Not Reaching Your Full Potential? Level Up With Professional Mentor Steve Moss
Steve Moss had two passions throughout his career: one was building brands, and the other was helping build people’s careers. After brand building in his corporate career, Steve decided to start a mentorship organization to give others the tools they need to excel in their professions.
Thus, Executive Springboard was created. But why did Steve choose mentorship over other coaching techniques, and how can you benefit from mentorship?
After lasting 19 months in his corporate job, Steve began researching and found that 50% of executive external hires fail in the first 18 months. When this happens, it’s not only stressful for the executive, but it also costs the company a ton of money.
This is where mentorship can help. Instead of coming from a particular field of study or HR (like many coaches), mentors have likely sat in somebody’s chair and gone through similar difficulties. Mentors can be vulnerable and talk about their failures and what they learned, which in turn helps mentees open up, face their fears, and avoid the same mistakes.
Especially after transitioning to a new role, mentorship is crucial to help someone grow and thrive beyond the 90-day onboarding period. But in addition to helping individuals navigate their careers, mentorship also aids the company as a whole. It boosts retention, helps people get promoted, and creates happier, stronger teams.
Listen to this episode of The Judd Shaw Way Podcast with Judd Shaw featuring Steve Moss, the Founder and President of Executive Springboard. Steve talks about the differences between mentoring and coaching, why he started Executive Springboard, and the ways in which mentorship can transform a person’s career.
In this episode:
- [0:36] Judd Shaw introduces his guest, Steve Moss
- [1:14] Steve talks about the difference between mentoring his children and mentoring his grandchild
- [3:21] What inspired Steve to start Executive Springboard?
- [6:48] The differences between a mentor and a coach
- [10:53] When is the right time to provide mentorship?
- [16:56] Steve explains how the mentoring process works at Executive Springboard — and what he looks for in a mentor
- [19:27] Why servant leadership is so important
- [22:40] How Executive Springboard matches mentors and mentees
- [26:02] Steve talks about why mentoring is a marathon, not a sprint
- [32:05] How mentorship can help serve a company’s mission and purpose
Transcript
Hi everyone, I’m Judd Shaw. Welcome to the show. Today’s guest, Steve Moss, from Executive Springboard. Steve, welcome to the show.
Sure, a pleasure being with you today.
Thanks for coming on, appreciate that.
Sure.
Steve, before we get into Executive Springboard and your story, I note that really the company’s primary service is mentoring. And I also understand aside from your children, you have a new grandchild, is that correct?
That’s right.
Congratulations.
Thank you. He’s all of about seven months old now.
And tell me the difference between mentoring your children and mentoring your grandchild.
Well, they’re certainly at a different life stage right now. In one, I’m waiting for some measure of appreciation and then the other, a smile just melts me.
I lived with my grandfather, true story in college and in law school, and I cut out an article, back then it was one of these, Just Say No ads, that were running about drug free. And there was a picture of a grandfather sitting with his grandson on a park bench. And it was a message in the New York Times to grandparents, speak to your grandchildren about this subject because grandparents have a certain mentoring, coaching power over parents, which is somehow, it doesn’t seem like a lecture. It doesn’t seem like the advice is differently. And it says, “Grandparents have a power over parents. Their message is heard differently, as a grandchild than a child.”
And I think that happens in mentoring, having a mentor versus a boss. And I don’t want to necessarily assume that parents are children’s bosses. I think a lot of children would disagree with that, but that little bit of a gap, a little bit of distance, makes a big difference. I guess I just came off of three consecutive days of babysitting while my daughter was away, so I do know how tiring mentoring can be particularly with a seven month old.
Yeah. There’s a great guy named Lee Cockrell who ran operations at Disney. And he says that he, he’ll mention, “Treat your team like your children,” that message does come across. Let’s talk about before we get to Executive Springboard, you have a really interesting background of all the nefarious companies that you had worked for before you did good stuff. Tell us a little about, how did you get to Executive Springboard? What’s the history there?
