About
Chris Stasiuk P.Eng.
COACH & Consultant
Nobody taught me how to lead. I got promoted, got a team, and worked it out in public for the rest of my career. Some of it went well. A fair bit of it did not, and the parts that did not are most of what I know now.
I’m an engineer who coaches engineers, and I run workshops and team sessions for the firms that employ them.
Almost three decades in the physical world
Out of school, I spent two years writing custom coal blending software and testing and commissioning it live in a coal reclaim system. The code ran on a system that could not be taken down, in a building where the people who kept it running were the ones who told me what was actually happening. I worked alongside the oilers every day and helped out when there was something to help with.
That was the start of a career in control systems. Full-cycle implementation, legacy conversions with little to no downtime allowed, networks built for real-time control, and protecting power generation infrastructure through Y2K. Seed processing, manufacturing, mining, and power facilities across Western Canada.
Small firm, so everyone wore several hats. One of mine turned out to be talking to clients.
I didn't set out to do the people side of the work. In a small firm it landed on me, and it turned out to be the half I was best at.
What I learned the hard way
In 2005 I moved to Lethbridge with the firm I was working for. The president didn’t want an office here. I did, so I opened one. There was no plan beyond that. I knew there was no competition and I knew there was work. I called a former classmate to ask what was happening in the area and whether any of it would fit. That was the extent of the market research.
I opened the branch, recruited and trained the team, and became a shareholder in the firm a couple of years later. It peaked at eight people with its own client base, and that office is still running today.
Then oil prices collapsed in 2015 and the work dried up. The firm lost money. We laid people off. I had nothing to carry it with, so I quit. Leaving cost me most of my shares.
A few months later I asked for my job back and got a smaller one. I came back reporting to an engineer I had hired and mentored. He was good at the job. I was the one who had to adjust. Not long after, the firm was acquired, and I spent two years serving two organizations that each assumed the other one owned me. I could have started a competing firm when that ended. I started this instead.
What I do now
The problem usually looks like this: someone gets promoted because they were the strongest technical person in the group, or because the firm needed the position filled and they were the least bad option. Either way, nobody develops them as a leader. The team waits on them, the client conversations go sideways, and the skill that earned the promotion is the wrong tool for the job they now have.
I work on the actual situation in front of you. The project meeting that drifted. The senior engineer who has become the bottleneck. The conversation you have been putting off for three months. Specific situations, structured analysis, concrete adjustments before you leave the session. No hypotheticals, no homework about your childhood.
My clients are smart, skeptical, and allergic to fluff. So the work runs the way engineering work runs. Name the problem, find the mechanism, change the inputs, check the result.
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes. Bring the situation you’re actually dealing with, and I’ll tell you whether I can help and how. If I’m not the right fit, I’ll say so.
What Others Say
“I contracted Chris to support personal development needs within our team. The results exceeded my initial expectations. Chris has a long-term technical and engineering background, which allows him to put himself into the shoes of the candidates to be coached. Chris also established the necessary alignment and information flow back to us. This helped me stay in charge of the overall process.”