Margi-Challenging the Linear Career: Power Moves, Hidden Motherhood, and the Velocity of Modern Design

In this high-impact episode, Lauren Homme sits down with Margi Kaminski, the firm-wide Health Practice Leader at CannonDesign, to pull back the curtain on what it truly takes to build a lasting legacy in the AEC industry. Spanning four decades of professional evolution, Margi shares her circuitous path from launching her own interior design firm in the 1980s to navigating a high-stakes corporate buyout and leading hyper-specialized healthcare modalities for global firms.

Moving past standard corporate talking points, this raw conversation dives deep into the multi-generational shifts in work-life balance—from an era where women entirely hid their children to protect their careers, to the modern, often exhausting pressure of "having it all" while presenting to a firm with a baby on your hip. Together, Lauren and Margi confront the unsustainable intensity and frenetic velocity of the modern workplace, delivering a validating, essential roadmap for women striving to protect their time, claim their power, and redefine success in an evolving industry. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to AEC Women on Top, the podcast celebrating women shaping the future of the built environment. I'm your host, Lauren Hami. I'm a marketing and business development strategist with over 15 years of national experience. Along the way, I've met some powerhouse women. And each episode, I'll sit down with them to explore their career journeys, the support they wish they had, and some of the tough lessons they learned. Whether you're just starting out or already leading the charge, these stories are meant to inspire. Well, Margie, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so, so excited to learn more about your story. I've had such a wonderful pleasure of working with you. So let's get started with what do you do?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

What do I do? Oh my goodness. It's a long list. Uh, the short form is I'm an interior designer, have been for my entire career. And now I am the um health practice leader firm-wide for Canon Design. And how did you get there? It was a circuitous path, certainly not one that I had initially planned. I was a great planner. I thought that I had my whole career mapped out, and then life happened. Graduated from college, and shortly thereafter, um, my husband and I decided to start a family. And I had um two children back to back in two years, and was trying to figure out a way to have a career and have a family at the same time. And at that time, you know, we're back in the 80s now. There wasn't a lot of uh work-life balance, discussion of family life and work life and the intersection of the two. And so there wasn't a lot that was offered out there, and especially not in the interior design community. And so I decided to chart my own path and decided to start my own firm so that I could control my time and commitments. And so I did, and I did that for 15 years. I stumbled upon an emerging market called Senior Living, and it was absolutely explosive at that time, going into the 90s and year 2000. I needed to grow and I needed to grow fast. And so um I connected with my biggest um competitor and said, Hey, what would you think about merging? And there's a whole story behind that. But the long and short of it is she came back and said, Well, what if I bought you out? And honestly, that worked out so well with my plans because at that time I had four children and they were all teenagers, and I felt that I needed to be more available to them. And, you know, after uh five years of um being with Studio One Design, that's the firm that bought my firm, decided to take off some time from there. I thought that I might be retired, but now I call that my four-year sabbatical because when my youngest child entered college, that was actually my first day back into design, but design with the big firms. So I was hired by RTKL here in Chicago, and I was with RTKL for about 10 years, and then I decided to expand my my career, maybe go in a slightly different direction and and landed at Canon Design, which is where I'm at right now. And I've been here for eight years, and it's been wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

I have this visual of like you and another woman, and you're like power suits over lunch, chit-chatting, you know, it's just like such a romanticized visual of these women in the 90s who were making big moves saying, I'm just gonna buy you, you know. That's that's oh I that's a power move. I love this.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

That was a power move. And uh I have to say, um, you know, we're still friends today. Usually around the Christmas season, I'll I'll get a handmade card. It was really a wonderful um experience, and it allowed me to have that work-life balance because I needed more time. I couldn't be up until midnight five days a week, trying to get the work done and up at five or six in the morning. It allowed me to do both, you know, taking off that time to tie up loose ends. And time is currency, it's precious, and you can't get it back. And the beauty of it was that I was blessed with what I call my second career. I'm in my second career. It's very different in the big firms.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, I love that you call it your second career. I also think that speaks to the evolution of a career. You don't just have to pick one and stick with it.

SPEAKER_01 5:22

Life isn't linear, and neither is our career. I think you have to be open to the possibilities that um present themselves. It's being open, being flexible, being resilient, and now more so than ever. Now, what problem would you say you solve? I have to think about that for a minute because there are so many. There are internal problems, there are external problems, but I think the biggest one is that I practice in a hyper-specialized uh modality of design, and that being health care. And so we are impacting people, human beings, at the most vulnerable times in their life, and that's a big thing, that's humbling. What we are doing can shape somebody's experience. Experiential design to me has really come to the forefront, and it's about time. I've been thinking about experiential design for about 20 years, and I love that that's how we practice today. Yes, I'm an interior designer, but it's no longer about this static envelope of a space, it's about the people in the space and what they are doing and how what we create is supporting them and what they are doing. And I'm really passionate about that.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Yeah, and I love how eloquently you explain it. And it's so true. I mean, if you think about it, most humans enter into the world in a hospital setting. Right. And some of those same humans leave the world through the hospital as well.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