Well, yeah, nefarious for sure. My career in corporate life was primarily as a marketing executive in global companies and that included time in tobacco and liquor and fatty products like Haagen-Daz’s ice cream. As a marketer, I kind of feel like, you can measure success by how many hundreds of millions of dollars of extra revenue you may have generated. But at one point in my career, I looked back and said, “As a successful marketer, I may have been responsible for a few hundred deaths because of cancer or cirrhosis or heart disease,” and it gives you pause. It makes you think about, “Can you do something different in your life?”
And I did some things like green technology. But the other thing that got me as a marketer, I had kind of two passions in my career. One was building brands and the other was helping to build people’s careers. I sufficiently scratched the first itch with brand building through my corporate career and with Executive Springboard, it’s become much more of a chance for me to do the other, to help people at various stages in their career, give them the tools they need to succeed, and in fact, excel, particularly in new roles.
That’s Executive Springboard, tell us about it.
About five years ago, still licking the wounds of my last corporate gig, I started thinking about why things didn’t go as well as I had hoped. In that role, I was a chief marketing officer for a $2 billion company. And I was at kind of the forefront of a significant transformation that they were making, really from thinking of themselves as a manufacturer, to much more of a marketing, driven business. I lasted about 19 months and I gave a lot of thought after the fact on why things didn’t go any better than they had. I started doing a lot of research on the rates of failures for executives in senior roles. 50% of executive external hires for executives fail in the first 18 months. And it costs companies a boatload of money when things don’t go well.
There was a pain point that I hadn’t uncovered that I wanted to think about addressing. And as I did more research on why people fail in new roles, not even just those who are hired from the outside, but people who are promoted, people who are reassigned, people who get into a position after a merger and they’re being integrated in place. Very seldom, does it come to the point that somebody has failed because they’re functionally not competent to do the job. The process to get them there, the vetting process, kind of will make sure that somebody does have the requisite skills to do their job correctly. But it’s always the people issues that bite them in the tail and people might start making mistakes on how they deal with certain topics. And it leads to a cascade of failures. And I wanted to do something about that and that was kind of the impetus behind what became Executive Springboard.
There’s a difference between a mentor and a coach in my experience, and also some of the research that I’ve done looking into that more. For instance, my grandfather was a great mentor. My first boss who I worked for, for nearly a decade, was a great mentor. I always say that I learned so much from him when I started my own company, so much of the DNA of my own company, had his DNA in it. I brought over a lawyer who was working with me at that other company and he came over to start the new company with me. And you could tell that there were things about that other company that we just simply replicated, and that became the mentoring.
The coaching I’ve had with their consultants or people who either have coached me or coached… Generally sometimes are, it’s like a therapist when you go there and you talk about the problem that’s happening that week and you feel better certainly about it going out of it, but it doesn’t necessarily help you, confront the next problem or being ahead of it. What are your thoughts about the difference between that, the mentoring and coaching?
Well, certainly when I started Executive Springboard, a thought had occurred to me that this would be a platform for me to hang up a coaching shingle and that’s what I would do. And I decided to take a mentoring approach instead. And I’d have to say Judd, that there’s a lot of overlap. If you do a Venn diagram between coaching and mentoring, there will be an awful lot of overlap. Many times there is more difference between a mentor and a coach than there is between mentoring and coaching. About 80% of executive coaches come from a psychology background or an HR background. They’ve developed terrific, active listening skills. They ask great questions. What I find with mentors are that they generally, instead of coming from a particular field of study or an HR profession, mentors are more likely to have sat in somebody’s chair, whether it’s in their company, whether it’s in their function, et cetera, so there’s a been there, done that factor.
And you see that in really their ability to pass their wisdom on to a new generation, that’s what a grandfather would’ve done. That’s what your early boss may have done. And it’s very often, not always, but very often, an intergenerational thing. And it comes from a credibility from shared experience, that lots of times coaches don’t have. I think there’s also something else that happens. It’s unfortunate in coaching. I have an awful lot of respect for coaching. If you were my boss and you said to me, “Steve, I want to give you an executive coach.” Sometimes there’s a thought bubble that would come up, “Gee, I wonder what I did wrong?” There’s kind of a remedial component to coaching, which is unfortunate. I think there being tarred with a brush, that’s not necessarily fair, but that’s how things are, and as opposed to mentoring, which seems to be more of a clean slate. It’s easier for somebody to recognize that if somebody’s being given a mentor, it’s really, they’re being tools to be more effective in their job, in their career, in their life.
