As you all may have discovered in my Mother’s Day interview with Shannon Hayes, I’m not a parent. “Motherhood is a trip from what I hear” is how I started the article. I learned a lot about what it meant to be a working parent when I met with Shannon, and I enjoyed our conversation so much that I didn’t want to stop there. Of course, I knew I’d write a feature for Father’s Day as well, which is funny, because not so ironically, I know even less about being a dad than I do about being a mom.
So, when I was considering who I wanted to speak to in honor of Father’s Day, I quickly thought of Chris Kiefer. If I could imagine how much thoughtful preparation, teaching, and shared success goes into being a dad, Chris sure does come to mind. And if you know Chris, you understand why.
Chris is the leader of our Virginia transportation design team and a principal at the firm. He earned his BS in Civil Engineering from Notre Dame. He has almost 35 years of experience in transportation design, including transportation planning, traffic engineering, and roadway design. He’s an expert in VDOT guidelines and procedures, which is a necessity in his role as a primary consultant to both public and private clients. Chris has significant expertise in utility coordination, roundabout design and analysis, design-build process, and construction administration across projects with a myriad of funding sources. Chris also oversees the Right of Way Acquisition Team here at Timmons.
Chris and Roxann at their ‘favorite venue’ (AKA, the Notre Dame Stadium).
Chris oversees 25 people on the team, including the 9 project managers and senior project managers he directly supervises. Having grown up as one of nine children himself, Chris is no stranger to the thought processes it takes to keep lots of people on the same page, and that shows in his leadership style.
“I never had any intentions of how large the group could get, but my project managers, engineers, designers, and right of way specialists have been really successful at cultivating relationships with clients over the years. So, the team keeps growing and becoming even more successful,” Chris said. The project managers on Chris’s team are also a vital part of the equation to grow as successfully as they have. “I rely heavily on the project managers and team members in our group as partners to help the team function as highly as it does, and I’m grateful for them.”
“I don’t want it to sound like my employees are my kids, because I think of them as colleagues. But our team is a family within the whole firm, and I have absolutely used similar motivations within the group that I do with my own family.”
Chris with his Timmons Group team during the holidays.
In addition to being successful in the AEC business world, Chris is also hitting a home run in the game of family life. He’s a loving husband to Roxann and pragmatic father to four awesome people. I can vouch for how cool they must be because I’ve worked directly with two of them (Brich and Jack), and I can figure that the rest of the family is just as neat.
“Roxann and I met as freshmen in high school. So, we’ve known each other, or dated, or been married, or engaged for 42 years,” Chris laughed.
Chris and Roxann have four children. Their oldest son, Charlie, works in marketing and lives in Richmond with his wife, Brittany. And Chris’s second and third sons, Brich and Jack, also live and work in Richmond. Chris told me with a chuckle, “My wife [Roxann] was not going to be deterred by having three boys, and she wanted a girl.” And they got what they wanted! Caroline, the youngest of their four children, is studying nursing at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.
The Kiefer family circa 2006 (left to right: Chris, Brich, Caroline, Roxann, Charlie, and Jack).
Chris started his job at Timmons Group about the same time he and Roxann got married, so parenting four kids was an interesting position to be in while taking on a new full time career. “Raising kids is a partnership for sure,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without her, and she would say the same about me.”
The flexibility to raise their children while working, Chris says, has been a cornerstone in his time at the firm. “The flexibility that’s been afforded to me has been fantastic as the kids are much older now. But when they were growing up, I coached soccer, softball, baseball, lacrosse, basketball,” Chris listed off. “Sometimes I was coaching three teams at once and the ability to come in at 6 a.m. and head home by 4 or 5 p.m. to coach was amazing. Our flexibility is fantastic. The culture supporting it, letting people be responsible for themselves and their own actions. And sometimes it meant that I worked from home in the evenings for a bit, but that was a realistic part of the flexibility that Timmons Group offers.”
The Kiefer family relaxing as a group at the beach.
Raising four children taught Chris several mindsets about how to parent with a partner, and a lot of those translate to work too. He says he’s a pretty relaxed leader both at home and at the office.
“I’m not really an uptight person or a micromanager. I try to let my team figure things out on their own until they need or ask for help. But I’m also not the person that demands that the team do things a certain way,” Chris said. He’s more ‘the kind of person that is available for advice.’ “If you come to me and ask me for help, I’ll give you my advice and give you suggestions for things in life or in work that have been successful for me before. In the end, it’s your choice and your endeavor and I will have your back. That thought process is also huge in my family structure at home.”
Chris has learned how to manage group dynamics and personalities at home, and he champions that in the office as well. “I think a lot of engineers can be very thoughtful, logical thinkers, and sometimes we need to work on meshing those relationships within the group. Just like my kids, I try my best to understand what works for each of their personalities in different settings. Some folks on my team need a more regimented structure, and others don’t prefer that. Regardless of the situation though, the main thing is consistency,” Chris said.
“I do my best to try and lead by example,” he continued. Chris preaches that he doesn’t ask someone to do something that he wouldn’t do himself, and that translates to his own kids too. “I’ll go right in there and try to help solve the problem with someone if that’s what it takes, and that’s something I learned from being a father.”
Chris and his kids playing golf at one of their favorite courses.
Not only did Chris raise his kids on a thoughtful leadership style, some of them also took the ‘like father, like son’ motto seriously when they joined the AEC industry themselves. Brich is a project engineer at KBS Inc, a Richmond-based construction company, and Jack works right here at Timmons Group on our residential design team. Chris’s father also earned his BS in Civil Engineering from Notre Dame, the same as Chris.
“I think our industry provides for a good, secure lifestyle. It has provided for me and my family very well over the years and my father before that. So, I don’t know if it’s the stability or just the technical way our minds are wired. But either way, I’m awfully proud of the fact that they followed in my footsteps,” Chris said.
The Kiefers celebrating Christmas.
It’s no wonder why Chris came to mind when I thought of fathers in the firm. He’s a wholehearted supporter of dedicating time, energy, and experience to help uplift young people around him, and that includes raising his kids as well as being a mentor and leader for his colleagues at Timmons Group.
Interested in joining the Timmons Group family? Learn more about Chris’s team and the positions he is hiring for here.
