Elevate Your Own Personal Traits: Interview with Darren Isom, Partner at the Bridgespan Group

I recently went one on one with Darren Isom, partner at The Bridgespan Group.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Darren: Where I am professionally is a result of happenstance. I’ve always been interested in doing work that drives social change, and for me, it has been a question of finding a place where I felt like I could bring something unique to the world while doing something that brought me some degree of satisfaction.

While growing up in New Orleans, I did a lot of work with the nonprofit sector and social sector in high school and college as an intern and young worker. Later, I went off to grad school and studied abroad in Paris, focusing on French immigration policy toward ethnic minorities. After graduating, I went into finance, working in Paris and Brussels. Then I moved to New York, and I was there when 9/11 happened. I had an epiphany that day: that if dying at work was inevitable—and it felt that way to everyone in New York at the time—I should probably enjoy what I do for a living.

I left finance six months later and returned to the nonprofit sector and had opportunities to work with a new development and a community foundation (both in Brooklyn), and I was at Columbia Business School at that time as well.

I ended up at The Bridgespan Group quite randomly. I was talking with a friend and mentor who asked if I had ever thought about consulting. In my mind, consulting was Bain, McKinsey, and BCG. I looked at her very graciously and said, “Consulting is not my ministry.” She said, “What about non-profit consulting?” She and two other people recommended Bridgespan, which serendipitously happened to be hiring. The organization had only two offices at the time—one in Boston and one in San Francisco—and that made the decision very easy. I packed up my things and moved to San Francisco, and that’s where I’ve been since.

Consulting is a great space for me. I love supporting nonprofits and philanthropic leaders. Growth, in our current world, is defined by your successes—you do something well, you get promoted—but most of my growth has come from failure. It’s when you mess something up badly that you grow significantly. You can measure your success by how you fail quietly.

Adam: What are the best leadership lessons you have learned as a leader at a non-profit organization?

Darren: One of my biggest leadership lessons came during a call some months ago. I was interviewing Black and brown leaders for an article that appeared in Stanford Social Innovation Review on the skills and assets of leaders of color. I was speaking with David Thomas, president of Morehouse College. In that conversation, he offered a pathway to leadership for leaders of color or really anyone from a marginalized group—be it queer people, women, or others—that I had never heard articulately so effortlessly and seamlessly. He said success comes in three parts. One, figure out what makes you different from a life perspective, from a viewpoint perspective, and be proud of that. Two, find an organization or company that sees what makes you different as critical to their success. And three, surround yourself with people who urge you to hold onto that difference, both in service to the organization and in service to yourself.

Also, it’s important for nonprofit leaders to understand the community they serve, to understand their assets, and to recognize that, in many ways, you’re a cook. You’re working with whatever ingredients exist in the cupboard of the community you’re serving. Being able to understand and appreciate those ingredients is crucial.

I was working many moons ago with Liz Thompson of The 1954 Project. She spoke about what makes a good leader from a nonprofit or philanthropic perspective, and in defining the values of our work, she made sure to define it as coming from a place of love. She really elevated the idea that we should be operating with love for the communities we’re serving. When we do that, the work isn’t transactional, and it makes your expectations for the people you work with very different. You treat them with love, and you have high expectations for them from a space of love. As Liz would say, all that’s done in love is done well.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Darren: We say all the time in the arts world that good art is first and foremost relevant, and leadership is the same. What it means to be a good leader in one community may be very different for another community. For me, again, it’s important for leaders to have love for the communities they serve in order to get the most out of the work and to really push the communities and themselves. All good leaders I’ve worked with have also been extremely curious people.

Leaders have to be comfortable with ambiguity. They have to realize that the world we’re trying to create is one that we don’t know. They have to be strategic and have a north star from a success perspective, but they also have to roll up their sleeves when necessary and support the implementation of the work and support others in the work.

