What’s the Key to Leadership? People!

Cianbro Institute

By Mark Brooks, Chief Security Officer/Cianbro Leadership Coordinator

One universal truth for any reputable organization operating today is that they are interested in developing their team members. Moreover, these organizations understand how important it is to develop their talent to carry the organization and the industry into the future. Unfortunately, most organizations are so busy focusing on day-to-day operations that they lose sight of those long-term goals, and the next generation is thrust into leadership roles without adequate preparation.

Thankfully at The Cianbro Companies, that is not the case.

Pete Vigue, Cianbro Chair; Andi Vigue, President and CEO; and Mike Bennett, Cianbro Vice President, have set goals for The Cianbro Companies that encourage further development of our leaders through a course of education we call the Cianbro Advanced Leadership Initiative (CALI).

In designing this course, we have deliberately combined learning styles such as theory, reading, experience, projects, team building, and opportunities for personal growth to better prepare leaders for ever-increasing roles and responsibilities. CALI builds on themes from other professional development programs, including Fundamentals of Supervision (FoS), Engineer Development Program (EDP), Cianbro Leadership Initiative (CLI). CALI builds upon the foundation of these courses – our principles of “it’s all about People,” “no one is smarter than all of us,” and “our word is our bond” – and instills them in a more advanced fashion.

CALI began on June 14-16, 2022, at Acadia National Park’s Schoodic Institute. These three days focused on team building, advanced leadership theory with Dr. George Manning, assignments to be applied with their respective

On October 10-14, 2022, we switched to an experiencebased model for learning. The CALI Team assembled in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where we explored part of our nation’s history at the Battle of Gettysburg. The team members specifically learned how decisions made by key leaders on both sides changed the course of history.

CALI team members read the book Killer Angels and watched the movie Gettysburg in preparation for the trip. Again, Pete and Mike spent the entire session with the team members and covered topics on sacrifice, re-emphasizing the reasons “it’s all about the people” must remain at the heart of Cianbro’s decisions.

Other topics covered by licensed Battlefield Guides, National Park Rangers, and other staff were: communication, transformational leadership, seizing the objective, and loving the people you lead.

Each topic was taken from a lesson on the battlefield, which the participants applied to their current roles.

Throughout the two-year program, Andi Vigue assigned CALI team members a strategic objective to work on over the course of a year. Andi asked the team members to work in pairs to identify enhancement opportunities to advance the company. Their goal is to study and frame the problem and seek innovative solutions to these complex problems.

The CALI group will assemble again at Cianbro’s Rainbow Lake property in Maine in the summer of 2023 as they finalize their projects and present their findings, ideas, and solutions.

The Cianbro Companies knows that there is more to developing the leaders of tomorrow than merely talking about it. Instead, Cianbro is taking the initiative to continually improve our legacy leadership programs, even developing new, robust programs like CALI for our future!