Paul Hewins
Title: General Manager/Executive Vice President, Skanska USA
in New England
Age: 48
Experience: 27 years
Paul Hewins was born with an engineer’s mind. He spent his youth building projects – and taking things apart – in his parents’ basement. When he was in high school, he wanted to attend a technical trade school, but his father talked him out of it, telling him that he deserved every opportunity available, and that meant staying on track for college. So Hewins went to college and became a mechanical engineer. When he graduated, he found he wasn’t fond of the field, so he joined a construction company as a project engineer, moving to project executive, then operations manager. After a while, he tired of the constant traveling required by the job, so he started looking for a new job and found a home at Skanska, starting as a project executive and quickly moving to the management side. As general manager for Skanska in New England, he oversees projects across all six states.
Q: You mentioned that you were really connected to the physical side of construction. Has that changed as you moved into management?
A: I got into the business because I liked building things, but I really like working with people as well. I found that I actually enjoy management, sales and the other aspects of the role. I used to think I was giving up the direct connection to building, and that kind of troubled me, but what I gained was the enjoyment of building relationships, building teams. It’s really a people business. You get good people in the right positions and on the right teams and you’ll be successful. I really enjoy that.
Q: What’s a typical week like for you as general manager for all of New England?
A: My day-to-day and week-to-week is changing all the time. I don’t think I’d want to be working for a big corporation plugging, away 9 to 5. This job changes every day with new challenges and new people. Take this morning, I had an interview with a possible new strategic hire as a project executive on multiple projects. Then I went to an industry event and learned a little more about some of the development there. I had a client meeting after that. We had a calibration meeting to evaluate our employees and ensure that they’re following the right path for their own professional development. There’s also an international group here today, a worldwide environmental Skanska committee, and I’m meeting with them later today and going out to dinner tonight and we’ll tour the city. And there a proposal that I’m working on for a new potential project. That’s just today.
Q: What kinds of projects are your bread and butter?
A: Skanska wants the different offices to act like Skanska, but to also be entrepreneurial and do what makes sense locally. So we have markets that we usually do work in – institutional work, commercial development, health care, life sciences. Those markets all fit us. That doesn’t mean every job makes sense for us. Right now, we’re working on the Novartis [$600 million, 550,000-square-foot addition to its Institute for Biomedical Research] project in Cambridge, a major institutional project. We’re working on a big data center in Springfield for the state because we have the expertise in data centers. We recently finished a project at Harvard Law School. Skanska also has a large civil presence in the U.S. We’re pursuing two large civil projects that should give us a large presence in that market in Boston in the near future.
