I recently went one on one with Errol Pierre, author of The Way Up: Climbing the Corporate Mountain as a Professional of Color. An insurance executive, Errol was previously COO of Empire BlueCross BlueShield.

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?

Errol: My journey has been a very windy uphill trek through corporate America. It is one of the reasons the title of the book includes “Climbing the corporate mountain as a professional of color”  

I grew up with blue-collar immigrant parents from Haiti. During college, I worked in a beauty supply store warehouse where I met the Chief Operating Officer of one of the largest health plans in New York. She offered me an internship and over the next ten years, I rose up the ranks and became the chief of staff to the CEO. I left that company to join a new health plan and after 8 years I was recruited back as Chief Operating Officer, taking the same position as the woman who gave me my first internship! However, when I got the job, I felt empty. Even though I worked my whole career to get to this position I wasn’t happy. That was 2019 and that’s when I knew I had to write a book about my journey. When the pandemic hit,  it dawned on me that I finally had time to write it.  So that’s what I did. 

Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?

Errol: The book has two main audiences: professionals of color who are looking for ways to move up in corporate America and corporate leaders who want to better understand what their employees are going through in the workplace. 

For professionals of color my main takeaways are (1) have the courage to make one million mistakes and the wisdom to not make the same mistake one million times. (2) Do not sacrifice who you are or dim your light trying to be someone different, and (3) when you lead always think about the legacy you will leave. 

For corporations, the takeaway is there are no excuses for not having diversity at the upper echelons of leadership teams. No more research, no more committees, no more diversity trainings, no more performative allyship is needed. We know all we need to know and now it’s time for execution. 

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Errol: Effective leadership starts with a leader who is grounded in unflinching personal values. Honesty, fairness, humbleness, work ethic, transparency and communication, and intelligence. Whatever the value set is, the leader must live them with relentless consistency. 

Secondly, a leader must place the enterprise they run ahead of their team and must keep their team prioritized ahead of themselves. 

Lastly, a leader must provide clarity around the mission and vision of the company with the consistency in decision-making that only serves to reiterate and re-emphasize the corporate strategy. 

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Errol: I attended Harvard’s Advanced Management Program earlier this year with over 160 business professionals from 44 countries. The major takeaway from the program was the difference between where you are and where you ought to be is a performance gap. Closing that gap is the definition of management. 

However, the difference between where you should be and where you could be is an opportunity gap. Closing that gap is the definition of leadership. 

Taking your leadership to the next level is creating a team who can manage your performance gaps so you can spend time on closing opportunity gaps. 

Secondly, in corporate America, early in our careers, we get rewarded for being an individual contributor that has subject matter expertise. However, once we get promoted to a leadership role, the rubric changes. We are no longer valued based on our individual contributions; we are now measured on how well we bring out value of the teams we manage. It’s a big shift but it happens subtly, and many times leaders struggle in the transition. Leaders that pivot quickly to these new dynamics find even more success in their future. 

Adam: How can leaders build truly diverse and inclusive organizations?

Errol: Everyone has bias, including good people. And bias can be implicit. As such, the key to having a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture where people feel like they belong, is having a diverse executive leadership team. It ensures there will be a diverse set of implicit biases with influence. Calling out bias as well as understanding it’s nearly impossible to root it out means you are consistently mitigating its impacts. 

Rudine Simms Bishop, the mother of multicultural children’s literature, speaks to the concept of windows, mirrors, and sliding doors, when referring to the books she researched. The concept also has merits in corporate America. All employees need windows in their organization. These are executive leaders of color that provide a view of leadership from an ethnically diverse perspective. As a window, employees get exposure and access to people different from themselves. Employees of color use those same executives of color as mirrors. They can see themselves in their leadership, which is important for inclusion and belonging. Lastly, sliding doors are executives of color that allow a few people in the organization to enter their inner circle. Leaders feel safe enough to be vulnerable with their teams and this is where the magic happens. In the best of circumstances, if there are racial or gender issues bubbling up underneath the surface, these issues can be nipped in the bud early on when such trust exists between the leadership team and the employee population.  This is a powerful framework corporations can use to proactively create a culture of inclusiveness. 

Lastly, corporations should create a statistically validated inclusivity survey to get a baseline for your organization, then focus on the insights and findings to continuously improve your results. 

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Errol: 

1) Lead while leaving a legacy. 

2) Remember we make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give. 

3) Focus on building and maintaining your corporate board of directors. 

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

Errol: Create an environment for thrivers. As an executive, your #1 job is to create an environment where the best comes out of your team members. People do not always remember who had the right answer, but they never forget how another person made them feel. This is why corporate culture is so important. Build a culture of autonomy, transparency in decision-making, integrity, inclusion and belonging, and teamwork. 

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Errol: The greatest advice I ever received was that I am not as good as my best day, but I’m certainly not as bad as my worst day. Why is this important?  The higher you move up in corporate America, the more it becomes harder to separate yourself from your job. As such, if a project fails, it sometimes becomes hard to divorce yourself from the failure. Likewise, if you have a big win at work, it’s important to be careful not to let it get to your head and become arrogant and blinded by your success.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also 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. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, 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. 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.

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