Leadership Lingo (w/ Mateo Portelli)

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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. Ladies and gentlemen, you're ready, ready, ready, ready.

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I'll brainstorm this later. We'll edit it later for now.

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Welcome to Leadership Lingo. My name is Matteo Portelli.

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Today, we'll be hearing from a few folks and their experiences as leaders and find out the best principles and practices that make our community a better place. Welcome to Leadership Lingo. Hey, what's going on, guys? Welcome to Leadership Lingo.

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We are in Nashville, Tennessee with Carly Loudon, who's a field rep for North Carolina

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for Campus Victory, the Campus Victory Project. project. Really appreciate her taking the time to talk to us and speak to you all about leadership in a very unique organization. Campus Victory fosters growth in students just like us looking to get involved in their campus student government. So we get a wealth of knowledge here. So Carly, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. So Carly, first question I've got is what do you do in your current position? So what does a field rep do, especially in North Carolina? And day to day, what does that look like?

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Yeah, definitely. So being a field rep for Campus Victory Project is broken down into kind of two separate categories. So the first semester that we're working with the students, so from August to December, is mainly recruiting. So we're finding students, whether that's Instagram, LinkedIn, student government, websites, like Greek life, Instagram pages, basically doing a lot of Instagram and social media deep dives on these students and trying to find if they would be a good fit to work with our company. And then day to day for that section is a lot of stalking on social media, doing a lot of research on these students to make sure that they would benefit from coming to our conference and would end up wanting to work with us long term. Second half is campaigning. So once we find these students, we bring them to our conference, which is where we are right now. And then we help them build out their campaign, build out their coalitions that they're going to have working with their campaigns. And then we help foster all those ideas that we've worked with and we've used in the past. And we share all that knowledge that we have and hope that they eventually win their campaigns in typically March, April, May time period. The day-to-day to that is mostly meeting in person with students, making sure that everything's going smoothly, if they have any bumps in the road, whether that's, you know, election code violations or anything like that, we're there as a resource for them and we're just there to like help them out and make sure that they're feeling comfortable with the process and not too overwhelmed. So the day-to-day for that is a little bit more enjoyable than the first half, because we're actually interacting with the students, and we get to go on campus and be with them and see how things work at some campuses and how they work at other campuses.

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So yeah.

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Now I know this is the first time that the Perspective Leadership Retreat's been in Nashville, so it's super cool, super awesome city. It's not too much different from Vegas, it's much more, it's like Vegas, it's just more country. But obviously, we're here to seek and find new leaders. So folks who aren't, maybe they're in a particular student government, but they want to step up to represent their college or run for president. So in thinking of new leaders emerging, what does leadership mean to you?

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Leadership honestly means a lot to me. Even since I was really young and doing sports and athletics and everything that I was involved in. Leadership, it's always important to have a strong leader. And for a while, I was always the youngest. I'm the youngest in my family. I was always the youngest on my sports teams. So I looked up to these leaders. And then whenever I got to high school and got involved in other things, with class cabinet and other clubs, I wanted to be the leader. And taking all the tools that I saw from other people that were above me and other things and putting that towards my own personality, I have become like a competitive monster and leadership to me is just the ideal of hating to lose and wanting to do anything that you can to put yourself and the people that are working with you above everybody and leadership is a huge aspect of our organization and we want our students to be great leaders and we want to relay all the information that we've gained from our past knowledge and past experiences to them. So in conclusion I think a great leader is just someone who has experience and the thing that they're doing and is confident enough in their skills and their abilities to help give that knowledge and teach people that can benefit from the knowledge that we have. And I love this job because I feel like I'm very knowledgeable about what I'm teaching, and I'm very comfortable and confident in talking about it with all the students that are here.

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Now, it's great to know what to strive for as leaders, but can you give an example, or just maybe a definition of poor leadership?

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What could we avoid pitfalls that new leaders find themselves in.

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Yeah, it's definitely hard to be a good leader because you're treading on a very thin line of being overbearing and coming off like you have a huge ego. So you want to be personable with the people that you're working with and not come across as someone who knows a lot more than they do. And you want to build up the people below you and not try to push them down. I've had several experiences with bad leaders. Whenever I first started in SGA, when I was a student, the current administration, like the executive, the president, the vice president, were not the best at that while I was a senator. And they really tried to push us down and make us seem like we were way below them and that we didn't have as much power as they did, which was frustrating as a sophomore in college when I just wanted to be involved in something and kind of have a voice on campus. So that also helped me become a better leader, I think, because seeing what taught not to do and knowing things that they did that were wrong and didn't make us feel empowered. So it's definitely a thin line, because you don't want to be rude and come across as you know everything and no one knows anything. But you also want to be confident. So finding that thin line between the two is crucial in being a strong leader, or else you'll be a bad leader.

