Denise Dea is an Associate Principal at PAYETTE whose work has focused on studio management, project management and integrating a holistic understanding of people and culture into our Practice. In addition to her twenty years at the firm, she has simultaneously taught architectural design and theory at institutions such as Boston Architectural College, Wentworth Institute of Technology and is a core faculty member for PAYETTE’s OpenLAB Studio in collaboration with Virginia Tech.
Emily Miyares, AIA is an Associate at PAYETTE. She is an experienced Architect and Project Manager with recent projects at Tulane and Tufts Universities. Emily is also an active contributor to the firm’s culture; she has served on the Recruiting Team, organized the firm’s MLK Day of Service, served as the Licensing Advisor, and coordinated the High-School Internship program.
We are thrilled that Denise has been promoted to Director of People, Culture and Studio Integration. Having someone whose main focus is people and culture affirms our ethos that people are our most important resource and that culture requires a steward as we evolve generation to generation. Denise and Emily sat down to discuss this new role and what it means for our practice.
Denise: To start things off, Emily, what are some things that you feel are ubiquitous to the people and culture of PAYETTE?
Emily: We are smart, curious and kind; we are drawn to our science and healthcare building typologies because we believe in their mission of advancing knowledge and caring for others. We are also ambitious and driven, and we pour a lot of ourselves into our work. This can also mean that we need lots of support! I’m so glad there’s a formalized role in the office focused on how we work together.
Emily: Denise, this is a new role within the firm and a new title for you, but you’ve been focused on people, practice and culture for years, both at PAYETTE and in your teaching work. What are the ways this work will expand or change with the new role?
Denise: This new role is an exciting one for me! It’s true that I have always been people focused. When I first started at PAYETTE, I was influenced by Tom Payette, who was focused on the very human connections that allow us to make, create, design with each other, our clients, our users and our consultants. Any project, no matter what scale, location or typology allows for human interactions – and those engagements are key to the practice and culture that we have at PAYETTE. That belief that people matter and are the reason why we do what we do at PAYETTE is the reason why I am so happy working here. I feel like I belong here and can make a difference in our practice as a connection to the past and reminder of this important ideal.
Over the last twenty years, I have been informally building networks of people within the firm simply through my work, presence and desire to know everyone in the firm. As our firm grew over this time – we are considerably larger than we were – I kept growing my network. At the base, my special focus is finance – but my architectural training has taught me that everything has the potential to be a design problem. I realized that even while focused on numbers that might tell one story, the bigger, more interesting narrative is in the creation of teams and the culture around a team. This is a fun design problem that I could help offer solutions for because of my continuous dialogue with all levels of people at PAYETTE through a network of people that I have cultivated for a long time.
To answer your question more directly, I think that this role is an augmentation of what I naturally do and have proven to be successful at. The title gives everyone at the firm a singular individual who they can go to with anything and trust that I will always help with challenges and applaud successes and see paths for new career opportunities.
Emily: Something special you bring to the role is a great deal of experience as an architect, Project Manager, and teacher. I think it gives you a holistic perspective on the work we do and the support we need as people to succeed. Can you share more about how your understanding of people developed, and how it influences your work?
Denise: Design Always is an important tenant to PAYETTE – everyone here is part of that ideal. This role is meant to recognize the complexity of PAYETTE’s organization; there are many pieces operationally that connect in different ways that can only be solved by design. We have designed this role around the understanding that people are our most important resource, and that people are common denominators across any team, department or levels. I have been given the honor and opportunity to be a resource to our people and guardian of our culture.
I have taught for over 30 years, and I am deeply passionate about the education of young designers. Teaching design keeps me at the forefront of what students are concerned about. Knowing individuals at this early stage of their career allows me to make correlations with our interns and young designers that might not be obvious to someone who isn’t interacting with students on a regular basis. I am comfortable talking to students, assessing their work and helping them become better architects by having transparent conversations about what they are good at, pointing out discrepancies in their intentions and design work, and helping them become more self-aware and critical about the work.
Being engaged in practice has allowed me to understand the phases, as well as the rewards and challenges of a practicing architect’s career over a lifetime. Clearly, there is an evolution in an architect’s career, as well as an understanding of the circumstances of life that may affect that process. There are moments of sheer exhilaration of being part of the team that wins a new project and securing your place on that winning team and there are moments of quiet due to an unexpected pause due to illness. I have a lot of empathy for all the things that can happen to people. I have experienced enough in my various career roles to be able to mentor people by understanding a larger context and sharing how life experiences unfold into a lengthy narrative full of ups and downs, as well as being clear enough to solve an immediate issue effectively and quickly.
The practice and teaching of architecture are complementary and having a keen understanding of what architects do, and their process, has allowed me the opportunity to build strong and diverse teams that will work well together to create good architecture. It is the understanding of people with their varied, unique strengths coupled with their growth potential through specific project opportunities that I plan to use to help our staff manage their careers.
