Whitney Pearce

I have great coaches through our coaching mentorship program here within Miller Hull, and I've had great coaches over my career that have given me a lot of great advice. I would say the number one best advice is to never be afraid to ask questions, and always remain curious. The second you stop being curious is the second you're dead in the water. To continue to grow and evolve, I continue to ask questions and be just curious about everything around me, everything related to my client, everything related to the project. And I try to instill that in our project teams to always be curious and ask questions.

I observe a lot of women in our industry shy away from the Lead Design Spotlight. It's something that I continue to see more and more women moving towards management, and there's very few women in that leadership design role. So I would say, not that that needs to be everyone's path - everyone has their own path and their own set of strengths - but to really lean in and be very intentional with your career choices, even when you don't realize you're making a choice, you actually subconsciously are. The roles you take on in project teams and where you put your passions and your extracurriculars - I think my main advice is to be very intentional and realize that every single day you are making incremental choices that will set you on your path and your trajectory. And to be very intentional with those choices.

I would say some challenges that we see as a whole in the industry is that the role of the architect has shifted and continues to evolve. I think with the trend towards progressive design-build, it's super important that we find the right partner and partnership, and partners that truly value what we bring to the table and value design. If you don't have the right partner or the right owner who values design and values the input that we bring, the delivery method could make the architect feel less valued. And we bring a ton of value when it comes to working with the owner teams and bringing diverse stakeholders to a table and finding consensus-based decisions - that is something that will never be replaced by AI, and it's also not the general contractor's strong suit. They're very good at a lot of things, but that's not what they're trained to do. So I think as long as we, as an industry, find the right partnerships and continue to value that set of tools that we bring, it's a wonderful delivery method, and we can accomplish really great things together.

I would say, definitely in both, building an environment of trust and accountability, and that kind of comes to your everyday verbal promises of I will deliver something to you by a certain time, to just acting with credibility and honor, and always having your team's back. Always, at home, making sure that my kids know that I always have their back, and I'm on their side. And just being accountable, so making sure that you always follow through with anything that you said you would deliver.