterprise rollouts for 40+ companies in 15+ countries and 12+ industries. She's an award-winning speaker, consultant, coach, and author, with a master's in industrial/organizational psychology, CPTM certification, and credentials from ATD, SHRM, and McKinsey. She started her career in early childhood development and education, and today she's a working mom of two who blocks off 8 a.m. for the school and daycare run.

What We Cover:

• Introduction and Amanda's background across 40 clients, 15 countries, and 12 industries

• What to do when someone says "this isn't for me anymore"

• Why a high performer going quiet should get leadership's attention

• Getting 3,000 people in five countries to live the same five core values

• Why a values poster on the wall doesn't change behavior

• The three stages of leadership: yourself, individuals, then teams

• Adapting your communication style for engineers, techies, and salespeople

• Why your C players might just need a different leader

• What has to be true before you hand over autonomy

• Appreciation styles and the platinum rule

• Why prioritization matters more than time management

• The Eisenhower matrix and the "one thing" question

• What a people-first culture actually takes

• The biggest mistake leaders make with culture change

• Boundaries, working in global markets, and parenting two small kids

• The career advice Amanda would retire for good

• Where to find Amanda and her free goal workbook + closing thoughts

Key Takeaways:

• Before labeling someone a C player, check three things. Are they in the right role? Do they have processes that set them up to succeed? Do they have the support and tools they need?

• Autonomy needs structure first. Give people a clear picture of what good looks like, a plan with the right amount of management, and regular evaluation. High performers still want feedback on what to do better.

• Use the platinum rule when you give praise. Treat people the way they want to be treated. Public praise can make an introvert want to hide, while a quiet email can make an extrovert feel overlooked.

• Adapting your style isn't being fake. Amanda lowers her voice, shortens her sentences, and leads with data when she presents to technical audiences, because the goal is to be understood.

• Ask what one thing would make everything else on your list easier or unnecessary. If a task is neither important nor time-sensitive, take it off the list.

Resources + Links:

• Amanda's free goal development workbook: GoGTDS.com

• Amanda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandavanderheiden/

• The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White

• The Eisenhower Matrix

• The ONE Thing by Gary Keller (source of the "one thing" question Amanda references)

Every career advice list says to protect your relationships. Almost nobody explains what that looks like day to day. Julia Hurley has built a real estate business, a political career, and an athlete management company on relationships, so she knows the how.

Julia and Bryce compare matchmaking in real estate and recruiting, and why buyers and candidates are both getting choosier. Julia explains how she teaches college athletes to be the CEO of their own lives by separating the people who support them from the people who manage their money and careers. She shares her rule of thumb for rental property and the "asset or liability" game she plays with her kids. She also explains why she believes nobody at work is your friend. The conversation ends with an honest look at what it takes to lead as a woman in the South.

This episode is for professionals managing their own career moves, anyone who has blurred the line between coworkers and family, and women who are often one of the few in the room.

About Julia Hurley: Julia Hurley is a broker and the owner of Just Homes Group, a boutique real estate firm in Knoxville, Tennessee, with fifteen years in the industry and a business built almost entirely on past-client referrals. She is a former elected official, an author, and the founder of an athlete management and mentorship company. That company helps college athletes build investments, financial literacy, and professional teams that last beyond their playing days. She's a die-hard Tennessee Vols fan and plays "asset or liability" with her kids to teach them how money works. Website: thejuliahurley.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juliahurley

What We Cover:

• Introduction and Julia's path from public office to real estate to athlete management

• Why every industry Julia has worked in comes down to relationships

• How one athlete client turned into an athlete management business

• Why a burned bridge travels fast in niche industries like AEC

• What makes someone say yes to a move right now, and why buyers are getting choosier

• Real estate and recruiting as matchmaking

• Knoxville's growth, and what it can learn from Nashville's boom

• Teaching college athletes to be the CEO of their own lives

• Support system vs. management system

• The "asset or liability" game, and why your home is a liability

• The 1% rule for rental property

• The worst career lesson Julia learned: nobody in business is your friend

• Leading as a woman in the South

• Where to find Julia and her books + closing thoughts

Key Takeaways:

• Separate your support system from your management system. The people who helped you get here deserve your loyalty. They don't automatically get a vote on your next move.

• Hire your advisors independently. When one stops fitting, you can replace that person without unraveling everything else.

• Work relationships need boundaries. You can golf with your boss and go to dinner at their house, but when "we're family" replaces clear expectations, people get hurt.

