The skills that made you the person everyone relies on are not the skills that run a practice. Six things worth building now, while nobody has given you the title and the stakes of learning them are low.
The last piece in this series argued that the move from department manager to practice leader isn’t the next rung on the same ladder, and that firms hand it over without preparing anyone for it.
Which leaves an obvious question for the person who wants the job. If the firm isn’t going to prepare you, what should you be building on your own?
Probably not more technical depth.
That sounds wrong, so let me be careful about it. Technical credibility is not optional. In environmental work especially — where the client is NYSDOT or a state agency or a municipality, and the exposure is regulatory — nobody follows a practice leader they don’t trust technically. The same is true in a transportation group or a structures department. The credibility is the floor.
But it is the floor. You are already standing on it. Another five years of getting better at the work you’re already the best at will not move you one step closer to the seat you want, because the seat isn’t a technical job.
Here is what I’d build instead. Six things, none of which require anyone’s permission to start.
1. Learn the economics of your practice
Knowing whether your projects are profitable is not the same as knowing whether your practice is profitable. Most strong managers know their projects’ numbers but have never been walked through the economics of the practice.
Learn how your firm actually thinks about backlog, utilization, multipliers, margin and revenue — and how those four or five numbers move against each other when a decision gets made. Ask to sit in on a forecasting cycle. Not to contribute. To listen.
This is the capability that separates people fastest, because it’s the one nobody offers you and everyone assumes you’ll absorb by osmosis. You won’t.
2. Learn how work is actually won
Most technical managers enter a pursuit at the point where someone asks them to write the technical approach. By then every interesting decision has already been made.
Get in earlier. Why this client. Why this project. Who are we against, and what do they do better than us. What does this client care about, as opposed to what the RFP says. How are we positioning the team, and why that structure rather than another one.
Volunteer for one strategic pursuit end to end — go/no-go through the interview. One is enough to change how you see the work.
3. Start owning client relationships
There’s a real difference between being the technical person a client respects and being the person the client calls.
The second one is built when there’s nothing wrong. Ask to come along to client meetings where there is no problem to solve, which are the meetings technical people are least often invited to and which matter most. Then follow up yourself. Learn what the client is trying to accomplish beyond the scope you’re delivering.
A relationship that only activates when something has gone sideways isn’t a relationship. It’s an escalation path.
4. Become known for developing people
This is the one firms say they value and rarely measure, and it’s the one that will most distinguish you when a firm is deciding who can lead.
Pick one promising project manager or technical specialist and deliberately build them. Delegate something you’d normally keep because you do it better. Send them to the meeting you’d normally take. Then debrief with them afterward, which is where the actual development happens and where most people skip.
Your value as a leader stops being starts being what the people around you can accomplish, not what you alone get done. That transition is uncomfortable for the people who got promoted for being the best technical problem solver in the building.
5. Learn workforce planning
When should the practice hire? What expertise will it need in two years that it doesn’t have now? Where is it dangerously dependent on one senior person? Which skills have become hard to find in this market?
These are answerable questions and you can start answering them today without any authority to act on them.
It matters here more than most places. The current NYSDOT capital plan is $34.3 billion over five years — the largest in the agency’s history — and that work runs through environmental review, permitting, design and construction support for years. ENR’s 2025 Top 500 Design Firms grew revenue 7.3% to $147.8 billion, and the same firms named finding and keeping people as a top concern.
There is work. The constraint is people. A practice leader who can look two years out and say what the group will need, and start solving for it now, is worth more than one who can only staff what’s in front of them.
Ask to be in a hiring discussion even when the opening isn’t on your team. You’ll learn more about how leadership thinks in one of those conversations than in a year of project meetings.
6. Develop a point of view about where the practice should go
This is the biggest shift of the six.
A manager asks how we deliver the work we have. A practice leader also asks what work we should be doing three years from now.
Which services should expand. Which clients are worth investing in. Where regulatory or infrastructure priorities are opening something up. And the harder half of that question, the one people skip: where shouldn’t we compete.
You do not need the title to have a view. You need to have been paying attention, and to have thought about it enough to say it out loud in a room where it might get argued with.
What this actually gets you
Two things, and the second matters more than you might expect.
The first is obvious. When a practice leadership role opens — at your firm or another one — you are a candidate who has already been doing pieces of the job rather than a strong technical manager the firm has to take a chance on.
The second is that you find out what you’re actually signing up for. Some very good technical managers go through this and conclude they don’t want it. That’s not a failed experiment. That’s a person who learned something important about their own career before spending three unhappy years discovering it from the inside.
The last piece in this series covered how to open that conversation with your own leadership, and I won’t repeat it here. The short version is that you have to say the ambition out loud, because nobody is going to guess.
What I’d add is this: of these six skills, one of them is the thing your practice leader would be genuinely surprised to hear you ask about.
That’s the one to start with.
Lynn writes about hiring, careers, and the talent market in Western New York’s architecture, engineering, and construction community. More at nordstromwilliams.com.
Next in this series: inheriting an established practice and fixing a struggling one are two very different jobs. What to find out before you say yes.