Great leaders also develop the pipeline of future leaders. As you rise, who are you bringing up with you? Leaders of color recognize that the world we are trying to achieve won’t be achieved in a lifetime. From the beginning of time, Black people had people speaking at podiums about the world they seek and their children and their great-grandchildren achieving it. This idea of success being intergenerational and multi-generational means you have to have leaders that can live with the times. An effective leader has to be able to recognize the world that they’re in and meet that world where they are, but also develop people who can lead that work differently. My grandparents and teachers were training me for a world they didn’t understand, a world they would never see.

When I interviewed activist and writer Urvashi Vaid on my podcast, Dreaming in Color, she spoke about faith being articulated by action. For aspiring leaders who are taking their skills to the next level, it’s all about just doing the work and living in the moment. The more you do the work, the more you engage in the work, you learn more tools for success, you get better at the work itself, and you offer yourself space to both grow and fail. Giving yourself that space to fail can take your leadership to the next level. Work with humility, and always have a learning orientation. It’s important for people to see you as vulnerable.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Darren: You have to be aware of what we call situational leadership: being able to understand where people are on both the skill and confidence spectrums. You work differently with someone who is both highly skilled and highly confident than you do with someone who is highly skilled and has low confidence. 

It’s important, from a team perspective, to understand your assets as a leader as well as your gaps. It allows you to both leverage your assets and find people who can allow you to fill those gaps. It’s also important to know where you may have trauma, professionally speaking, and how you may be projecting that trauma onto others so that you can stop those patterns. Finally, you should embrace every relationship as a learning opportunity for both you and the people you’re managing. Consider how to delegate with love and trust and how to give people space to grow.

I’m on my eight-year early retirement countdown, and it’s important to think about your exit strategy not so much from a job perspective but from a work perspective and how you’re preparing people to fill the gap when your departure happens. There’s been a narrative, historically, about working yourself to death, and now we recognize that success doesn’t come with martyr syndrome. Success comes from how you normalize the work in a way that’s sustainable.

It's also about working from a space of self-care. Take care of yourself, take breaks, take vacations. I work from a space of joy and laughter. You want to be someone whom people want to work with. When people see your name pop up on their calendar, they should be excited about the conversation, not anxious.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Darren: I’ve gotten so much good advice! I’ll share two.

In my first year of consulting, I was working on a project with a senior partner. I had my first big client presentation: I showed the slides, and I killed it. Afterward, I was debriefing with the partner, who said, “Great work with the client. One piece of advice: In the conversation, you were so serious, and you left no room for people to argue with you. You’re a tall Black guy with a deep voice, and you should be aware that if you say something is the answer, people probably aren’t going to push back. That’s going to be an asset at some point, but at this point in your career, you want people to think. You have a joyful and playful way of interacting with people one-on-one. Think about how you bring that into a room with a group setting.” The lesson was that success is individual. You have to bring your best to your interactions. As I joke on my podcast all the time, my uncle used to say, “You’re never going to beat white people at being white, but you can beat them at being Black.” Elevate your own personal traits.

I also received great advice from Lisa Walsh, one of my mentors at Bridgespan who has since retired. I had left Bridgespan and was considering returning as a partner. She asked me what was least exciting about the prospect of coming back, and I said, “As much as I’ve enjoyed the people I worked with at Bridgespan, I’ve never seen a partner who I could see myself being. I don’t see myself in the partner role.” And she said, “Maybe your job is to model a different type of partner that others can look to.” It became a question of how I, as a queer Black person, could exist as someone whom other people want to see in the world.

Adam: What can anyone do to pay it forward?

Darren: It’s a question of recognizing that with all your successes, you have an obligation to bring others up with you.

At one conference I attended, a seasoned Black woman professional said she learned very early in life that you should be proud and excited to be “the first” but embarrassed to be “the only.” As soon as you get in there, you should make sure you’re not “the only.” My grandma always said that we should probably celebrate “the third.” That’s when it has been normalized.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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