• The right fit has to line up on every front at once: location, people, money, and timing. That's true for a house and for a job.

• For women who are one of the few in the room, stepping into the conversation is not optional. If you don't insert yourself, you're out of it, even if no one meant to leave you out.

Resources + Links:

• Julia's website: thejuliahurley.com

• Julia on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/juliahurley

• Just Homes Group: justhomesgroup.com

• Julia's books, a children's book and a real estate coaching book, available at thejuliahurley.com

This episode includes discussion of real estate and investing for informational purposes only. Nothing in it is financial advice.

Most AEC professionals move into leadership without any training for it. Engineering school didn't teach it and architecture school didn't either. So we copy whoever led us and hope it works. Zack Tomlin argues there's a better way, and that architects and engineers are wired to learn leadership as a craft.

Zack built Maple Engineering from a two-person operation at a Raleigh public library into a 20-person firm and sold it after 12 years. He explains why leading highly technical experts calls for high-agency leadership instead of command-and-control. He walks through the five levels of his Mountain of Why and why emotional intelligence is only one leg of the stool. He gives principals a concrete exercise to try this week, and he lays out the ROI math on developing your leaders.

This episode is for firm owners, principals, studio leads, and any technical professional who just got handed a team.

About Zack Tomlin: Zack Tomlin, PE, is a mechanical engineer and 20+ year AEC industry veteran. He founded Maple Engineering and led it for 12 years, growing it to about 20 people through a successful acquisition. He is the national award-winning author of Craft: The Expedition of Business and founder of Your Craft Your Climb (YC2), a leadership development practice working exclusively with engineers, architects, construction managers, and other AEC professionals. His wife is an architect, so the industry follows him home.

Website: yourcraftyourclimb.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zack-tomlin

What We Cover:

• Introduction and Zack's background, from the Raleigh public library to Maple Engineering

• The shift from "an engineer with support staff" to a real organization at six to eight people

• Why designing an organization is human-centered design, like designing a building

• The Mountain of Why: five levels of decision-making, from copying others to first principles

• High-agency leadership and why sports and military analogies can stifle technical experts

• The leader's job: clarity in the face of external confusion, order in the face of internal chaos

• Why every firm needs a compelling story, and how that creates cohesion across offices

• Why emotional intelligence is only a third of effective leadership

• The staff experience journey, and the project folder that wasted everyone's time

• The ROI of leadership development for small and mid-size firms

• How engineers, architects, and construction managers tend to lead differently

• The leadership advice Zack thinks is wrong: "hire people smarter than you"

• Where to find Zack and his book, plus closing thoughts

Key Takeaways:

• In AEC, your team often knows more about their piece of the work than you do. Your job is to create the conditions for them to make good calls on their own, not to direct every move.

• Leaders owe their teams two things: clarity about where you're going, and order around standards and accountability. Think traffic lights. Everyone knows the rules and what happens when you run one.

• Emotional intelligence is the price of admission. You also need a stronger mental model of people and organizations, and an understanding of how people prefer to work and solve problems.

• Walk your staff's workday like a customer journey this week. Open the files, find the SOP, wait on the software, and fix one point of friction. You're paying for very expensive brains.

• A studio lead running six or seven people oversees $700K to $1M in payroll. A $2,000 to $5,000 investment in that person needs well under a 1 to 2 percent improvement to pay off.

Resources + Links:

• Your Craft Your Climb: yourcraftyourclimb.com

• Zack on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/zack-tomlin (subscribe to his biweekly newsletter on high-agency leadership)

• Craft: The Expedition of Business by Zack Tomlin: free copy at yourcraftyourclimb.com, you just pay shipping. Reach out to Zack directly for a signed copy.

Bryce just got back from Women in HVACR in Indianapolis, where she spoke to a room full of owners and managers about a number that should keep them up at night: women are leaving the trades at roughly three times the rate they are getting hired into them. Every job fair booth, every high school program, every recruiting push is water poured into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

This is not a DEI session. There is no slide arguing that diversity is good for business. This is a retention conversation built for the owner who has one woman on a crew of nine and cannot figure out why she is already looking, and for the leader watching a $22,000 replacement cost hit the P&L for the third time this year and calling it a fluke. Bryce walks through the real representation numbers, the four reasons women actually leave, the single factor that moves retention more than everything else combined, four shifts you can start this week, and a 30/60/90 day plan you can run without anyone's permission. There is also a self-audit exercise in the middle, so grab a pen or hit pause when you get there.