I do think that there is a large overlap with the objectives and goals of either a coach or mentor. And the other real question I have for you is, is when do you bring in a mentor? When is somebody’s career where a company says, “We’re going to financially back it. We’re going to create the time, the bandwidth for it, because we feel it’s important that you have a mentor.” And there’s onboarding, there’s past your 90 day or your probationary period, you have reached manager title. You have reached the executive board. What’s the right time to provide mentorship?
It would be easy for me to say any time would be the right time, but I think there’s a few different ways that mentoring comes into play, that’s worth talking about. In many companies, particularly larger companies. They may put in place their own internal mentoring program, where a young person starting their career, or maybe somebody who’s a manager or even a senior manager, maybe even as far as a director, will have somebody in the company, probably outside of their line of command, who can play a role of mentor to them. And that experience within that organization is something that is very helpful for that person’s career. It’s a big boost on retention. It’s a big piece in trying to get people promoted. People who are mentored basically have a five times greater shot of being promoted than somebody who isn’t, so that happens all within the context of an organization that puts in place its own internal mentoring program.
What we’ve found is that there is a group of employees, particularly at senior levels, there’s still a demand for what mentoring provides, there’s still that need, there just isn’t the supply. And what ends up happening is, there isn’t somebody in the organization who is a logical source to mentor somebody who’s in the C-suite, for instance. People won’t make themselves vulnerable with somebody who might be in a position to use that information against them. And so it’s one thing to find a mentor, who’s a couple levels above you in an organization.
When you get to a point where there aren’t people above you in an organization, the options might be, you can have the CEO mentor you, that might be uncomfortable. You could have board members mentor you, that often doesn’t get the transparency that you try to get. In trying to find something to address the need to make yourself vulnerable, it’s normally somebody outside the organization and it might be an executive coach, it might be a mentor.
We found that there’s lots of calls for what we do, particularly when somebody has transitioned into a new role. As you mentioned, onboarding, and that’s a big part of what we do, because it’s often really pretty clear that somebody needs the help and there isn’t anything negative associated with it. You’re in this new role, we want to try to give you all the tools you need to be successful in it. Part of that may be giving you this wise person who’s been through these wars themselves and can share their scars with you.
I used the example with my chief operating officer. At a time, she had run management positions in nearly every department. She understood every role. She knew how to do the job. And she was tapped to be chief of staff for the company. I worked with her almost every Friday. I dedicated an hour or two and I would give her, my executive, really it was coaching. How would you deal with that? And how would you deal with that? And she understood core values and our mission and our purpose. And so she had all the criteria for it, but now that.
I look at it and I’m talking to you and some research, I think that mentoring would’ve been the perfect time for that for her, because at some point when then she became chief operating officer, I actually remember the conversation when I said to her, “I’m tapped out. I don’t think there’s anything else I can teach you.” And I went to look for a consultant, maybe should she join the National Chief of Staffs or whatever, or maybe go to this thing. I was trying to reach for, grasp for places for her to be able to continue to learn and grow, because I no longer, other than just dealing with a situation, I no longer was increasing her professional development.
In fact, I was probably going to get in the way, because it would be more me, it would be more dealing with these things on a very small basis. And also as you pointed out, I’m not going to be told everything. She’s not going to let me know everything because there’s still one person higher than her on that rank, and that’s me. And I think that’s probably the place for it.
That’s a great insight. And I think that ties into what you said earlier about the difference between parents and grandparents, to some degree as well, and who can play that role as a mentor. Another thing that I think of, there are various resources that somebody can use to try to develop themselves further. And it might be a mentor. It might be a coach. It might be a peer circle. It might be all three. I’d like to think of people creating their own personal board of directors. And each of those board members, if you will, may be playing a different role for somebody’s development.