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Now in your capacity as a field rep, before I go into this, how long have you been a field rep? This is my first year.

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But I worked with CVP for two years while I was in college.

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Okay, so what was going through your mind while you were with CVP in college when you actually applied to be a field rep? And you're already a leader among your peers, now you're like, all right, now I'm gonna go foster other leaders in other colleges.

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What was going through your mind when you applied?

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Right, yeah, my favorite part about CVP is the access that we have to students from all across the country. So when I went to Indiana University and I came as a student, my direct correlation to CVP was Indiana University students. And I ran several campaigns for SGA at Indiana, but I didn't feel like I was really reaching as many people as I potentially could. So when I found out that I wanted to apply for CVP, I realized that I would have access to so many more students, so many more universities, and so many more opportunities to help other students, just like the rep helped me when I was a student, or when I was in college, and the CVP reps helped me while I was a student.

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So now you're a year in, with your confidence, you seem like you're doing great. What's one hurdle or obstacle or difficulty you've experienced since taking this new job?

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Yeah, there's definitely a lot of obstacles. I mean, when you're working with college students, I can say this because I was just a college student six months ago, it's very difficult to get them to respond and to commit to things that they don't really feel comfortable with or they don't know a lot about. So working with students, especially at universities that I'm not super familiar with, I just moved to North Carolina for this position, so I'm not overly confident or comfortable with the universities and don't know a lot of students there, trying to just get them to respond and trust you and be like, this is a legit thing. A lot of people think that it's like a scam or that we're trying to sell them something, but it's a real program and a lot of people have benefited from the organization and the results are like they speak for themselves. Our win rate on student government elections is unbelievable in the sense of how many schools we work with. So I think that is one of the biggest challenges and just college students are difficult. They have so much going on and obviously we understand that, but we're trying to work with them and make them feel more confident and more comfortable with their student government campaigns. It is difficult to make sure that they stay engaged. So that would probably be the biggest hurdle is just working with students who are, obviously the students we're working with are heavily involved already. So trying to get them to like commit to another thing is a little bit difficult.

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So let's kind of cap that off then, right? Looking at some folks who are really involved and they're interested in serving their peers. Let's say that one day, hopefully, folks listening to this show will come to a future perspective leadership retreat. What if one day they want to be a field rep like you, right? And they want to help build up other folks in their area, or just move to a new area, and help build up the future generation of leaders. What advice would you give someone if they want to be a field rep?

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Well, I would absolutely encourage them to become a field rep and work for CVP. It's the best job I've ever had. And the community that we are able to foster here with not just the other reps and not just our managers, but with the students as well, it's kind of a really strong, we build strong relationships here. So that's definitely my favorite part. The advice I would give is to just be confident in what you're doing and know that what you're doing for SGA or whatever you're doing, as long as you care about it and are passionate about it, you're making a difference and you're reaching a bunch of people, whether that's students, coworkers, family, whatever it is, you're reaching a lot of people and the connections that you're gonna make will last you a lifetime. And just stay true to yourself, be confident, and don't lose yourself in the path because it is very difficult to stay on track and keep the goal in mind when there's so many other distractions in life. But definitely go for it and be confident and love it. And just do like whatever makes you happy. And if that's being a field rep then absolutely go for it.

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Carly, thanks so much. Thanks for what you do. It's a delight being here learning from you and all your colleagues. But yeah, just thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you

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for having me. It was a great time.

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What's going on guys? I'm here with David Higgins. He's a field rep for the Campus Victory Project. David, what's your area of responsibility as a field rep?

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Yeah, so as a field rep, I do run the North Florida territory for the Campus Victory Project. Essentially, I identify leaders within the state of Florida, people who we think are

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projectable in the long term, right? The vast majority of CEOs of companies, people who are members of Congress, any sort of large leadership role. One thing they have in common is about 75 percent of those folks were in the student government and did have leadership positions back when they were in college. So my job is to identify those people, recruit them to be part of that organization, and then support them through their entire time in the student government association and hopefully be able to kind of build their capabilities to a point where we can take that whether they want to go in the private sector, whether they want to run for office, or whatever the situation may be. Just setting folks up to be successful, we think have quite a bit of potential.

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Now most folks that I've spoken to, most field reps, got their start straight up through CVP and in student government. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your position when you were in college, what you did and what the day-to-day of that looked like.