For HVACR and trade firm owners, field managers, operations leaders, and anyone in AEC who is tired of paying to replace the same role over and over.

Bryce Batts is the co-CEO of Career Collective, an AEC-focused recruiting and coaching firm, and the founder of Bryce Batts Consulting, where she runs a 16-week engagement helping firms rebuild hiring, retention, and leadership systems. She has spent more than a decade recruiting in the built environment, is a certified career coach, the author of The Career Architect, and the host of Women in AEC: Wine After Work. She speaks regularly on talent systems, leadership, and women in the trades.

• Why women leaving HVACR is a leadership problem, not a pipeline problem

• The real representation numbers, and why the 45% growth stat is misleading

• What turnover actually costs, and why it never shows up on the P&L as turnover

• The four explanations leaders give, and what exit research says instead

• Reason one: harassment, and the 80% number that does more daily damage

• Reason two: isolation and why being the only one compounds everything

• Reason three: childcare, accommodations, and PPE that does not fit

• Reason four: the promotion path nobody ever wrote down

• The single biggest retention lever, and why most managers have never been told about it

• Four shifts, each with something you can do this week

• The stay audit exercise, and the one question to end it with

• A 30/60/90 day plan

• Recruiting harder makes a retention problem worse, not better. If the back door is open, more spend at the front door just means you lose more people faster while every metric on your recruiting dashboard says you are winning.

• The manager is the retention strategy. A positive relationship with a direct manager is consistently the number one retention factor for women in the trades. Not pay, not benefits, not the values page on your website.

• Turnover is a margin problem that got miscategorized as an HR problem. Replacing a skilled trade employee runs $15,000 to $30,000, and construction turnover can run 50% to 200% of the departing person's salary. It hides in overtime, recruiting spend, and callbacks.

• Practical barriers are operational fixes, not cultural ones. Properly fitting PPE, scheduling, and parental accommodations require someone to place an order and update a document. That is exactly why it is damning when they do not get done.

• Fix the system, not the individual. An arrangement you build for one person and never write down leaves when she does, and the next person fights the same fight alone.

1. Pull your last three complaints and read what happened after they were filed. If the answer is "I talked to them," that is a conversation, not a resolution.

2. Ask every person on your team what their next role is. If they cannot answer, neither can you.

3. Pull your PPE and scheduling policies and ask who each one was designed for. Then go look at what is physically in the supply room.

4. Name one connection point you can create in the next 30 days for anyone who is the only one on their crew. Put a date on it.

CSG Talent, IWPR, ACHR News, She Builds the Nation, Construction Owners Association (2025), People Element (2025–26)

• Career Collective: https://www.mycareercollective.com

• Women in HVACR: https://www.womeninhvacr.org

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryce-batts-recruiter

• Email: [email protected]

• Instagram: @brycebatts

• Website: www.brycebatts.co

Barb Allen spent 20 years on commercial job sites, starting as a carpenter apprentice in 1997 and working her way up to superintendent. She was the first woman her company had ever hired out of college for that track. She left the built environment in 2022 after a meeting where leadership told her she was "difficult to work with," then admitted nobody could say how.

That meeting became a book. In OneLadder to Leadership, Barb names four gender specific challenges as rungs on an unsafe ladder: missing, broken, sticky, and slippery. In this conversation she breaks down all four, tells the story of the day she stood up to a guy on her crew and changed how the whole site treated her, and explains why "are you the safety girl?" stopped making her blood boil once she figured out what to do with it.

This one is for AEC leaders trying to understand why the women they hire don't stay, and for women in the industry who have been handed feedback that sounded like a suggestion and only later found out it was a requirement.

About Barb Allen

Barb Allen is a keynote speaker, author, and 20 year construction veteran who climbed from carpenter to project executive and operations director on projects including $100MM+ high rise towers. She holds a bachelor's degree in construction management and spent most of her career as a commercial job site superintendent before leaving the field in 2022 to speak and write full time. She is the author of OneLadder to Leadership and hosts the Constructive Behaviors podcast. She is most active on LinkedIn, and yes, she has opinions about golf.

