Shawn Klinkner Fosters Trust and Transparency in Teams
December, 2020
Over the past several years, DAY CPM has been working as the owner’s representative overseeing three expansion projects for the Vancouver Clinic in Washington. Leading the charge has been Shawn Klinkner, market sector leader for health care. Shawn’s guidance and care with both his clients and teams have helped to bring the first two of the projects to ribbon-cutting well before the anticipated deadline and under budget. 
While Shawn acknowledges that the success of these two projects is a result of the team’s efforts, he is quick to point out that the role of the owner’s representative sets an important tone for the project. Shawn and the DAY CPM team set a precedent for upholding the values of trust, collaboration, and transparency and exercised that amongst team members and the client to achieve these outcomes.
Shawn’s leadership skills were built from his prior experience with non-profit management and healthcare administration. He credits that work with providing him a sense of mission and an understanding of the operations and dynamics that impact healthcare facilities—an understanding that is unique among owners’ representatives who usually come from backgrounds in engineering, design, or construction. Shawn understands the relationship of how the expansion of an organization’s mission in the built environment can create positive change for medical staff, providers, and the patients they serve.
The Vancouver Clinic expansions were a perfect platform for Shawn’s skills. Under his supportive leadership, DAY CPM staff, with the project team, opened the Ridgefield clinic three weeks early and $3M under total project budget. The Camas clinic, the latest expansion of Vancouver Clinic in the Columbia Palisades development, opened in mid-October, five weeks early, and is anticipated to come in $2.3M under total project budget. The Camas expansion was completed under COVID restrictions yet there were no delays, which Shawn credits to the high functioning dynamic of the project team that included DAY CPM, Andersen Construction, ZGF Architects, and Andersen Construction trade partners. Shawn’s role has predominantly been program oversight for the Vancouver Clinic projects and serving in an advisory capacity to the Vancouver Clinic executive team for the delivery of their new expansion sites.
Shawn works intentionally to ensure he builds a positive team culture so that opportunities to bring value to clients are actualized, risks are identified and managed, and project scope is delivered on time and under budget. Achieving these goals requires thoughtful leadership and close coordination with clients to ensure that decision-making is timely, problem-solving is proactive, and barriers to progress are removed so the project team can do its best work.
“A client receives the best engagement from a project team that is collaborating and innovating in service to them. This drives how the day-to-day work happens and I find that project teams operating at that caliber do more and save more, handle risks better, and innovate around challenges more nimbly,” Shawn said.
Shawn’s leadership philosophy has resonated strongly with the values and vision within DAY CPM/Otak, which is utilizing its market sector leaders to launch mentoring, coaching, and development initiatives and programs for role-based competency assessment and training of staff. Shawn has been a key voice in these initiatives as well as leading efforts to improve the recruitment and onboarding process for the division. “Shawn embodies servant leadership: he is respectful, very intentional, present, and is always seeking to support/serve. These qualities inspire stronger relationships and higher levels of service to our clients and within our projects and project teams,” Cathy Kraus, project manager said.
Shawn has also been spearheading the integration of Gallup’s CliftonStrengths program into the DAY CPM culture. The program helps identify a person’s strengths and establishes a medium through which companies can engage their staff around what they do best. Through strengths-based coaching, Shawn provides vision for how staff’s strengths relate to their roles and scope of work and he facilitates an understanding of how their core strengths influence their personal communication and engagement styles. This lays the groundwork for successful team dynamics, and in turn, successful projects.
The healthcare industry is built around the idea of patient care and a positive bedside manner. With Shawn at the helm of construction projects within this sector, that people-first goal starts from the ground up.