One guiding principle for successful organizational leadership development is recognizing that leadership is a privilege – it’s not an opportunity simply handed to each new hire. It has to be earned – but not just through individual contributions. The potential to be considered as an emerging leader becomes evident through a new hire’s everyday engagements and interactions with colleagues and superiors. Developing and curating these relationships as an early team member becomes as important to professional advancement as fulfilling one’s well-defined, job-specific tasks.

You want to take the time to do it right. Managing others is a discipline – and it looks different at every level. As you work your way through an organization, those tactics evolve, but what is common are the values and principles.

We are all familiar with the cliché “lead by example.” The thing about clichés is the underlying element of truth contained in most of them. While it may not be as simple as this cliché might suggest, students and new professionals can benefit greatly from observing the actions of others they admire and how their own decisions might help guide their actions.

Take, for example, the distribution and responsibility for your own work product as an individual and the work performed by others on the team you may have recently assumed responsibility for leading. One day you are focused on the work assigned to you as an individual and the next day you take on new responsibilities as the manager of others and their work product. How do you assign work? How do you manage the optimal execution of those work assignments? When do you step in to revise and when do you “simply” recommend changes for your new team to execute themselves?

That sounds a lot like a robust endorsement of mentorship. Can you speak a bit about the importance of mentors and where soon-to-be graduating students and newly hired professionals should look for guidance?

I’m in the camp of those who believe that everybody needs mentors and that you can’t have enough of them. Where to look? Seek out the people that you feel are doing it well, people that you admire or people that – when you look at their career path you think – “that's someone I’d like to emulate or model myself after.”  

And then reach out to them. Directly. Lay out why you’re asking them to help guide your just-launched career. You may be surprised at how willing these people will be to return the favor of mentorship they’ve likely benefitted from themselves.

Finally, you are serving as a judge for the Tiger Cage finals, Auburn’s entrepreneurship contest for early-stage venture funding. What insight would you offer to those who are attempting to start their own businesses – those who have what they feel is a unique new business opportunity that warrants a unique, yet-to-be-considered approach?

I’d again turn to what’s common to all these laudable entrepreneurial objectives – raising money. No matter what the particular sphere of business you’re engaged in, if you are planning to start a new business, be prepared to spend more of your time on fundraising than you’d planned. Chalk it up to the price you have to pay to do what you love – pursuing your passion.