• Website: https://constructionbarb.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/constructionbarb/

• Book: https://www.amazon.com/ONE-LADDER-LEADERSHIP-everyone-ladder/dp/B0GT7MBTGS

What We Cover

• Introduction and how Barb found construction management two majors and one near dropout into college

• Day one as a carpenter apprentice in January 1997, and the tool bags nobody told her to buy

• Why the hazing started three months in, not on day one

• The G.I. Jane moment with Don, and what changed on that site afterward

• Backstage support and why an apology after the meeting is not the same as backup during it

• The missing rung: why women get feedback that sounds like a suggestion

• Whether women leaders are as direct as men, and Barb admitting she was harder on the women who worked for her

• The broken rung: golf, hunting trips, and where sponsorship actually gets formed

• The sticky rung: how the industry misreads confidence, and the case for humility, curiosity, and collaboration

• The slippery rung: unconscious bias, "are you the safety girl?", and the response that actually lands

• The conversation that ended Barb's 20 years in the built environment

• Three types of firms when it comes to women, and what each one is getting wrong

• What Barb would tell a young woman walking onto her first job site

• Where to find Barb and closing thoughts

Key Takeaways

• If your feedback to a woman on your team sounds like "maybe you could think about doing this differently," you have not given feedback. Direct and actionable, or it goes to the bottom of her list with everything else that is optional.

• Stop evaluating confidence by who speaks first and asks the fewest questions. Barb's reframe: humility, curiosity, and collaboration. The person willing to say "I don't understand that acronym" in a room of twenty is demonstrating leadership, not doubt.

• Backstage support is not support. If you apologize to her in the hallway after the meeting instead of speaking up in the meeting, you were part of it.

• Look at your leadership page. If you are hiring good women and none of them are on it, the problem is not your pipeline, it is how you are evaluating leadership.

• When someone assumes you are the safety girl, the win is not the comeback. It is leaving them aware enough to ask the next woman on site what she does instead of guessing.

Resources + Links

• Barb's website: https://constructionbarb.com

• Barb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/constructionbarb/

• OneLadder to Leadership on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ONE-LADDER-LEADERSHIP-everyone-ladder/dp/B0GT7MBTGS

• Constructive Behaviors podcast (Barb's show): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/constructive-behaviors/id1685754635

• Mentioned in the episode: the movie G.I. Jane (1997)

Architecture is usually discussed as a service. A client has a need, a firm delivers a building, everyone moves on to the next project. Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni makes a harder argument. She says the built environment is one of the strongest forces shaping whether people in a place trust each other, and that the consequences of getting it wrong can take generations to show up.

She would know. Marwa is an architect based in Homs, Syria, who stayed through the war and wrote about what she was watching in real time. In this episode she and Bryce talk about how decades of zoning and redevelopment separated communities that had lived together, what she believes reconstruction actually requires, why identity and beauty are structural concerns rather than decorative ones, and what it means to keep practicing architecture in a place where the profession's stakes are impossible to ignore.

This one is for architects, engineers, and firm leaders who want a bigger frame on what their work does after the ribbon is cut. It's also for anyone in AEC who has started to wonder whether the profession they trained for still means what they thought it meant.

Dr. Marwa Al-Sabouni is an architect, urban thinker, author, and international speaker based in Syria. She holds a PhD in architectural design and Islamic architecture, and her work brings together sociology, contextual and psychological analysis, and aesthetics to make the case for architecture as a society-making tool. She is the author of The Battle for Home (2016), Building for Hope (2020), and Mosque (2026), published internationally by Thames & Hudson, and a chapter-author in the Getty publication Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities (2022).

Her writing has appeared in RIBA Journal, Architectural Review, Standpoint Magazine, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the ICRC Journal, Renovatio, Middle East Eye, and others. She received the Prince Claus Award in 2018, was named to the BBC 100 Women list in 2019, and won the World Monuments Fund Watch Award in 2023. The Battle for Home was named one of the Guardian's best architecture books of 2016, Prospect Magazine named her one of the top 50 thinkers in the world, and Architectural Digest listed her among the top contenders for the 2018 Pritzker Prize. Her TED talk has been viewed over a million times.

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marwaalsabouni/?hl=en

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marwa-al-sabouni-44a07b21/

• Introduction and Marwa's background as an architect in Homs

• How the built environment shapes trust between neighbors

• What happened to Homs before the war, and what the design decisions had to do with it

• Writing The Battle for Home from inside the conflict

• Why identity, beauty, and belonging are structural concerns and not decorative ones

• What real reconstruction requires, and how most rebuilding efforts get it wrong

• Mosque (2026) and what a single building type reveals about a whole society

• Practicing architecture when the stakes are impossible to ignore

• Advice for architects and engineers who want their work to matter more

• Where to find Marwa and closing thoughts

• The built environment is not a neutral backdrop to social life. Zoning, density, and material choices change how likely people are to know and trust the people around them.