And we’re always, all of us, are continual works in progress. What we find that’s really kind of interesting and lots of times it will get in the way of success, is when people resist admitting that they’re still learning. Somebody who’s been a COO three times before and they come into a new organization, its like, “I got it. I know how to do this,” but it’s a new organization. It’s a new culture. It may be a new industry. It’s certainly new people you have to work with. And all of those dynamics can give people fits if they’re not reflecting on it. And lots of times they need somebody to help them think through those issues.
You’re never too old to stop learning.
Absolutely.
Is mentoring always one on one with Executive Springboard? Is it in group? How does it work?
For us, it’s one on one. Let me use this as an opportunity to talk just a little bit about the criteria that I use in bringing in mentors to our organization. We have about 100 mentors, most of them in the United States and Canada, but we have people in about a dozen countries around the world and I’ve vetted all of those. I’ve recruited all those people into Executive Springboard. And there are a few things that I look for when I’m bringing somebody in. First thing is, their resume. Does their resume say to a potential mentee, “I see how I can learn from this person.” That may be a low bar, but I’ve got to at least get that down. The second area is going to be about active listening skills, because that’s what executive coaches are great at. And I don’t want to get clobbered in comparison, in an area where we’re doing something that is a similar function.
The third thing is recognizing that this is not about me, it’s about the other person. And so there’s got to be a generosity that comes from this whole activity. And what we find is lots of times, yes, people will learn from the experiences that I’ve had and if I’ve had success in something, it’s great for me to be able to share that with somebody, but people will learn a whole lot more from my failures than from my successes and being in a position where I can talk about those and make myself vulnerable and open up about the things that didn’t necessarily work so well, so somebody else’s learning will be a little bit less painful, that’s a pretty important thing. And also in that process, that step of me making myself vulnerable, makes it easier for that to be reciprocated, and that’s when the magic happens. When people can open themselves up to sharing what they’re concerned about, what they fear, what they’re unsure about, that’s when they can find themselves open to new possibilities.
I always said, I wish I had a mentor early on. I couldn’t afford one, but I wish I did because my growth came from mistakes. I learned from the mistakes, not what I did right. And that was great training, but I still would’ve liked to make less of mistakes.
Well, yeah, it hurts a little bit. It’s valuable for sure, but it hurts while it’s going on, for sure.
Sounds like a great quality for a mentor is servant leadership.
Yeah, absolutely. And I’d say that, that’s something that we all realize how important servant leadership is not just for the mentor, but if there are lessons that we try to portray, lessons that we try to communicate to the people that we’re working with, that would certainly be one of them. If you think about it, somebody who comes into a new role, perhaps they’re coming in from outside the company, we’ll use that as an example, very few are ever told, “We want you to do exactly what your predecessor did.” It’s almost always explicit that you have an agenda for change.
Okay, so you come in with this change agenda. You don’t know how anything works in that company. Your ability to get things done is really completely in the hands of other people. And so where I see a lot of people making mistakes is buying into the notion of the first 90 days, and that there’s something magic about what happens in three months, and if you don’t get a lot of stuff done by then, you’re in trouble. The first three months and then some, should really be spent in large part, building the relationships that are going to be necessary for the alignment to come that follows. If you start getting people to feel confident in you, if they see your confidence, if they understand how they can make that they’re in agreement with you, then all of a sudden the change that you want to make becomes a whole lot easier, and that becomes a big piece of servant leadership.
Working with humility is a critical part of that. Part of that is being able to admit, “Yeah, I don’t know everything yet.” Part of it is, I find, early on, having somebody who goes through a listening tour and learns what people in the organization think is important and what they want to do, et cetera, is critical, going forward. Then when you are about to announce the changes that you want to put forward, it’s been done with the knowledge of how people in the organization are viewing things. They feel invested. If you do something that somebody has suggested, they feel like that’s their idea. The easiest way to get people to be aligned with you is for them to feel like it was their idea.
100% for buy-in.
Yeah, and even if you don’t take their suggestions, but you can explain to them why you didn’t, they feel heard and maybe not quite as strong as them feeling like it’s their own suggestion, but it’s much easier for them to buy in.
