The veteran surveyor and draftsman stepped into the role of Survey Manager sooner than he expected to and brought a vision of mentorship and expanded services.
Coaching a high school soccer team and managing a surveying department might seem worlds apart, but for C.S. Davidson Survey Manager Chris Salemme, the fundamentals are the same: Build trust, understand your people, and get everyone moving toward a shared goal.
Whether he’s mentoring players from the sidelines at Spring Grove Area High School or leading C.S. Davidson’s survey team across multiple offices, Chris approaches the roles with a philosophy of emphasizing individualized support and instilling confidence in team members so they can perform at their best.
Linking surveying and engineering
Chris spent more than two decades in surveying and drafting jobs across Pennsylvania and Maryland before joining C.S. Davidson as a survey technician three years ago. He was on a trajectory to slowly train to take over as Survey Manager at the retirement of his mentor in that position. When his predecessor departed sooner than planned, Chris stepped into the job early.
Today, Chris leads a growing survey team split between the York and Gettysburg offices. His long-term vision includes building dedicated survey crews to support engineers in those offices and the firm’s Lancaster location.
His leadership style is intentionally hands-off. Rather than micromanaging, Chris provides clarity and trust, giving crew members the information they need and empowering them to communicate directly with the company’s civil engineers. Cutting out middle steps, he believes, leads to stronger collaboration and better outcomes.
Training and mentorship are central to his approach. With a relatively new team, Chris leans on experienced surveyors to help bring survey technicians up to speed, pairing them in the field so learning happens hands-on.
Unexpected finds marking history
For Chris, surveying is the starting line and the final checkpoint of many infrastructure projects. Survey teams often are the first on-site, recording elevations, locating utilities, and mapping boundaries. They’re also the last to leave, returning to confirm that construction matches the design and that borders have been respected.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” he says.
One of his favorite aspects of the job is that he and his team get to work in and improve the communities in which they live. Serving those municipalities means Chris and his crew regularly see the long-term impact of their work.
“You drive past the same culvert and you’re like, that does not look good,” he says. “Then we come through and we fix it, and you’re like, oh, that looks great. We did a good job.”
Surveying also offers moments that can’t occur behind a desk. Over the years, Chris has come across old gravestones, abandoned junk sites, and historical property markers, some dating to the early 1800s.
“We’ll find that stone, and it’s still the property corner,” he says. “I think that’s pretty cool.”
Those discoveries connect modern projects to centuries of land use and development, reinforcing for Chris the importance of accuracy and respect for what came before.
‘Get in and do it’
As the surveying profession faces workforce shortages and rapid technological change, Chris sees opportunity. From expanding to offer aerial and underwater surveys to exploring new data-management tools, he’s excited about what the next five years could bring for C.S. Davidson’s survey team.
“You just have to get in and do it,” he says to anyone considering entering the surveying field. “If you’re willing to learn, we can teach you and get you to where we need you to go and where you want to go, but you have to be willing to learn and have to be willing to take advice from someone.”