I recently went one on one with Steve Beard, CEO of Adtalem.

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? 

Steve: It was an unlikely path to the C-suite. I didn't go to business school. I'm a lawyer by training, and I'm a first-generation college student who’s African American. I believe all of those attributes are part of what got me here. It was also a lot of determination, a lot of tenacity, and a lot of luck. There was also a willingness not to take setbacks personally – to bounce back, to persevere – in the face of obstacles that sometimes seemed unfair. I always had a curiosity to learn new things, and to take risks in my career. 

Lawyers are often viewed as folks that don't have the skills or attributes necessary to be successful as a CEO. However, there are a number of former lawyers who are CEOs. Leaving the law to jump into new areas, beginning with strategy, then marketing and communications and ultimately running a P&L led to successes and setbacks that helped me personally and professionally. It was an unlikely path, but I wouldn't trade any of the winding parts of that path to this point. I'm very much enjoying what I'm doing today.

I was born on the South Side of Chicago. My father was a transit worker, and my mother was a secretary. We were folks of modest means. I was a good student, but never expected to go to college. It was actually a high school counselor who encouraged me to apply to a university. I had planned to get a job, join the military, or do something else. I ended up applying to college with the help of this counselor and got into University of Illinois. After graduation, I worked in banking for a couple of years. Working as a white-collar professional in one of those places where you wore a blue or gray suit every day and a white shirt was new in my family. It was a completely new environment, but I thrived there. I applied to law school and then went to work for a white-shoe law firm. 

I had the good fortune to meet folks who took an interest in my career and helped me navigate the systems of corporate America that weren't necessarily familiar to me. I understood that some of these organizations and leaders took a risk on me, and I worked to ensure that risk would pay off for them.

Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?

Steve: I'm a big believer in talent, and the importance of talent. This includes the idea that most business problems can be solved with the right person, in the right role, on the right team. Leaders need to work on attracting, retaining, and developing the best talent, as well as matching that talent to the most valuable activities we have in the organization. 

We talk a lot about critical areas within our organization where our teams help differentiate Adtalem, and what are the levers for value creation for us. That's where our talent must be better than the competition. There are a lot of places where talent can be good or strong, but matching talent to value in a thoughtful and programmatic way is an important step in accelerating the performance of any business and growing it accordingly.

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

Steve: I think humility is a super important attribute combined with a relentless focus on results, and a love of people. At first, they may sound disparate, but I think when they come together, they make for a powerful combination.

You also need to possess the ability to consistently keep your commitments to your customers, to your shareholders, to debt holders, and to your employees to ensure that results meet or exceed expectations. To do so quarter after quarter, year after year, really requires getting the most out of people. I think to get the most out of people, you’ve got to love. You’ve got to love people. You've got to love watching them win and helping them win.

You truly need to thrive on the psychic energy people get from the collective success that you all create together. If you love that, you'll create the conditions for that kind of success. That's an important ingredient, I think, in being a successful leader.

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

Steve: I think it’s believing, authentically, that the work is never done – buying into this idea that one has to continually improve and grow. Leaders of organizations need to invest in one's own development, and that the work is never complete. 

I'll never forget the first time I was assessed as an executive. I was stunned by the results and how unaware I was of what the diagnostic said about me. So, at that point I decided that I wanted to get better. I thought of it almost like being an athlete and working to improve your game and conditioning. That is, working to take better care of yourself, so you can attain peak performance. This included being mindful of my own strengths and weaknesses, shoring up those weaknesses, and leveraging strengths. 

The conditions of the market and the business will always require you to adapt and be sufficiently malleable in your capabilities, but sufficiently rigid in your value system as you grow.

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

Steve: It’s keeping the main thing, the main thing. 

It’s this idea of really being critical about what you're working toward and identifying your north star, which means allocating attention and resources in a very disciplined way that eliminates the inevitable distractions. We've all met folks that can take any issue and make it more complicated. I think one of the things we’ve worked on as a leadership team is getting to the heart of the matter, what's really important, and then focusing the resources of the team and the organization on that important, main thing. 

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

Steve: The way the word “team” is used in large organizations is interesting. I think it's a term that is used to describe a lot of things, but very few are actually teams. You have working groups, you have committees, you have affinity groups associations. 

I think it's important to understand what makes a team. You also need to ensure that you're working to cultivate those attributes in the team, such that they can be successful. That would be a group of folks with complementary skills, a common set of objectives, a shared sense of accountability for those objectives, and an aligned standard of what excellence looks like. It also can't be 150 people, right?

When you're building a team, you're putting the pieces together, hiring leaders, and trying to get them to work together. You know that shared accountability is the hardest part because people tend to think about their piece of the work. The collective accountability we have for success does come with a lot of risk for the individual. However, you can create the conditions where people feel comfortable to perform because they know they’re supported, that their success is my success, and their obstacle is my obstacle. Those are teams, I believe, that stand a chance of achieving the best results. 

Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?

Steve: Developing a distinctive value proposition for the product or service you're taking to market is the bedrock. That is, what is distinctive about what you have to offer that creates value for the customer and isn't easily replicated by the competition. Then, you turn to tailoring your messaging for the customer in a way that resonates and has real meaning for them. Increasingly, people don't want to be sold to. I think they want to find a connection with the brands that they trust, they trust those brands because those brands make a promise, and they deliver on that promise.

Cultivating a value proposition that constitutes a promise that you can deliver on consistently, that connects with the customer in a way that they have trust, and then delivering on that promise, from my perspective, is the most important part of marketing. It's not enough to attract people to that proposition and have it fall short – it really has to resonate with them and something that they're willing to take the risk of trusting in. Customers are loyal to you and your product because the brand delivers on the promise.

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

Steve: ‘You're good enough,’ and ‘Don't let anyone convince you that you're not good enough.’ 

Throughout my career I’ve been consistently underestimated. As a Black executive or Black lawyer, I’d walk into a boardroom and could feel the discount that was applied by people immediately. As a younger person, I used to chafe at that. As I've grown in my career, I love it. I think to myself, ‘You’re never going to see me coming. You have no idea what I'm about to bring to this conversation. You're going to be caught completely unaware.’ It has allowed me in the course of my career to surprise people – occasionally delight people and sometimes overtake people – in ways they never expected. Because they've immediately discounted me on the basis of what they think they see, that's been a gift. With the benefit of hindsight this reinforces that advice I got as a young person.

I can walk into a room with a colleague and someone who does not know who I am. That person knows one of us is the CEO and one of us is the CFO, or one of us is the CEO and one of us is the General Counsel. The reflex is to think that the person who doesn't look like me is the CEO happens all the time – but that's okay. I’ve learned to relish that opportunity to sometimes delight people and sometimes to correct people, particularly if it's an adversarial setting. However, I mostly educate people that you can't judge a book by its cover. 

Sometimes our biases are just beneath the surface without us knowing. We're discounting someone in ways that put us at a disadvantage. As a leader, you need to open the aperture because you don't know what people are capable of once they’re educated.

Adam: How can leaders drive change to create more equitable cultures?

Steve: American society has come a long way. I had it much easier than my father, who had it easier than his father did. The fact that you're talking to the son of a transit worker who wore a uniform every day and collected fares on the subway is itself a testament to how far we've come.

I think the first thing that leaders can do is recognize how much further we have to go. They need to be vigilant about seeking advice and opportunities to create the kinds of environments where people can thrive and succeed, both because and in spite of their differences. I don't expect every CEO to be an expert, but rather able to learn from their own experiences. I very much want an organization where people feel like their opportunity to realize their professional ambitions – to have satisfactory professional experiences – is not limited because of some difference in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation. I want them to believe that we actually value all of those things in our organization. In my view, that is part of the ingredient of success, because those diverse perspectives make us better thinkers, lead to better decisions, and then we outperform our competitors because we make those better decisions. Embracing that authentically, and modeling that for an organization, gives smart people who know how to help you make that change permission to guide your hand as a leader in that direction. 

It all starts with accepting and embracing that we still have a long way to go. I think particularly as leaders of corporations, just given the relative trust in corporations compared to other institutions, we have a special responsibility as employers, and as corporate institutions to try to be a bigger and more visible ingredient in that change.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Steve: As a new CEO, the one thing I would say, is that I supported four different CEOs directly before I became a CEO myself. When it became clear that I was going to succeed my predecessor, I went into the job believing that I knew about 80% of what the job was, and maybe there's 20% that wasn’t visible to me. It didn't take me long once I was in the job to realize I had that ratio incorrect. There was 20% that was actually visible to me, and 80% of it was entirely new. 

It is a singular role in corporate America. The learning of the job comes with an incredibly steep learning curve, but getting up that curve is an incredibly gratifying journey.

Adam: What is the 80% that surprised you?

Steve: Where to begin! It’s the sheer complexity of the broad range of stakeholders to whom you're accountable. It’s also going from being a peer on a team to leading a team. It’s an incredibly complex dynamic of resetting all of those relationships. 

With the demands on your time, there’s a need to get disciplined quickly about where and how you spend it. That’s in addition to trying to figure out what are the things that only the CEO can do. 

Of course, there’s the importance of developing a credible vision for the company that defines what success looks like. That's the only way people rally around you. It isn't because you’re named CEO. It's because you're the person who has a compelling vision for the company so that folks are prepared to embrace the changes you'll inevitably make. I saw other people do this in my career, and I quickly acquired the full context for just how heavy and complex of lift that was. 

As CEO, there are benefits of having a unique periphery to see the entirety of the playing field. However, being the only one with that line of sight can be isolating because no one gets to see the landscape quite the way you do.

It's been a great experience. I stumble sometimes, but I'm loving the journey.


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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