Colorado Region Leader Chris Bisio is Driving a Vision of Growth by Navigating Change
March, 2021
Every organization whether hiring its first employee, moving to a bigger building, or expanding into other locations, experiences growing pains. Business as usual cannot be the norm if true growth is to occur. Successfully navigating change takes a flexible staff and skilled leadership.
Otak’s office in Colorado faced those growing pains but has been fortunate to hire Chris Bisio who has been leading the way as the office adds more staff and capabilities while continuing to do work for clients it has supported for several decades
With more than 30 years of experience, Chris was the ideal candidate to take on the role of regional manager. She came to Otak from CH2M, another engineering firm with Oregon roots that was purchased by Jacobs in 2017. “The fact Otak was also based in Oregon was special to me, and I wanted to be in a smaller firm so I could be closer to the clients and everything that’s going on,” she said. When Chris started her career the number of men in the engineering world vastly exceeded that of women. But while Chris has been called a pioneering woman in a field of men, she said she always felt she had a right to be at the table and that if anyone did good work they would be recognized equally. For her, it just happened that she was a woman, but she does like seeing more and more women entering the field.
Chris joined Otak in 2019 at a time when the company was in expansion mode following the acquisition of Loris and Associates in Colorado in 2017. Her focus then and now is on project management, profitability, and the basics, which she calls hiring good staff, doing good work, and having a good culture.
She said Otak surprised her because it had corporate functions such as accounting/finance, human resources, and business development that were of the same caliber as the larger firms she was familiar with. This functionality allows Otak’s employees to see possibilities beyond what people in a smaller environment might see. “We have staff that’s as good or better than that of bigger companies,” she said.
This is not to say there haven’t been challenges. She said that there are 30 people in the Colorado office who all work in the same office but in different groups, which sometimes makes it hard to keep everyone on the same page. Chris said introducing a more proactive stance on projects as they develop has helped avoid some issues down the road. “The worst thing that can happen is to not deliver for a client or to have a technical glitch, so we’re trying to do more check-in’s on how we’re doing along the way so we find problems early and can solve them before they get bigger,” she said.
As regional manager, Chris wears many hats from project management to business development to taking care of staff (including hiring). She thrives on the variety and especially appreciates that her position allows her to dig into all the work that occurs on some level so that she’s able to step into the shoes of her co-workers to see their point of view. For Chris, leadership is about listening, understanding, and modeling behavior to help guide the team towards the same vision of where the company and office are going and could go.
One of Chris’s favorite projects to date has been the Coffman Street Busway in Longmont, Colorado. The Otak team won the job in large part because of the expertise on similar Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects in the Redmond office. Chris said it’s a great example of how Otak is an attractive choice for municipalities because it retains so many diverse and skilled disciplines for a company of its size. The Colorado office was able to tap into the knowledge base of the Redmond office to create a winning proposal that incorporated multi-modal transportation into just a one-mile stretch. “The client gave a specific vision of an exemplary multi-modal project in a mid-sized town. When I hear a client say that he wants it to be special, I take that to heart in that we’re responsible for helping him meet his dream,” Chris said.
With Chris providing the guidance, the Colorado office is regularly turning client dreams into reality.