Mary Gamba Describes Working on "Lessons in Leadership"

Steve Adubato talks with Mary Gamba, Director of Development at Stand and Deliver, about the best business advice she and Steve have learned from CEOs, innovators, authors and educators while compiling his latest book, “Lessons in Leadership”.

2/28/17 #2018

Excerpt:

"Welcome folks, Steve Adubato here. For those of you who consistently watch our program, you know that I've been asking people about the most significant lesson they've learned about leadership for a long time and one of the reasons we've been doing that is for the last couple of years I've been working on a book called "Lessons In Leadership" and the first chapter in this book "Lessons In Leadership" right here takes all of those quotes about leadership from hundreds of people and condenses them the best that we thought we had and we break them down and we try to teach people through that. I wanted to bring on my colleague Mary Gamba who is the Director of Development at Stand and Deliver to join me in this segment so we can make sense of what we've heard from those experts, those leaders of every stripe, and also offer some lessons for folks. How are you doing? Very good. How are you? Good. So, I didn't ask you this question. The number one leadership lesson that you have learned... [laughter] No! Seriously! I've been doing this with all kinds of people. Mary has been working with me for 16 or 17 years. Mm hmm. She runs our Stand and Deliver not for profit program with youth leaders. 500 every year. We teach them all kinds of leadership skills. Number one leadership lesson you've learned is? I would have to say you can't lead others until you learn to lead yourself. Which is a chapter in the book. What does that mean for you? It is. For me, it took me a lot of time to realize that you need to know who you are, be true to yourself, and compose yourself a certain way. Be able to adapt to situations when things go wrong and I think that as far as leadership goes, that's a very important leadership trait. And then once you get to that point, anything else is possible because then you're humble enough to realize, "Hey, I made a mistake. I'm going to lead myself and then I can lead others." Mary and I talk about this a lot and one of the first clips you're going to see, or one of the first excerpts you're going to see in terms of leadership lessons really goes to a lot of what Mary just said. Mm hmm. It comes from an extraordinary interview we did with Eric LeGrand who is 25-26 years of age right now but at 20 years of age played for Rutgers University, one of the stars there playing Army. A terrible collision on the field and his life was changed forever, but he was sitting across from us right..."