Tell us how does it work in terms of moving forward? Somebody wants to lean on Executive Springboard. They have somebody, a mentee that they would like their company to mentor. How do you pair it? How do you match it up, for instance, in a legal industry, which I’m in and have somebody, a non-lawyer, it’s more managerial? How do you do that and what’s the cost? Can you talk about that?
Yeah. What I’ll try to do is take advantage of shared experience. My first cut will often be and that Judd, is a big part of my job, is playing the matchmaker. I’m looking among those 100 plus mentors for who might be a good fit with this individual. Is this your CFO? Okay, if it’s the CFO, I may have eight people within Executive Springboard who are or have been CFOs in the past, and now I’ll go a step deeper. Has anybody been in a similar industry? Is the ownership in some way similar as a private equity company or a publicly traded company or what have you. Did they come into a turnaround situation? Did they get promoted into that position or did they come in from the outside? And I’ll try to do as good a job as I can in coming up with a few candidates for somebody’s consideration on, does this person have experience that will be relevant for the situation, that this mentee will be facing?
And then the mentee and the prospective mentor will have a conversation, normally a half hour conversation or so, to see if there’s a chemistry there. If the mentee says, “I can’t learn from this person,” then there’s no point in doing it. If the mentor says, “I can’t say this has ever happened, but its possible that this person is a knucklehead. There’s nothing that I can do to really help them. I don’t think we have the chemistry,” then we’ll talk to go to somebody else within our organization to find somebody who will be a good fit.
I mentioned that the work that we do is normally not based on the first 90 days. Michael Watkins book, The First 90 Days, is something, it’s part of the cannon that Executive Springboard mentors are quite familiar with. But at the same time, we recognize that this whole process of onboarding even is not a sprint, it’s not done in 90 days. It’s probably not done in 180 days. Our sessions tend to be eight months long. And we’ll work with the executive with pre-work before each session, and we’ll have two sessions per month, so there’s 16 sessions, that executive has with their mentor.
Along with the work that they’ll be doing in Zoom calls and the pre-work that they’ll have, we’ll conduct a couple of assessments that we’ll share with them. We’ll conduct stakeholder interviews as well, so that the executive gets an idea of what our expectations from other people in the organization about their development, and then we’ll gauge their progress along the path in that, and that’s information that’s shared with the executive and with the mentors and the mentor can make course corrections along the way. Depending on the level of the people that we’re dealing with, whether somebody is a director or assistant vice president, up to a CEO, the range in price is between $12,000 and $18,000 for the eight month engagement.
Got it. And you owned your past corporate accountability and I have to own mine, which is you’re right, I think that somehow we have a 90 day period and we run on the medieval theme. You start with us as a squire and you get to 90 days and you become a knight and the idea of training. And then somehow at 90 days magically, they can go and fight any crusade and battle on their own. And quite frankly, even hearing you, it’s not true. In fact, that’s where they finally show an ability to understand core values and the purpose of the job and basic requirements and processes and systems. The real growth happens after that time, when they can stop focusing on just how to log in and now really how to meet the company’s purpose.
When we started, we set our engagement at 12 months and we offered clients an opt-out after six months, and nobody have opted out. But what we were finding was by about month 11, the mentor and the mentee were looking at each other like, “Don’t we have this all figured out by now?” There comes a time when an executive no longer feels new in their position. And a lot of what we want to try to do is get somebody to the point that they feel like they belong. They’re seen as fitting into the organization. They’ve created the relationships that are going to put them in good stead for the long haul and it’s not about the short term wins. There’s something that besides the length of time in the first 90 days that I have kind of a reaction against, it’s the motion of quick wins.
Yes, we all have to try to get some quick wins. They’re never strategic. They’re always basically about making your competence personal enough for the other person to buy yourself a little bit more time to keep learning. And so we kind of found that it takes at least six months for almost all of the uglies to bubble up to the surface and for somebody, even the most self-aware, most socially aware people, to figure out where some of the problems might be. For that reason, we really feel like people are hitting their stride after about an eight month period.
And what a cool, 360 approach by a mentor getting some feedback from people that the mentee is either supervising, managing, working closely with and having that discussion, which is really a whole nother set of learning possibilities.