Just like in architecture, where a building can’t be designed by one person, I can’t influence firm culture on my own. I collaborate with everyone from Principals to Designers, Directors to Project Managers, from Architects to Operations to get the full picture of what is happening every day. Culture moves in small ways every day; it is reinforced in everyday conversations, and it is prioritized in our project showings, design alcove discussions, and even in the Foundation curriculum of lectures for all of our staff. It always comes back to the realization that it is our people who allow for interconnections between our design and process and our culture. We all need each other to be the most effective no matter our specific role at PAYETTE and designing that structure is really what the opportunity is here.
Emily: You have a wide range of responsibilities at PAYETTE. Do you have a common approach to how you handle so many different kinds of responsibilities?
Denise: I often say, “Everything is a design problem.” This fundamental belief is apparent in my approach to everything from team formation to mentorship to project finances to career management. But it all starts with listening to people, defining the problem and then synthesizing surrounding context for the best solution. The best design considers a myriad of concerns and solves the problem by making it seem effortless and beautiful and functional. When you have all those elements, you know the solution is good. To me, this works for anything – developing communication strategies, creating new opportunities for staff learning, balancing workloads, creating teams or even ensuring profitability. Because of this understanding, you can put me into any situation, and I will make it better.
Because of this ability, I have been fortunate to have opportunities in many aspects of our practice that are unusual for either someone in operations or architecture. I float between both worlds which enables me to have a place embedded in diverse aspects of our practice such as Social Media, Finance, Marketing, Design Teams, Project Management, Staffing and OpenLAB.
Emily: PAYETTE has always been very connected to the world of academia, and I’ve watched this relationship become more and more central to the firm’s identity in the past five years. I know you have some plans to incorporate more academic-style programs into our array of professional development tools; can you describe what the vision is for this?
Denise: I am involved in a few initiatives planned for this first year that could be understood as academic in nature while simultaneously advancing our practice and there are many more planned for the future. I can share two things that I am currently working on.
One initiative is called FOUNDATIONS . It is based on the understanding that what is good for our students is good for our people. We are augmenting several lectures that we developed in the Professional Practice course of OpenLAB and making them available to everyone at PAYETTE. These courses are designed to help our students quickly understand our firm culture and values and productively engage to advance their designs and process.
With the growth of our firm over the last several years, we find that we need to share our firm’s design ethos, process and expertise, as well as various facets of our practice that are unique to PAYETTE with both experienced and new staff. FOUNDATIONS is designed to create a common ground that will make us all designers with the same base knowledge, ideals and underlying beliefs. These lectures touch on our typologies, areas of innovation incorporated into practice and specialized roles and allow deep discussions on these topics for cross-discipline knowledge amplification and clarity of their importance to our culture.
Another is the education of Managers in our practice. We realize that this takes a special kind of attention as it is identified by our staff as the most difficult transition to make in a career. This is envisioned as much more than a singular initiative and needs to happen in multifaceted ways to be effective. There is a component that provides clear content about how to manage people or situations well, as well as opportunities for discussion and mentorship and gathering resources and making them accessible to all.
Part of an academic practice is about defining the culture that actively allows for the critique of our design to ensure excellence. We have several aspects that engage this – from our design showings to alcove discussions, even our comprehensive reviews. I am also trained as an architectural historian/theoretician, which allows me a unique viewpoint to see trends across our projects, current and even diving back in time to our roots. As a champion of our culture, this is a unique academic perspective that I look forward to sharing.
Emily: Architectural education does not typically include a lot of leadership or management training! At PAYETTE, a critical thing you do is support emerging managers and leaders as they develop these skills on the job. Can you share what your leadership and managerial style is, and what influenced you as you navigated your career?
Denise: I aspire to be a generous leader. I am interested in making space for others; I can do so much more when I invite people in!
You can see this in my physical location in the office – I am in the center of the floor. Everyone is likely to pass by and say hi or check in as they traverse the office. I like being open and available. I even keep a comfy chair next to my desk – anyone can drop in at any time for a conversation. I am always happy to help!
One of my teachers told me that you should always have a mentor and have lunch with them once a month. She always made time for me, she believed in me and I would not be who I am without her. I feel this is a professional debt that I cannot repay to her, but I can pay it forward to the next generation. I will always make time for coffee or lunch to spend time with people over a meal.
Emily: In many ways, this new role is a continuation of work you’ve been doing at PAYETTE for a long time, but I know you have lots of ideas for the future – can you share some of our vision for the role going forward?
Denise: There are short-term goals and long-term visions. The short-term goals lie in the recognition that we need many different kinds of people to make excellent design. Everyone is part of Design Always. Having someone in a position to recognize this and remind everyone of this goal, while leveraging our deep resources and making connections across teams and within our teams, will make the firm better. We need to be able to speak transparently and respectfully to one another to do good work.
Long term, it is about our people. Our people make our culture.
This new role offers me the opportunity to continue a tradition of caring for our people, while also evolving it. Our culture is ever-changing. It is important to have someone in leadership taking care of these aspects of the firm.
A Week With: Women in Fabrication
Sandrine, Sophie, and Emily are vital members of our Fabrication Team—a part of PAYETTE’s Engine. They collaborate with multiple groups in our office, constantly shifting in scale, material, and type of