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Yeah, sure. So I was Senate President of Florida State from 2018 to 2019. One of those years I was with CVP as a student. I was recruited by one of our older field reps that was actually there when the organization first started about eight years ago. From the day-to-day standpoint, probably the biggest thing I did was talk to students, right? I mean, every day we had office hours where I was in my office for about three to four hours a day. I'd have students come up to me with, you know, whether it was an issue they had, whether it was ideas they had, and I would deal with them and try and figure out how I can address that and how I can maneuver through kind of the bureaucratic nature of public universities and the different kind of funding that we had and all the different vehicles we could use to kind of fix some of those things on campus. Another thing I did a lot of is work with the university and the administration. You know, when you're Senate President, you're a part of the boosters. So you're involved with athletics. You're a part of the foundation. So you have to help raise money and pitch donors for the school. You're a part of bringing different speakers to campus and trying to almost set what the discord is going to look like at the university through some of these student government programs. So on a day-to-day level, it was actually quite a bit. There's a lot of different things we had going on.

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So were you a student senator elected by your peers to preside or was this a separate position from being a student senator?

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Yes, so I was a student senator that was elected by my peers in the Senate to preside over the organization. And that was definitely a unique process, to say the least. It's one thing when you're going out and getting students at large to come vote for you. It's another thing when you're looking at individuals, no names, no faces, and know that you've got to get that person to like you and you really got to get, you know, people to have faith in you. And, you know, all those people are also people who have been in the Senate before. They've seen how you operated on a day-to-day level. They've been in your committees. They've seen what your floor, speeches on the floor of the Senate are. And so, you know, compared to just running for student body president, which kind of tends to be a popularity contest, it really does become more about leadership and what people think of you. And being evaluated by people who you've spent a lot of time with, who understand what your work ethic is, it's a different ballgame, and it's kind of a humbling ballgame as well.

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So obviously, running to represent your constituency, that's one style of leadership. It's very cultural leadership. And now, if you were a president of an entire legislative branch, that's more administrative leadership, bureaucratic leadership, a lot more intimate. Looking at these experiences, and of course now, in your professional career, what's a good definition of leadership that you've developed?

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Yeah, that's a tough one. I would say for me, I define leadership as things that you do that you don't plan to get anything out of. I mean, I think there's so many people that consider themselves a leader because of the name that they have or the title they have or you're in a leadership position, so to speak, but anybody's in a leadership position, right? I mean, as I say, if you're helping your mom, who's a single mom, if you're working part-time to help her make ends meet, that's a leadership position. If you're taking care of your neighbor's baby because they're not home and they can't do that, that's leadership. I mean, leadership isn't about being on CNN or being on television and talking to people about things like that. I mean, a lot of those people aren't leaders. A lot of those people are kind of selfish. They wanted to climb the ladder and they wanted to go through the process and they want to drink the champagne and go to the parties and do all of that. But leadership is just putting yourself before other people and not expecting anything in return.

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Can you give us an example, and you can either leave it at the scholastic level or you can go into professional work experience, but what would be a good example of bad leadership

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for some of our young listeners to avoid? Yeah, so bad leadership is, you know, one thing they say is kind of crap falls downhill, so to speak. I've seen situations where when people at the top mess something up, I've seen that at the university level where people say something that they're not supposed to, when an email gets released that they didn't want to come to the light of day and be out in the public, that instead of taking responsibility and owning up for that action as real leadership would, they push it down the chain onto other people. And they think that because they're in that so-called position of leadership, that they're able to kind of pawn their problems off onto other people to kind of cover their own rear end. I've seen that time and time again, and I think that's just the worst, worst version of leadership that you possibly can have. Because if somebody at the top doesn't help the people below them and you don't feel like you're all on the same team. No organization is going to function well. You're not going to be able to build a team with great people, which is the fundamental of leadership, is that you have to be able to build teams and build coalitions and get things done. So I would say people at the top kind of pushing things off to people who are below them, so to speak.

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Now, after you were elected and you had some experience in the Senate. What really pushed you to run for Senate President? What was going through your mind when you put your name in?