It is. And I’ll clarify something on that. It’s a little bit of telephone tag that we’ll play on this because I personally, will conduct those stakeholder interviews with the people in the organization, and I’ll pass that learning onto the mentor. And the reason we do it that way is, it’s really important to me, that the mentor has no relationship with anybody in the organization, except for the mentee. That’s how we create a confidential relationship. If the mentee has no worry that anything that happens in their time with their mentor, is going back to the company. My role is to play that intermediary, getting the feedback from the company, sharing it with the mentor who then is using it in their discussions with the mentee.
What I would say on that is additionally, and that’s something that over, particularly when we got started, has become less of an issue, maybe is I’ve become more comfortable with things, but I’ve had a lot of potential clients who said, “Wait a second, so you’re not going to tell me the progress that’s happening there?” And they’re used to that from executive coaches. But what we say is really important is we’d like to keep this Las Vegas rules within the mentor relationship. What goes on in that place, stays in that place? Well, if the mentor thinks there’s something really untoward going on, they may raise their hand, but I can’t think of any case where that happens, we’ll have that conversation with the executive early on. But what we’ll do over the course of an eight month engagement is have three, one person Survey Monkey surveys where the mentee is reporting what they’re getting out of this. There’s something for the company to feel like they understand the return on investment from the mentee’s point of view.
At my company, we have JSU, which stands for Judd Shaw University. And that’s because at certain point, our method is called The Judd Shaw Way. And that is, in order for me to teach another team member, how I make a client call or how I would do this, or how I would do that, allows a company to scale. I can take on more and somebody knows how I was doing it, which was the way we wanted the company to do things. And a lot of that is guided by our four core values, which serve as our beacon in our code of conduct.
We always tell our team members, our knights, that if you’re given a choice are A and B, use your core values first. If you went to A, is that a be a knight in shining armor or B, is working the wow, and using those core values. How does the company turn over to Executive Springboard, the comfort that this mentor is giving guidance to someone who’s obviously critically important to the company generally, and know that, that guidance is also not only to the benefit of the mentee, but also serves the purpose of the company’s mission and probably why they’re even signing on for a mentor to begin with?
It’s a really good question. One of the things that we’ll talk to companies about is, what are kind of the limits on where the discussions go between the mentor and the mentee? And again, without us talking about what’s happening in the sessions, because that we want to keep off limits to the company. But one of the things that we make clear to the client is that, our own values include recognizing our success, is based on the success of the mentees in their roles. And where that can come into play is we being rather explicit with the company about the limits of what we do. If a mentor is working with an executive in a company, and that executive says, “You know what, I’ve been here six months, this is a clown show. This is dysfunctional. I hate my boss. I got to get out of here.”
The mentor as close to the relationship as they’ve been building, the mentor recognizes that’s a wall they don’t pass. And they say, “Look, I’m here to make you successful in this job. I’m not here to give you guidance on how you get out or to help you with any of that. That’s a bridge too far for us. My role here is, remember, who’s paying for this. This is about to make you successful there. That makes it win-win, its good for you. It’s good for the company. The company kind of realizes that we have that in their best interests as well. A lot of them will also recognize that the confidentiality that we’re trying to build, which does put a wall between the CEO or the head of HR and whomever and what happens in our groups, that’s really being done to encourage vulnerability in that relationship between the mentor and the mentee.
And we hope to be able to get to what’s on their minds, their hopes, their fears, et cetera. And that’ll be something that comes out in the discussions I have with the stakeholders, is what are they seeing? Are they seeing progress? Are the things that they felt were important early on, are they seeing this executive make progress towards that? If not, we have a conversation. If there are other things that are coming up, there are other issues that are coming up, we get to that. The first time that I’m talking with the stakeholders within an organization, I’m also asking a set of questions about their culture, and it’s not necessarily all about their values. I’m defining culture as the way we do things here. What are some of the processes? What are the norms that the organization has?
