Below the Line With Chad Cousins of McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture

Welcome to Below the Line, a monthly question-and-answer column in which Chancellor Bennie L. Harris, Ph.D., of the University of South Carolina Upstate interviews a leader about change, technology, education, and leadership. This month, Dr. Harris spoke with Chad Cousins, chief executive officer of McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture. (This interview has been edited for clarity, content, and length.)

Harris: Tell me about who you are. Did you see yourself being where you are today?

Cousins: I did not imagine I would be the CEO of an architecture firm 20 years ago. I studied economics and thought I'd go into law. What I learned was that I'm a strategic person. I enjoy looking at opportunities, markets, potential solutions, and then building an organization to take advantage of those opportunities.

Leadership requires willingness to be bold and pursue opportunities, but also discipline in how you do that. I'm also a creative. I love to draw and sketch. I enjoy being involved in planning development and understanding its impact on people encountering the built space and the surrounding community. For me, this is the dream.

Harris: Architecture brings character to society. It makes people feel better and lets them feel awe when they experience what has been envisioned.

Cousins: A pervasive concept in our culture is being a citizen architect. Beyond advising and designing spaces, it's understanding the impact and value of that work. It is gratifying to see people experience environments that help them accomplish a mission or encounter space in a productive and positive way.

Harris: You've been described as more of a wartime general than a peacetime general. How has that influenced your leadership?

Cousins: The significance is understanding where I'm best: having a lofty vision and creating organization and strategy around it. I need a big hill to climb at all times.

I look at career and organizational strategy in three- to five-year increments. I enjoy taking ideation, converting it into strategy, and applying discipline to create opportunity from those strategies. I surround myself with leaders attentive to details and maintaining systems while I focus on vision and transformation.

Harris: As CEO, what goals did you set early and how have they shifted as the firm has grown?

Cousins: When I joined in 2012, we were about 90 people across offices in South Carolina, with small offices in Atlanta and Asheville. Today we are approaching 500 people in 11 studios with seven practice lanes.

We transitioned ownership, diversified governance, and organized into practice groups connected to community studios. About 80 percent of our work spans institutional sectors like health care, higher education, K-12, civic and cultural work, along with private sector mixed-use, commercial, and industrial markets.

Our aspiration is to impact communities throughout the Southeast through deep local engagement rather than parachuting into projects.

Harris: What are your values as an organization?

Cousins: Our purpose is to create a meaningful and lasting impact for the good of all in communities throughout the Southeast.

Our values include elevating and inspiring; fostering trust; serving with integrity; staying curious; and “we, not I” collaboration. These guide every strategic decision.

Harris: I see your people integrated into communities. It's never been a sales pitch — it's participation.

Cousins: The highest compliment is when a community sees us as integrated community architects. The reward is seeing the impact of projects and community experiences over time.

Harris: How does the growth equity partnership with Providus Capital Partners support your long-term vision?

Cousins: We are a profitable, well-run firm. We sought a capital partner offensively, not for liquidity, but to accelerate growth and reinvestment.

Many firms remain lifestyle firms with limited reinvestment. We wanted infrastructure and resources to support expansion and integration of like-minded firms.

Our partner is “hands-with” — not hands-on or hands-off — providing advisory insight while allowing management autonomy.

Harris: How is the firm leveraging technology and digital tools?

Cousins: We've always led with technology. We established a project management office early, embedding project managers alongside designers to oversee financial health, client experience, and risk management.

Harris: How does artificial intelligence fit into your work?

Cousins: AI helps accelerate iterative decision-making and remove manual effort in organizing information. In design, it helps generate starting concepts, but qualitative human judgment remains essential.

AI allows us to explore more options faster, but human experience determines what makes a space truly effective.

Harris: Will AI make architects obsolete?

Cousins: No. Architecture is an enduring profession. Like transitions from slide rules to AutoCAD to 3D modeling, AI is another tool requiring adaptation. Construction remains an imperfect, context-driven process that requires human interpretation.

Harris: What trends should future architects and educators prepare for?

Cousins: We are seeing increased integration between universities, industry, and development through innovation districts. Campuses are leveraging land assets to connect research, living environments, and industry partnerships.

Multidisciplinary collaboration across health care, higher education, and industrial training environments is becoming increasingly important.

Harris: What role does external recognition play in motivating your teams?

Cousins: Recognition is affirmation, not the reward itself. It validates meaningful outcomes and helps attract talent while reinforcing humility and continued growth.

Harris: What are the biggest opportunities and challenges for architecture in the Southeast and beyond?

Cousins: Opportunities are everywhere due to regional growth, migration, housing demand, education expansion, and health care needs.

Challenges include community resiliency and designing environments capable of adapting to environmental stress and future conditions. Resilient design provides both stewardship and economic value for communities.

Harris: What advice would you give young professionals entering architecture and design?

Cousins: The future for architecture is bright. It sits at the intersection of craft, technology, planning, and public impact.

There is growing diversity in the profession and expanding career paths across design, technology, planning, and industry collaboration. Architecture offers meaningful community involvement and long-term impact.

Harris: What guiding principles have helped you lead through change?

Cousins: My life verse is Micah 6:8: “Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.”

So I think I try to distill things down to that simple thing. When I think about leading through change, is what we're doing right? Is it for the right motivation? Purposeful, purely financial motivations are not my motivation.

Now, I will say when you do things well, you tend to also accomplish good financial results, and good financial results allow you to reinvest and give back. We have a principle when we do our strategic planning. When we talk about profit, we say “responsible profit.”

What we mean by that is we have an obligation to perform well on behalf of the client, with respect to the stewardship of the resources we've been given and the trust we've been given. We have a responsibility to perform well so that we can continue to invest in our firm, and we want to give back to the community.

So when I think about that bottom line for me as a leader through change, like during Covid-19 as an example, you can never over-communicate, but there needs to be clarity in the message. I think keeping things simple and consistent in your vision and mission is important.

How does what we’re doing feel to our people? How does it affect them? How does it feel to our clients, and in our case to the communities where these clients reside and work?

I think that’s the key thing: empathy through change.

Harris: And I think that's very powerful. We've often heard quotes from Maya Angelou that people quote all the time about how people may not remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. Leadership is a lot about the empathy you're able to employ in decisions that you make.

So, the title of this series is Below the Line. Often, leaders have to guide others through things unseen, like the part of the iceberg beneath the surface. What does “leading below the line” mean to you?

Cousins: I feel a strong sense that leaders have an obligation to develop those around them to take up the next season.

So for me, “below the line” means I want to know that I've left a good impact in my work, that the values I described are evident in the way I operated.

I'm not perfect, but did I inspire? Did I foster trust? Was I collaborative and caring? Did I demonstrate empathy in the way I led, even when it was tough decisions? It’s not always a democracy, but was there empathy and care in the way we did it?

Did we care about the impact we made? Was it purposeful? Did we take something in our tenure, in our season as a leader, and build on the shoulders of what was there? Did we sometimes transform what was there into something we can look back on and say we worked through people to develop something great?

I really do believe that’s below the line for us.

Below the line means leaving a meaningful impact, demonstrating values, inspiring trust, showing empathy, and building something that others can carry forward into something greater.