Our professional development programs are based on our Leadership Capabilities—our framework for leadership behaviors and how we cultivate a culture of trust, accountability, growth and inclusivity at ArchTam.

“It’s important that we invest in the full pipeline of leaders to support our vision and culture,” says ArchTam’s Global Vice President, Leadership Development Kimberly Currier. “Regardless of what level someone is at ArchTam, our series of development programs is designed to help accelerate and boost performance as employees make critical turns in their careers.”

Leadership at all Levels programming is tailored to each career level to help our employees become innovative thinkers, supportive managers, and impactful leaders. Take a look at what we offer to support the growth of your technical capabilities and professional skills.

We support our early career employees by helping them learn about our vision and focus, how our business operates and kickstart networking across our organization. A few of our early career programs are:

• Graduate Development Program (Americas)  
• Growing Professional Skills (Australia and New Zealand)
• ADVANCE (Europe and India, Middle East and Africa)

To help our employees become trusted advisors with our clients, our Accelerate program focuses on developing the skills they need to build confident, promising relationships with clients that enable them to counsel and make recommendations.

Through our Manager Mindset Development Series, we offer our people managers tools to deliver great work while supporting and cultivating diverse and thriving teams. This includes equipping them with the skills they need to manage others with empathy, create a coaching culture, and stay informed on timely topics in our organization.

For our high-performing employees who are strong contributors and want to level up their leadership and business skills, we offer Elevate (Americas) and Evolve (Europe and India, Middle East and Africa). These programs are focused on self-awareness, strategic thinking, and career development planning.

To prepare the strongest drivers of our business as future business leaders at ArchTam, weoffer Business Builders Circle, which provides opportunities for coaching and mentorship.

To further develop our best strategic, operational and technical talent, we offer CEO Circle, our executive leadership development program that prepares our leaders to drive growth and transportation across our organization. The program features Wharton Executive Education as a learning partner. CEO Circle participant Andrew Bui said of his experience, “I’ve learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and importantly, I’ve learned a lot about the qualities I want to strive for to make myself a stronger leader for both my team as well as ArchTam as whole.”

Technical skill building

Your career is as unique as you are – reflecting your own capabilities and ambitions. In addition to our professional development programs, we also encourage our employees to hone their technical skillset.

• ArchTam University offers self-directed, personalized learning content from providers, including LinkedIn Learning, TED Talks, AutoDesk and Bentley.
• Our Global Business Line Technical Academies include high-quality, structured technical learning across our global business lines.
• Our Technical Practice Network provides access and exposure to the people, tools and resources that drive our commitment to technical excellence.

Our programs will let you assess your own abilities, learn with others, and personalize your professional development. 

Be sure to check out our Career Paths framework to see how you can pursue rewarding career opportunities at ArchTam with our four career paths.

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When psychologist Martin Seligman introduced the term “learned helplessness”, he proved the principle: if you experience that you cannot change what happens to yourself, you are paralyzed, leading to a downward spiral, no success stories, no motivation, no success. This was a substantial insight into the psychotherapy of depression. However, during his further studies as a psychologist and researcher, Seligman realised that not all individuals react to adverse circumstances in the same way – some tend to give up sooner, whereas others seem to have resources that prevent them from getting frustrated. In the meantime, a movement called “Positive Psychology” evolved, focusing on exactly these resources. Instead of looking for ways to cure mental illness, Positive Psychologists began to focus on ways to improve the quality of life.

We can transfer the core idea of Positive Psychology to the workplace. There is a simple recipe. Barbara Fredrickson, a distinguished expert in the field of positive emotions, suggests that optimistic thinking can lead to “flourishment”. This might sound a little esoteric, but it is a valuable concept in everyday life, describing a state of entire life satisfaction, comprising “feeling good” and “doing good”. Fredrickson posits that this state is enabled by the Positivity Ratio of 3:1 – that, on average, people who experience three times more positive than negative emotions are healthier, more optimistic, have happier marriages, better relationships and are more creative (try testing your own positivity ratio here!).

Bringing this theory into the workplace, a study found out that in successful meetings, the number of positive interactions clearly exceeds the number of negative interactions. Negative emotions are often experienced as more intense than positive emotions but luckily, for most individuals, the number of positive emotions experienced throughout their usual day exceeds the number of negative ones. And if the ratio is 3:1 or higher, we “flourish” (depressive individuals usually have a ratio of 1:1 or lower). This lead to an “upward spiral”, with motivation for new activities growing with positive experiences, and better motivation creating more positive experiences.