I’ll ask them about values, but I’ll put it in terms of lots of times, you may have values on a plaque in the wall, and there’s another set of behaviors that you really value. You can talk about teamwork and accountability and the things that are very common to see in corporate value statements, and what you really value is, when you have to start making cuts, who is it who doesn’t blink an eye about getting rid of people in their organization? Well, that’s something that’s kind of important to know about how things really work in that company. We have kind of a lightning round of questions that we’ll ask to try to get a sense of the culture. We’ll share that with the mentor, so they’ve got a way of looking at that. And it’s also things that we are getting kind of confirmed through the assessment tools that we use with these executives.
I think that’s so well said, Steve. When you think about that, you’re never too old to learn and that continuous growth, that really plays a part here, I think that we can all use really good grandparents in our lives and they can be a good influence and so can mentors. And I think that mentorship at the right time and right place can really just be such a powerful tool. How does somebody get in touch with you, Steve?
If somebody wants to reach out to me, they can email me, info@execspringboard.com, E-X-E-C, springboard.com.
Steve, I greatly appreciate you coming on the show. I realize now that I have to look well within my own organization, for those that probably can use somebody at this point, more than me being their parent, but somebody taking on the role of a grandparent, that’s really what this is about. It is really just, they’re there for that mentee. They’re there for the mentee’s growth, and I think it can be very powerful and it can really work well.
And we find that even a mentor who comes in with experience that brings credibility, we have to continue to prove our worth to those mentors and to the companies that employ them. And that becomes a continuous thing for us. Hey, Judd, I’d love to have the chance to talk to you again about the people in your organization who might need some mentoring.
I would too. And going back to the culture thing, I heard it once said that everybody has a culture. If you think you don’t have a culture, you do. You can either be intentional about it or not intentional about it, but there is a culture and that culture is really that set of behaviors. And when a company can be real about that, as compared to some writing on the wall, that’s going to be the powerful starting point for any mentor mentee relationship.
And very few people in an organization will have a lot of opportunity to change the culture. A lot of it is really about how are they going to adapt to the culture that they find. Maybe if you’re the CEO, that becomes a different conversation. But in many instances, even people in C-suite positions, they have to figure out, the rhythm of that organization and how they dance to it.
Steve, enjoy that grandson, man. Congratulations again-
Thanks so much.
You’re doing some really great work. Thanks for coming on.
My pleasure. Great to talk with you.
Thanks everybody. And if you need to reach out to me, you can always do that at judd@juddshawinjurylaw.com and be sure to email me and make a request for some swag and we’ll send you some cool company swag. Thanks for coming on.
🎙️ Meet Your Host 🎙️
Name: Judd B. Shaw
What he does: Judd founded Judd Shaw Injury Law (JSIL) and serves as the firm’s Brand Chief. He founded the firm on the premise that clients come first. Over the years, the success he attained for his clients helped JSIL grow significantly. Judd’s clients are not just another number to him or his law firm.
Company: Judd Shaw Injury Law
Words of wisdom: “At Judd Shaw Injury Law, it’s all about high-quality representation and excellence in client service. Our clients are counting on us to win and the stakes are high. Our endless pursuit for awesomeness through our core values, the ability to WOW our clients, is in our DNA.”
🎙️ Featured Guest 🎙️
Name: Steve Moss
Short Bio: Steve is an Executive Mentor, President, and Founder of Executive Springboard, a network of current and former C-suite executives who mentor leaders to help them excel in new roles. Before Executive Springboard, Steve was the interim CEO for Minnepura Technologies, a Marketing Consultant and President at Moss Re-skilling, and the CMO at Imitation. Steve received his BA from Georgetown University and his MBA from The Wharton School.
Company: Executive Springboard
🔑 Relevant Resources 🔑
- “Choosing a mentor: Four questions to ask yourself”
- The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins
- Lee Cockerell on The Judd Shaw Way Podcast
This podcast is designed for general information purposes only. Nothing on this podcast should be taken as legal advice for an individual case or situation. This information is not intended to create, and viewing does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship. No aspect of this advertisement has been approved by the Supreme Court. Any results set forth herein are based upon the facts of that particular case and do not represent a promise or guarantee. Those with legal questions should seek the advice of an attorney.