While Eng-Spire couldn’t achieve anything worthwhile without compassion and resilience, the relentless pursuit of mastery is fundamental to our identity as a company. We like to push each other and to be pushed in return. Our drive is what brought us together. We believe it will take us a long way.

What is Drive?

One way to define drive is as a quest for peak performance. Studying teams that reach peak performance has led us to develop a recipe for it: take driven professionals with deep senses of purpose, assemble them in an effective team that respects their autonomy, and watch them break records.

This is consistent with what Daniel Pink argues in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He presents a compelling case that it is autonomy, mastery and purpose that truly inspire us to excel. He provides concrete strategies for businesses and individuals alike to boost productivity by tapping into intrinsic motivations as opposed to relying solely on external incentives. By creating an environment and culture that is based on this understanding of drive, excellence becomes commonplace.

No one succeeds alone. Drive is intrinsic, but it grows like wildfire when driven people come together. At Eng-Spire, we’ve found a team of individuals who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. People who have the drive to make a difference in their own lives, in the lives of others, and in the world around them.

Unlocking the power of drive

Having a deeply inherent motivation for excellence is a fundamental trait that our team at Eng-Spire brings to the table every day. The dedication to bringing communities together through our craft has been a part of our team long before Eng-Spire was formed.

Consulting engineering is competitive and demanding. It requires a unique blend of ambition, courage, and a drive for excellence to grow at the pace necessary to be successful. It takes great focus and dedication to succeed in this field, as the workloads are high, and expectations are even higher. The ability to take on unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and difficult tasks with enthusiasm, as well as developing creative solutions that push boundaries, can set apart a great consultant from others in their field. This has held true for me ever since I started working in the field.

My education may have provided me with a theoretical foundation in structural engineering, but it certainly didn’t prepare me for the real-world challenges of designing and constructing a building. It didn’t take long for me to realize that collaboration with others is essential, and that buildings don’t quite get put together like a series of homework assignments. A situation with real-life expectations and consequences is an uncomfortable place to be for a new engineer. But that’s exactly when someone’s drive can take the wheel; pun intended.

I had this moment of realization when I was tasked with one of my first projects; the Stantec Tower in downtown Edmonton. That project put me in uncomfortable situations every day, but being surrounded by a driven team of professionals inspired me with a desire to push boundaries and test my limits; to be relentless in pursuit of excellence and transform stress into growth. Not only did I learn how to be a better engineer, but also a better professional.

Overcoming obstacles with drive

There were many of those moments through my years as young engineer. But those moments were always associated with some really incredible projects—buildings that would make a lasting and meaningful impact on their communities.

The Edmonton EXPO Rehabilitation Project is one of the most challenging—and most rewarding—projects that I’ve had the privilege of working on. This project has a massive construction budget of over $100 million and the ambitious goal of achieving the largest solar rooftop in Canada. To successfully deliver this project on time and on budget required an outstanding team, coming together in an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) contract model, who can effectively manage a myriad of challenges, obstacles, and difficult situations.