• Beauty and identity are not budget line items to cut first. They are part of what makes people willing to stay somewhere and take care of it.

• Reconstruction that ignores what a place meant to the people who lived there rebuilds the buildings and loses the community.

• Architects have more influence over social outcomes than the typical scope of work suggests, and that influence operates whether or not anyone claims it.

• A career in this industry gets more durable, not less, when you can name what your work is actually for.

You've optimized your schedule, pushed through the late nights, and kept delivering — but you still feel like you're running on empty. What if the missing link isn't mindset or time management... it's nutrition?

Valerie Hawkins is a nutritionist and self-concept coach who left engineering to help women tackle anxiety, burnout, and brain fog through the power of what they eat. In this episode, she shares the science behind the nutrition-mental health connection and her Self-Concept Method for making lasting, practical changes.

You'll learn:

• How your diet is directly affecting your anxiety, mood, and energy — especially under pressure
• The link between nutrition and conditions like ADHD, migraines, and burnout
• What easy and effective nutrition changes actually look like for busy professional women
• How addressing root causes leads to sustainable weight loss AND better mental health

Connect with Valerie: valerieHawkinsnutrition.com | LinkedIn: Valerie Hawkins

Architects have been losing ground for years, and the industry keeps explaining it away with fee pressure, schedule pressure, and software. Beau [Last Name] has a less comfortable answer. He says the profession's own craft has declined, and that decline is exactly why architects keep getting moved further from the decisions that matter.

His case runs like this. When drawings are incomplete and coordination is loose, somebody has to fill that gap, and lately that somebody is the builder. The builder absorbs the risk, then reasonably takes the authority that comes with it. Beau and Bryce get into what caused that slide, why architectural education has to become craft centric to reverse it, how AI either accelerates the decline or becomes the thing that reverses it depending entirely on how firms use it, and what he means by the "Super-Architect" and the three characteristics that define one. They also talk about the fracture inside the profession itself and why a national focus on craft may be the only thing that closes it.

This one is for principals and firm leaders watching their scope shrink, for emerging professionals who were never actually taught to draw a building, and for anyone in AEC who wants the architect back at the table where the real decisions get made.

Beau Dromiack is Principal of [Firm Name], a practice focused on mission critical architecture delivered with quality, efficiency, and craft. He has integrated design expertise across Design-Bid-Build, CMaR, Design-Build, and Integrated Design delivery, and is a member of AIA, DBIA, SCUP, and NCARB. He holds a Master of Architecture from Arizona State University, serves on the ASU faculty teaching graduate architecture, and mentors emerging professionals. He also volunteers teaching design to design-build teams at Northern Arizona University's School of Construction and teaches STEM based architecture and engineering principles to elementary students, including teaching tools he developed himself.

He is the author of The Craft Advantage: Reviving Craft in Architecture to Build a Better Environment and Improve Influence and Super-Architect: The Future of Architecture, which is also available as an audiobook on Audible, Apple, and Amazon in five countries. Beau has been married 34 years, has four adult kids, and spends his free time backpacking, raising chickens in pursuit of the perfect egg, and baking in pursuit of the perfect cookie.

• Introduction and Beau's background as a principal, professor, and author

• What craft actually means in architecture, and what it does not mean

• How the decline in craft eroded professional respect

• The craft gap, and why builders are filling it

• How poor documentation shifts risk to the contractor and authority away from the architect

• Why architectural education needs to be craft centric

• The three characteristics of the "Super-Architect"

• Using AI proactively to build AI optimized practices and new business models

• Why a fractured profession is a fragile one

• What a national focus on craft could actually reunify

• Where to find Beau and his books, plus closing thoughts

• Influence follows responsibility. Every gap in a drawing set that a builder has to close is a piece of authority the architect gave away, whether or not anyone named it that way.

• Craft is not perfectionism and it is not slowness. Beau's case is that higher craft is what makes speed and integration possible instead of dangerous.

• Craft cannot be recruited. It gets built through mentorship, documentation standards, and leaders who actually teach, which makes it a firm systems problem rather than a hiring problem.