You know, I I share this with my colleagues in that, you know, it it's almost um a sacred appointment, you know, that that we get to do what we do. It's so it's so very fascinating to practice healthcare design. I know that a lot of people don't understand, you know, like when I tell somebody I'm an interior designer, immediately people are thinking about HGTV. And it's like, no, that's not what I do. Oh, and I've got to be honest, my best friend is a residential designer and she does fabulous work. And I love um talking about design to her because um what I'm doing is highly technical and very aesthetic, but it isn't it to the same extent as maybe residential or hospitality or retail design. But in no way does that diminish what we do and how we do it. And I I think that people who do um healthcare design just have this um incredible commitment, desire to um really leave um a lasting legacy.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

I every time I venture out of the healthcare sector, I find myself just hightailing it back. You know, it's it's got so much meaning and purpose and impact that it's hard to do anything else. It truly is.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

I'm thank you for saying that. I I really genuinely feel that way about what we do. So um, yeah, it's been a it's been a good journey. And you know, I I could not have done it without the support of my family. So, you know, here there's the work-life balance. And I was always very um torn because there wasn't a lot of discussion about work-life balance back in the 80s. And it was just like, sure, you could do it, you know, you're a modern woman. Again, that the that visual, I will never forget this. A magazine page with a woman sitting in a business suit with a child on her lap in front of a computer, one of those old chunky computers, which at the time seemed very high-tech. And you know, I just laugh about that because that is not reality. And and yet we were trying to figure out our way, and um, and it took a it took a long time at the beginning of my career when I had my two children. I never talked about my children, no one asked about my children. It was just very much that's over there, and this is here, and um, ne'er shall the two meet, right? Um, so what a difference today. I mean, we we talk about it. In fact, one of my colleagues um just sent an email. She's in labor, and she sent the email to everyone on her teams, and you know, we're all cheering for we're excited. Um, I wish it were that way, but it was not. And so um I think we've come a very long way, and I'm so grateful for it.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

I feel like we're still being sold that image of the woman in a suit with the baby on her hip in front of a computer, and it's just interesting that that image still holds. What do you think we could do better to support women? And not just moms, but women.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

You know, younger people ask me what is the difference today compared to how I practiced yesterday, which was 40 years ago. And I have said this for a long time. It's the velocity and intensity by which we work, and that is the gauge by which we live, and uh it's uh it's at a frenetic pace. I mean, you know, I'm still doing what I practiced 40 years ago. Granted, the tools have changed, the people, the markets, uh, but the velocity and intensity have grown exponentially to the point where uh you can't humanly uh keep up. You just can't. If you are always producing, how do you then have this deep thinking? And uh you you aren't, we're reacting instead of strategizing, and you know, or maybe strategizing isn't the right word, but it is that thinking, and I feel like uh especially in a creative field, to be creative, you do sometimes need just that downtime to uh think through and just let these these thoughts and ideas flow. I and I think that's why for me I love to be in in nature, I love to take walks, ride my bike, um swim, and I do some of my best thinking, but but the reality is I'm unplugged, and I am in a a natural setting that is very conducive to flow and to thought and to creativity, and so but I I don't do it enough, not anymore. And you know, we're we're all just running very fast.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Yeah, I try to be very intentional about not separating that activity from work, so I include it in my work hours. That's not something I do after the client call, after I get the thing out, after, you know, it's part of the process. Oh, I have a big deadline, I better go for a walk, I better hike through the the forest, I better end up at the beach, I better lose time, you know, and then I come back and I've got so many ideas and uh energy about it, right? I can do it quickly instead of forcing ourselves to sit at a computer and be creative.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Isn't it interesting that some of the data is showing us or the research um that sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day is like smoking a pack of cigarettes and are just as bad as smoking a pack of cigarettes, and we are more sedentary today, and sure you have the sitstand workstations yesterday. I spent half my day standing and the other half sitting, but I probably didn't move from that position much more than 20 feet at any given time. And when I think about how I try to go into the office two days a week, I travel a lot. I traveled six days last week, and so you know it it just varies from from week to week, but we filled all that in-between time with what we think is more productive time, but uh I am having my doubts about that.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, the sitting at our desk and then also the commuting, right? Those are two things that we know are bad, but it doesn't seem like anyone's really in a hurry to fix it.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, I some of this is just cultural. I it's so ingrained in our society in the United States. We are productive.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 16:19

I keep going back to time, but take your time. There is so much happening at any given time, and you need to choose wisely. And in order to do that, you need to take the time to think through and prioritize what's really most important to you, and then align what you're doing with that. Um, because I I felt as a younger self, a younger interior designer, like I had these goalposts, and I I had to hit them. And like, who cares? Um, because all that planning you do is interrupted by life and circumstances, and so don't be so hard on yourself. Give yourself grace and take the time to do what intuitively you will know what is right.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Thanks for listening. Until next time, go shine your light.