In summary, the recipe for fostering positivity and thus productivity in the workplace is: make sure we all have three times as many positive emotions as negative emotions.

How can we do this? Consider trying out the following ideas:

• Start a meeting by reporting reasons to celebrate and success stories. This allows participants to start off in a positive state of mind. It could help more difficult and tricky issues to be solved throughout the meeting. Research has also shown that individuals can enhance their awareness for positive events by keeping note of at least one good thing that has happened every day – this could be translated into a meeting by making sure to recap any positive outcomes as the meeting finishes.
• Allow “flow” by activity-based working. Doing something you’re really good at and confident in, but with a sense of challenge, can be an extremely positive experience. When these conditions are met, researchers discovered a state of timelessness and sense of total mastery, known as “flow”. Leaders can help enable this in the workplace by assigning the right tasks to the right people, but another important factor is the environment: a space can be ideal for one task (concentrated working in a quiet library), but detrimental to another (the same library to conduct a creative and exciting meeting). If it is possible to choose a suitable space for an activity, it is easier to experience “flow”, which has been shown to be a great enabler for creativity in the workplace.
• Surprise your colleagues. The tiniest positive experiences have been proven to significantly enhance our mood and change the way we approach things. Think about how you might cheer up others at work. A joke on the noticeboard? An unplanned break to have cake? Some flowers?

There are thousands of ways to bring more positivity into the workplace. What else can you think of?

Jennifer Gunkel is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

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I recently wrote a soon-to-be-published article for iCroner that outlined the “Journey of Leadership in the Workplace”, defining the skills a leader would need in 10 years to lead and manage in a more consumer-type workplace, as defined by the ArchTam workplace research. I argued that leaders would need to be able to redefine boundaries and rules, and ensure that they are established throughout the social context. They will need to have a high level of emotional intelligence, demonstrate benevolence towards others, have the intellectual capability to get the job done, and the ability to communicate messages consistently and frequently, so that staff are fully aware of what is expected of them, including the requirement to interact with, and be an active member of the organisation in a consumer-like manner.

With these ideas fresh in my head, I then went to the ballet to see “Cubania” with Carlos Acosta. You may think what does this have to do with leadership and the workplace?,  but I saw pushing, challenging and working within boundaries. Metal bars signified a box on stage and, one by one, each dancer would enter the box, dance, then step out of the box and watch the others do the same, until eventually they all danced in the box: sometimes in sync with one another, sometimes complementing one another, and sometimes dancing their own dance whilst still in the box with the others.

Inspiration struck, and I started to think that, just like in this dance, in the workplace leaders and teams watch each other, are sometimes in sync, sometimes complementary and sometimes doing their own task. For the future workplace, I started to think that leaders and managers may not only need to look to define boundaries from a task perspective, but also in a behavioural and personality arena.

Most leaders, managers and staff members have a “work face” that they put on. When they go home, they put on their “home face”. Cynically, this is thought of as people being two-faced; in a business arena, as being professional, or rather showing professionalism at work. In the future, if (as I argue in my article) we will need a more holistic leadership style, then we will need to interact with the whole person – more than just the “work face”.

So what does that mean? Expectations will change and we will need to accept that we are interacting not just with part of a person, but the whole person – and that means that leaders will need to lead and manage the whole person. A person cannot always be professional, so this will mean we need to be able to manage emotion. I don’t mean our own emotion, in the sense that we hide it – exactly the opposite. We will need to learn how to cope when someone is emotional. What will we do when someone cries? Will we pretend it is not happening, which tends to happen now? What happens when someone shouts? Will we run away and hide? Bury our head? Or face it head on?

How we deal with emotion in our personal lives now will transpire into the workplace as both places meld into one. The expectation of “professional” will actually disappear, as no one person will always be professional.

And so back to that dance – sometimes we will be in sync with one another, sometimes we will complement each other and sometimes we will be doing our own dance. Whatever the case may be, we will need to accept, adapt and cope with these new emotional boundaries.

Jennifer Bryan (jennifer.bryan@archtam.com) is head of organisational development within ArchTam’s Consultancy practice.

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