WV Executive

OK, I admit it. I left West Virginia at 17 and vowed never to return. It’s not that I didn’t like it here. It’s just that I was naively searching for ‘A Bigger Life’ and opportunities I thought couldn’t be found at home.

Five years later, with no job and enough student loans to take a small country out of debt, I returned to West Virginia with hat in hand. The plan was to temp for six months, save some money and wait it out until my ‘real’ life began. Then, something unexpected happened—I stayed for three years.

Why the change? Skip Lineberg. Skip was chief executive officer of the Charleston marketing firm, Maple Creative, where I’d taken a temp assignment that turned permanent.

Now, if being a newbie graduate puts you at the bottom of the totem poll, being a newbie graduate temp puts you downright underground. As a result, I was accustomed to being overlooked, underutilized and basically ignored on the job. Previous em­ployers had low expectations of me; I had low expectations of them. Everyday that passed was one more “X” on the calendar countdown as far as I was concerned.

A Revelation

Then, I met Skip and somehow I knew he was going to help me. At the time, Maple was just a bud of a company and Skip just a bud of a CEO—but one who wisely knew that growing rev­enues meant grow­ing staff—all the staff. He encour­aged me (“That’s brilliant!”), chal­lenged me (“If you want to move up, prove you’re worth it”) and coached me (“Have you thought about…?”). Though we never used the word until years later, Skip effectively be­came my mentor.

Ultimately, the more energy he invested in developing me as a professional, the harder I worked to earn his faith. Unlike other mangers I’d had in the past, Skip saw his staff not for what they were, but for what they could be and actually put in the hours to help us get there. This cut right to the heart of my personal belief that a leader’s job is not to control, but to enable. (It’s a great irony in business that most employers are so caught up in numbers, deadlines and their own ca­reers, that they ne­glect the very thing that can propel them to the next level, i.e. their employees.)

Skip believed that if you expect the best from people, they will rise to the level of your expectations. (Conversely, if you treat them like dilettantes, they will behave accordingly.) He gave his staff key roles in important projects—usually before we deserved them—citing each as a chance to spread our wings. He would reprimand me for sitting silent in meetings (a behavior he dubbed “being a stooge”) and encourage me to read classic business titles from Dale Carnegie and Max DuPree.

At the time, I was learning so much so fast that I eventually stopped counting down the days and slowly began to realize that it’s not location that matters, it’s opportunity. And in the years that have passed since then, I’ve not only stayed in West Virginia—I’ve planted roots here. I got married, bought a house and even started a business of my own.

Would I have done all of this had I never crossed paths with Skip? Probably. But would I have done all of this in West Virginia? I think not. And that’s the point. If we are to cork the brain drain that robs this state of its future leaders, we’ve got to start giving them cause to stay. When I think about everything that Skip has done for my career, I can’t help but wonder if the reason most people never reach their full potential is because they don’t have anyone to tell them they are better than they realize and show them by example, an enhanced version of themselves.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

These days, when I speak to young professionals I go out of my way to ask whether or not they have someone in their career they would consider a mentor. In truth, most of them laugh. Why is that? Has company loyalty become so nonexistent that managers are scared to really invest in new staff anymore? Where have all the mentors gone? If you want to chase off a good employee, hand them over to a series of co-workers who have neither the time nor the incentive to train them properly. Trust me, it works like a charm.

As for Skip, he doesn’t seem to worry about whether the time he spends with a new employee might only prepare them for the next job; he just goes about the business of making sure his staff grows as professionals while under his watch—however long that may be. (Ironically, this appears to be the very reason they stay.)

If you were to ask him, Skip would probably say that he became a mentor because of the difference mentors have made in his own career. (See WVE’s September/October issue for Skip’s feature on John Wells.) The very lessons that Skip’s teachers gave him, he gave me, and together we are now sharing with new professionals and college students through seminars and our forth coming book. Someday, I hope they will in turn become mentors to the next generation of newbies. How all of this sprung out of a temp job from years ago is beyond me. But, then again, I guess that’s what can happen when you take a chance on someone.