As a kid, Diane Hoskins always loved building. Legos, Barbie Dreamhouses, the racecar sets that her brother got but didn’t have the patience to put together himself when it took reading along with an hour’s worth of instructions.
“Whatever it was … I just love putting things together and building things,” Hoskins, global co-chair of architectural firm Gensler, told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin in a recent CNBC Changemakers interview.
That childhood building bug also made Hoskins the atypical example of a person who knew exactly what they wanted to do from an early age. “It led me to want to be an architect,” said Hoskins, named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list for her role at Gensler, where she served as co-CEO for two decades before becoming global co-chair in 2024.
Founded in 1965, Gensler employs 6,000 people across 57 locations in 16 countries, and generated close to $2 billion in revenue last year.
While she said her passion for building as a child “became a drive that just felt right,” Hoskins did not take an exactly linear path to the top of the world of architecture.
She shared with CNBC some of the lessons learned on the journey to the top of her profession.
Say ‘no’ quickly to life under an ‘all about me’ boss
Once Hoskins graduated from MIT and had mastered all of the basic skills to be a professional architect, she went to work in her “dream job” at a firm run by a genius in the field. That genius was the worst boss she could have ever hoped for starting out in her career, she now says.
The story, which Hoskins shared last year in an MIT commencement address, was a warning to the current generation of students that their vision of an ideal architecture experience may be more difficult to find than they realize, and it’s an important lesson about being prepared to pivot quick, and even pivot away from a long-sought path.
“You buy into this mythology of working in the office of ‘fill in the blank’ architect, who you believe is the epitome of architecture. … I went to work for one of those architects and found it to be not creative, and basically all about that person and what they wanted and not about the ideas of anyone else on the team,” she told Boorstin.
And quickly, she realized, “I don’t want to do this. I won’t live my career as the support cast of someone else’s vision,” Hoskins recalled.
She moved back to her family’s home in Chicago and went to work at the perfume counter at the department store Marshall Field & Company. Even though she had an MIT degree, she said that decision made her feel “extraordinarily independent and satisfied.”
“It was about saying no to something I know was not right for me, even if it might have checked a lot of boxes on what kids in college think is the right job path,” she said.
Eventually, a former classmate came into the store one day and suggested during a conversation that Hoskins apply to her firm. It was a huge firm that had the exact opposite approach of the one she quit, with team-driven projects involving people from various backgrounds and countries.
“It wasn’t in the service of a particular architecture ego that was at the center of the pyramid,” Hoskins said.
This belief has turned into a guiding model at Gensler, and not just for Hoskins in her roles as co-CEO and co-global chair. “It’s a bit of the antithesis of the CEO ethos, the commander at the top, the pyramid and all that thinking,” she said. “We believe strongly in collaborative leadership,” she added.
At Gensler, there are co-chairs in every leadership role within the firm, co-regional heads, and co-leaders in “every domain of work practice areas,” she said.
Terrace at IBM flagship office at One Madison Avenue in New York City, designed by Gensler.
Alexander Severin, courtesy of Gensler
Follow inner path, not expectations, even if it’s non-linear career
Even once Hoskins was established in architecture, she left to get her MBA because she wanted to learn from the perspective of her clients and what was driving their needs in real estate development.
“I left the profession again,” Hoskins said. “I had the courage to follow an inner path rather than expectations.”
Learning about real estate, and also studying business and management theory and concepts in competitive strategy, including the work of Michael Porter and Peter Drucker, gave Hoskins a “deep thinking on how business works,” which she says has benefitted her ever since.
There will always be a framework involving a budget, schedules, a team of people, and maximizing resources, but Hoskins says growing an organization’s skills and learning beyond a core sector focus, such as architecture, is critical.
Every business, Hoskins says, needs to be about innovation today. “Business can’t run on yesterday’s premise,” she said. “Innovation is the thread in every single business enterprise today.”
That goes for the sector most closely associated with innovation, too. “Solutions need to be framed by more than one discipline,” she said. “More people in our tech companies would benefit from having been in other domains,” she said, “bringing more perspective to these tools across our daily lives.”
And in Hoskin’s view, that is true for all professions. The path to success, she says, is often about not coming at it “from a single set of ideas.”
Watch the Changemakers Spotlight video above to learn more about Hoskin’s career and her advice to finding career success on your own terms.