Hoskins, who was named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list, recently spoke with CNBC's Julia Boorstin about her path to success and lessons learned along the way.
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 and is now global co-chair.
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.
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, where Hoskins was co-CEO before she became co-global chair in 2024. "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, that is not only at the CEO level, but co-chairs in every leadership role within the firm, co-regional heads, and co-leaders in "every domain of work practice areas," she said.