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So, essentially my freshman year I ran for Senate. I didn't realize how the party system worked exactly. We have a pretty unique system there where you have to have a lot of institutional support to be able to get on the ballot and be on the ticket for the party. So, I just thought it was a pretty fair, simple process that I'd go in, I'd do an interview, and the best 26 candidates, which is the amount of undergraduate study seats that they had at the time, that those people would get selected. And I realized that that was not the case at all, and that it was a very political thing and that it was totally about who you know. Was your brother or sister in the organization before? Do your parents donate to the school? I mean, it was all sorts of different things. I went in and I gave a great interview and I thought that that would be reflected in getting one of those positions. I mean, I said, you know, how am I not top 26? I guarantee my interview is top 26. Consider I knew some of the people that did get selected and I did not. So I decided I'd run as an independent, an independent, had won a seat in about 20 years of Florida State. I decided I was going to do that. The week of the campaign, we had about one week in Florida State where you can campaign. I got the flu. I got influenza A and influenza B at the same time. I was collapsing in the middle of the night. I had a fever that was close to about 106. Finally, on election day, I was able to campaign. I was ready to throw in the towel. I really kind of just said whatever. I mean, the idea that I'm going to take down a party that's running with $20,000 in the bank and a team full of hundreds of people seemed very unrealistic. But I went to the dining halls, I went to the residence halls, and I just campaigned every minute of that day. I campaigned for about 16 hours that day from open to close. The first moment people were on campus is the first moment people left. And at the end of the day, I ended up with about 36% of the vote, which I was definitely disappointed I didn't win, but it was very evident that I made a statement to the rest of the people in that organization that looked past me that I really did mean business and I really did care about this. And even when things weren't as easy for me as it were for some of the other kids, that I was going to take initiative and I was going to make something happen. So after I finally got appointed, because the person who I lost to in that race ended up quitting after a week, so I was able to go get appointed by the student body president, who was also a CVP alum as well. I got into the Senate. I worked hard in there, trying to build a lot more transparency. You know, my big thing that I always said when I was Senate president is, if you're doing something, who did you talk to about this and why do they want it to happen? Because a lot of times I found that people wanted to do a lot of internal changes. People want to go to law school, so they want to deal with judiciary stuff and changing election code. And it wasn't really about going out to the student population as a whole, bringing people in and finding out what they wanted. And so I did quite a bit of that. And I think people really did take note of it. After that, the former Senate president, who was also a CVP student at the time, his dad's a federal judge now, and I believe Florida's in the 13th Circuit. I'm not totally sure on that. But he pulled me aside and said, hey, do you think you'd be interested in running for president? I think you'd be a guy who could do this job as well as I did. And he's a very, this kid who graduated Georgetown Law, and now he's working at a top three law firm in the country. Very impressive young man. And I certainly didn't feel like I could put myself up against him at the time. And then after a while, and I talked to some other people, and I just said, look, I'll talk to individual people and see if they like the idea. It wasn't like, hey, I want to do this, will you help me? It was, hey, do you think I should do this? How can I help you? And once I was able to do that, I got a very positive response from people. They said that they really liked the initiative that I was taking, they liked that I was more student-focused, organizational-focused, and wasn't just kind of all about myself. So, decided to run. I ran against three other candidates. Typically, we expected to go into a runoff. I felt that I had the votes, but I wasn't totally sure. Some of the people were shaky. I promised some people they'd vote for them, other people they'd vote for me. So I didn't know. So I went, you know, I gave a speech from the heart at about five minutes on the floor to give it. And at the end of the day, I ended up winning 90 percent of the vote in the room. There wasn't a runoff. So, you know, it ended up working out in the end. So let's say that somebody is interested in in run for senate and possibly being in that leadership position, almost like you to fight against the odds, what advice would you give them if they're if they're nervous about running or if like you were

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at you're at the time you saw much other qualified folks potentially going up against you? The only

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advice I would give is to try, just to try. I mean there really is something to be said about people who make the extra effort. Like, you know, if you think about the story that I just told, you know, I got noticed because I made the effort, even when the odds were stacked against me, and it was virtually impossible for me to go win. You don't know what you're capable of until you push yourself to your limits. And you go out there and you try to do these things. And you can understand and acknowledge that something's going to be difficult and success may be unlikely, and you can go home feeling good about yourself for trying it. And the reality is a lot of the people that do try end up succeeding. I mean a lot of these student government positions, there's vacancies in schools, people don't have time to do this, and a lot of people have other commitments. And so opportunities do come. One thing I say, and this is probably my favorite quote in the world, it's from a guy named Les Brown. I think he said this when he was addressing Georgia Tech's graduation at the old Georgia Dome where the Atlanta Falcons used to play. He said that, quote, I would rather not have an opportunity and be prepared than have an opportunity and not be prepared. And that's how I always conduct myself is the belief that even if something doesn't work out for you, the process and the commitment you made to yourself is vastly more important than the outcome of that and what other people think about what you're able to accomplish.

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David, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks for being on Leadership Lingo.

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Absolutely.

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Thanks for having me.

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If you want to find out more information about the folks we interviewed here today or just learn more, you're more than welcome to follow us at Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn at Leadership Lingo. You can also shoot me an email at mateo at leadership lingo dot show. That's M-A-T-E-O at leadership lingo dot S-H-O-W. We'll catch you next time. Stay safe, stay hydrated. That's M-A-T-E-O at leadership lingo dot S-H-O-W. We'll catch you next time. Stay safe, stay hydrated. Have a great day.