Leadership Skills for Architects, with Karen Fugle

In this Architecture Social CPD, executive and leadership coach Karen Fugle of SleepingGiant Consulting joins Stephen Drew for a practical conversation on leadership skills for architects. Recorded as a live session, it runs for approximately 54 minutes. You can listen using the player below, or on Spotify.

Who this is for

Architects and built-environment professionals moving into management and leadership: newly qualified architects inheriting a team, mid-level associates managing up and down, small-practice owners, and anyone who wants to lead themselves and others more deliberately. No prior leadership training is assumed.

Learning outcomes

After engaging with this session you will be able to:

1. Use a simple weekly reflection routine, including the "what, so what, now what" method, to learn from your working week.
2. Recognise the common reasons professionals avoid reflection and put practical countermeasures in place.
3. Identify your core values and use them as a basis for clearer career and leadership decisions.
4. Apply more effective approaches to delegation, feedback and difficult conversations within a team.
5. Tailor recognition and appreciation to how individuals prefer to receive it.
6. Protect thinking time and manage decision fatigue so that your most important decisions get your best attention.

Leadership is a skill for everyone, not just senior leaders

Leadership is rarely taught at university and is often picked up on the job, frequently the moment a newly qualified architect inherits a team. Karen argues that leadership development is for everyone, at every level, and that professionals increasingly need to take ownership of it rather than wait for an employer to provide it.

Invest in yourself, in proportion

Investing in yourself does not have to be expensive or mean a formal course. It can be finding a mentor, protecting time to think about what you want from your career, or simply looking after your wellbeing so that stress does not bleed into your work. The point is to take deliberate ownership of your own development.

Reflection as the engine of leadership

Karen makes the case that structured self-reflection sits at the core of leadership growth, supporting self-awareness, resilience and better decision-making. A useful tool is the "what, so what, now what" method: what happened (the facts), so what (the impact and how you feel about it), and now what (the action you will take). It can be done in around ten minutes.

Why we avoid reflection, and how to start

We tend to prioritise doing over thinking, feel short of time, and look for external validation rather than giving it to ourselves. The benefits of reflection also build over time rather than appearing instantly. Karen suggests starting small: a brief weekly review of your wins, challenges, what is still on your mind and your stress levels, ideally shared in conversation with a peer.

Know your values

Getting clear on what you value most, whether that is structure, creativity, family or something else, gives you a stable basis for decisions when circumstances change. When you feel unsettled or unhappy at work, it is often a sign that one of your values is not being met.

Delegation, feedback and difficult conversations

Three challenges come up again and again: how to delegate and set expectations, how to give regular feedback and appreciation, and how to handle difficult conversations. Karen frames appreciation as something to offer often rather than once a year, and notes that people value it in different ways, from time and acts of service to spoken recognition.

Difficult conversations and conflict debt

Much of the difficulty in a hard conversation happens in our own heads beforehand. Approaching it with a shared goal and a productive mindset helps. Avoiding the conversation builds what Karen calls "conflict debt": the unspoken resentment and stress we carry while the other person may not even be aware there is an issue.

The middle-management squeeze

Managing up, down and across all at once is one of the toughest stages of a career, often coinciding with greater personal responsibilities. Karen's advice is to build a strong support network, or "tribe", of peers in the same position for resilience, perspective and advice.

Thinking time, decision fatigue and habits

Offices tend to reward visible doing over thinking, yet pausing is often what unlocks energy and direction. Karen encourages "thinking about your thinking", or metacognition, to catch unhelpful patterns such as black-and-white thinking or catastrophising. To build new habits, attach them to something you already do every day, and keep them small enough to sustain.

The Architect's Leadership Journal

These ideas come together in the Architect's Leadership Journal, Karen's structured weekly tool covering goals, wins, challenges, stress levels and a rotating leadership question across self, team and strategic leadership, with quarterly reviews and appraisal preparation. It is designed as a low-cost, low-barrier way to build a reflection habit.

Key terms

• What, so what, now what: a three-step reflection method covering the facts, their impact, and the action you will take.
• Conflict debt: the accumulated stress and resentment caused by repeatedly avoiding a conversation that needs to happen.
• Metacognition: thinking about your own thinking in order to notice and adjust unhelpful patterns.
• Decision fatigue: the decline in decision quality as the number of decisions made in a day increases.
• LEGO Serious Play: a facilitated workshop method that uses building with bricks to surface ideas and support strategy and team development.

Reflective prompts for your CPD record

1. Where could a ten-minute weekly reflection fit into your routine, and which existing habit could you attach it to?
2. Which of your core values feels least met in your current role, and what one change would help?
3. Is there a conversation you have been avoiding? What shared goal could you open it with this week?

About the guest

Karen Fugle is a leadership and executive coach for architects, designers and construction professionals and the founder of SleepingGiant Consulting. A Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation, a RIBA Future Leaders coach and a member of the Women in Architecture UK committee, she spent more than two decades in the architecture, engineering and construction industry before moving into coaching. She is the author of the Architect's Leadership Journal.