By Howard Greninger
The Tribune-Star, Terre Haute, Ind.
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) Julia Winston, who has conducted leadership development and coaching workshops for organizations such as GE and Chick-fil-A, shares her thoughts on the importance of cultivating leaders.
The Tribune-Star, Terre Haute, Ind.
In 2011, Julia Winston and her family moved to Terre Haute.
Her husband’s job with GE Aviation would keep the family in the Wabash Valley for two years. And it was in Terre Haute where she started her own business, Brave Communication LLC, a leadership development executive coaching firm.
On Wednesday, Winston, now a resident of Huntsville, Alabama was keynote speaker for the inaugural Terre Haute Leadership Conference, hosted and sponsored by Terre Haute Young Leaders and Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce.
“Leadership starts with self,” she told about 130 people attending the conference at Ivy Tech Community College’s Terre Haute campus. “This community gave me the bravery to go out and start” her own company.
Winston said the world is in a leadership crisis, with 84 percent of organizations expect to experience a leadership shortfall within the next five years, as baby boomers continue to retire.
Forty-eight percent of the workforce will be millennials by 2020 and just 10 percent of companies say they have people ready and willing to lead.
Leaders need a mindset to “focus on your unique abilities, focus on solving the problem rather than worry about the size of it, and focus on reasons larger than self,” Winston said.
She asked conference participants if they are “READY” — with “R” to reexamine their beliefs, “E” to embrace yourself as a leader, “A” to assemble your team and tools, “D” to determine your next [goal]and “Y” for You Go! and lead.
Winston has conducted leadership development and coaching to organizations such as GE, Chick-fil-A, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, American Association of University Women, the city of Oxford, Mississippi, and Fisk University.
She is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia and a master’s in Human Resource Development from Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Jason LaBella, 35, of Terre Haute became the first person in Winston company’s five years of presentations to answer a question correctly on what was unique in a set of numbers.
Winston said LaBella went beyond what people typically do — he looked to the left side of the page and past a decimal point, to spot the difference.
Winston called the action a great illustration “that you can’t use the same thinking that got us into a problem to start with.”
LaBella is a validation engineer and certified quality auditor for Performance Validation, an Indianapolis life sciences company that provides validation, commissioning, and quality services for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device manufacturers.
A 2004 graduate of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, LaBella said he attended the inaugural Terre Haute Leadership Conference as he is “trying to get into a position business wise that I can help the community with the real estate side of the world. Coming from the engineering world, how can I put a plan together to accomplish that,” he said.
John Gettemeyer, program coordinator for new student programs at Indiana State University, said he attended the conference to network. He moved to Terre Haute five months ago. “I am hoping to connect with others in the community to provide better services for our students who are living in the community and look to integrate themselves,” he said.
Tonya Caddell of Terre Haute said the conference gave her inspiration, to expand her business — Sonshine Hollow — which teaches basic life skills, such as how to sew. “I basically just have to go do it. I have all my inspiration, all of my tools,” she said.
