Courtney Chapman 2021 Emerging Leader finalist

Meet 2021 Emerging Leader Award finalist, Courtney Chapman, Associate Structural Engineer at Beca. 

Courtney Chapman

Courtney Chapman

Courtney, how would your team describe your leadership style?

I believe my team would describe my leadership style as about building relationships and communicating with them in a way that they can all work together. I believe they’d say I was a hard worker and lead by example.

How would you describe your leadership?  

I hope the same way that my team see it! I am all about getting to know my team and its strengths and weakness. One of my strengths is getting to know people and tailoring my response to my team and my clients. Depending on who they are and how they best work.  

I'm an open communicator. 

Is it important to have mentors? 

It helps to have someone to bounce ideas off and to be a support when you need it. Also, someone to push your case if needed. More like a sponsor, than a mentor.  

How did you find the process of applying for the Emerging Leader Award?

The application was quite involved! Mainly because you had to think about leadership across all sorts of different avenues that you’ve had in your career. It was good to reflect on what you’d done.

I think entering this award is an opportunity to reflect on the past 10 years and realise I have done a lot of cool stuff that I didn’t necessarily think about before now. And I think for me I was quite shocked at the number of interesting projects I have worked on throughout my career to date. 

What do you get a kick out of in your current role? 

One thing I really enjoy about my current role is that I get to interact with all sorts of people within our industry – clients, contractors, graduates and seniors. I love getting to know them all, learning from them and also understanding how our decisions as engineers impact their daily work.   

Where do you see yourself in five - 10 years’ time?

I enjoy helping clients understand seismic risk and how they can mitigate it so I see myself moving further into this type of client relationship role. I’d like to get more involved at the early stages of projects so that I can positively influence the initial decision making to result in more resilient structures and facilities.

Why did you get into engineering and consulting? 

I love problem-solving and working through puzzles, and engineering allows me to do that on a daily basis. The real drawcard for me though was that it’s problem-solving with a real-world context and the work we do helps improve the built environment for communities. 

What’s something interesting about yourself we probably don’t know about?

I have two world cup silver medals as part of the New Zealand Touch team (lost to Aussie both times ☹). 

Meet our other 2021 Emerging Leader finalists