Turner Construction Company

Esi-Kilanga Bowser-Santiago

Esi-Kilanga Bowser-Santiago blends project planning, design execution, and sustainability to translate vision into buildable reality. She advances innovative, efficient, and environmentally responsible practices, pairing technical precision with strategic foresight. Through early alignment and people-first workflows, she delivers durable, high-quality outcomes that strengthen teams, optimize resources, and respect the environments where projects take shape.

In an exclusive interview with PropTech Outlook, she shared her views on transforming construction into a collaborative process and building stronger teams.

Translating Vision into Buildable Reality

I have spent more than two decades in architecture and construction, starting on the design side in South Florida, then moving to New York and shifting into construction. That design foundation became a real asset in the field. It helped me act as a translator between design intent and trade execution, taking a client’s vision, understanding the constraints designers face, and communicating that clearly.

At Turner, I have worked both in the field and on the business side, managing costs, budgets, and delivery across small projects and large core-and-shell programs. I also led a centralized engineering group in New York that supported portfolios of smaller projects that could not afford full-time engineers. This model later evolved into an international partnership under Turner Technical Services.

With the company pivoting in its focus, I returned to the field. Most recently, I was part of the team delivering Google’s new St. John’s Terminal headquarters, a milestone project for us. Now, my focus has shifted to a more strategic role where I am helping standardize systems and workflows across Turner’s offices nationwide. The goal is to close operational gaps, support a more mobile workforce, and deliver consistent client experiences across every project, no matter the location.

The Architecture of Accountability, Empathy and Communication

At the core, my principles are simple; lead with empathy, communicate with clarity, and create accountability, so people feel psychologically safe to ask questions, own their work, and grow from every experience. These principles manifest in how teams are paced to prevent burnout, how responsibilities are structured to build capacity from smaller efforts to larger, more complex projects, and how excellence is sustained without sacrificing people.

“Lead with empathy, communicate with clarity, and create accountability, so people feel psychologically safe to ask questions, own their work, and grow with every experience.”

It also means being consistent—setting clear expectations, providing clear feedback, and establishing clear standards— while recognizing that resilience and retention are built over time through intentional development. And it is inclusive by design; invest in both new and seasoned team members as technology and practices evolve, so everyone learns, adapts, and grows together.

Align Early, Build Smarter

Quality is not just the absence of defects, it is the presence of thoughtful intention at every step, from understanding the client’s expectations to engaging designers early, so the relationship stays collaborative and not adversarial. In the field that collaboration extends to our trade partners, it becomes a language that reflects how central they are to turning owner and designer ideas into reality, especially under tight deadlines and unforeseen challenges.

We set expectations early, define roles clearly, and reinforce accountability, so every team member understands what “good” looks like and how to execute it. Continuous improvement is built into the work, and quality is measured through trust, preparedness, team cohesion, and consistent execution, foundations that create successful projects and stronger teams.

Safety, Sustainability for Long-term Success

At Turner, safety and sustainability are inseparable. True sustainability protects people, processes, and materials across the entire project ecosystem. In preplanning, operations, supers, engineers, project managers and designers “build the job on paper,” modeling workflows that are safe and people-centered before anything hits the field. We vet site logistics and material strategies for suitability, install efficiency, storage, protection from environmental exposure, and lifecycle impacts that shape day-to-day execution. We align workflow, pacing, and installation schedules with trades and turnkey partners to ensure sequencing, expectations, and responsibilities are shared, and the plan is both agreed upon and executable.

Sustainability extends beyond products to include the workforce: building projects that last with healthy materials while developing teams capable of replicating success. Each project is a repeatable, sustainable system that engages people, strengthens processes, and supports the long-term health of the business, our teams, and the environments where we build.

Lighting the Path Ahead

Start early and build alignment. Bring estimating, procurement, and field leaders into the sustainability conversation at the outset to surface logistics, sequence, and sourcing trade-offs before they become constraints. Keep the project’s flow and momentum front and center, manage budgets with discipline, and ensure teams have the bandwidth to deliver high-quality work. Sustainability is as much about resourcefulness and planning as it is about materials.