• AI will either widen the craft gap or close it, and the deciding factor is whether a firm defines its use proactively or lets AI define the firm.

• A profession that can't agree on what it is worth is easy to move off the table. Shared standards are a growth strategy, not nostalgia.

• Beau's website: https://dromiackinvention.com/about

• Beau Dromiack on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beau-dromiack-aia-dbia-ncarb-scup-310747124/

• The Craft Advantage: Reviving Craft in Architecture to Build a Better Environment and Improve Influence

• Super-Architect: The Future of Architecture (also on Audible, Apple, and Amazon as an audiobook)

• Career Collective: https://www.mycareercollective.com

• Bryce Batts Consulting: www.brycebatts.co

If this one landed, rate and review Wine After Work wherever you listen. It's the fastest way to get these conversations in front of more people in the industry.

If you've ever felt stuck, scared to take the next step, or unsure of where you're headed — this episode is for you. Career and vision coach Carey Conley has spent 21+ years helping entrepreneurs and AEC professionals ditch fear-driven thinking and build a life with intention and purpose.

In this conversation, Carey breaks down why so many high-achieving women in technical fields stay trapped in survival mode — and exactly how a bold, defined vision becomes the catalyst for everything else.

In this episode:

• Why high achievers are often the most vision-deficient (and what to do about it)
• How to write a vision that actually changes your behavior and decisions
• The fear of success vs. fear of failure — and how to stop letting either one run your life
• Practical steps to align your goals with a purpose-driven vision

Connect with Carey at careyconley.com | Instagram & Facebook: @Carey.Conley3 | LinkedIn: CareyConleyINC

Great healthcare design is invisible. You feel calmer, you find your way, your family has a place to rest, and you never notice the hundred decisions that made it happen. Kristin Green, a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville, builds her whole practice around that idea. In this episode, she walks through what it actually takes to design hospitals that balance operational efficiency with genuine, patient-centered care.

We get into the human details and the hard tradeoffs. Why she starts every project by leaving her ego at the door. How ESa levels the room so the nurse's voice carries as much weight as the CEO's. What she'd change about sterile, all-white healthcare spaces. And how AI has earned a real place in her workflow, from generating exterior concepts to building a data-backed space program in hours instead of weeks.

This one is for architects, healthcare and AEC leaders, and anyone curious about where design and technology are heading. It's a thoughtful look at building spaces that serve people first and still hold up for the next 30 years.

About Kristin Green

Kristin Green is a healthcare architect at Earl Swensson Associates (ESa) in Nashville. Known for her collaborative approach, she works closely with design teams, clients, end users, and consultants to guide projects from concept to completion while preserving the integrity of the design vision. A University of Cincinnati graduate, she is skilled in 3D software and driven by the belief that great design should be functional yet beautiful, inspiring, and timeless. Her process starts with intentional listening, so that the spaces she creates reflect the people and stories behind them.

What We Cover

• Introduction and Kristin's path from Cincinnati's co-op program to healthcare design

• Why ESa's single-office culture in Nashville shapes how the work gets done

• Intentional listening and the visioning session that starts every project

• Leveling the room so end users, not just leadership, shape the design

• Balancing emotional patient experience with operational efficiency

• The small details that change everything, from daylight to washers and dryers on the floor

• Emerging trends: hospital robots, pneumatic systems, and AI-enabled patient monitoring

• How ESa thoughtfully integrates AI, from concept generation to data-backed programming

• Preserving design vision across years, consultants, and team turnover

• The Arthur M. Blank Hospital and designing for timelessness over trends

• Where to find Kristin and closing thoughts

Key Takeaways

• Listening beats telling. The best healthcare projects start with a visioning session where the design team leaves its ego at the door and hears what actually matters to the people who will use the space.

• Warmth is a design decision. A facility can be cutting edge and still feel human, through daylight, color, and details that fight the sterile, institutional default.

• AI is a curator's tool, not a replacement. Kristin uses it to generate thousands of concepts and to build data-backed space programs, then applies human judgment to what's real, buildable, and right for the client.

• The first design is rarely the final one. Collaboration and early contractor pricing often produce a better, more cost-effective result without losing the intended look.

• Design for decades. Timeless choices matter most in buildings that may not change for 20 or 30 years.

Resources + Links

• ESa website: https://esarch.com

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristin-plummer/

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/earl-swensson-associates/

• Career Collective: https://www.mycareercollective.com