Bernard Hampton
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bernard Hampton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so imagine missing three or four months of high school. That's what it took for the family to be able to survive and what that would mean. But then to go on and talk about a lineage that goes back into slavery and what I consider a point of privilege for my family, quite honestly, is at some point, my great, great, great grandfather's
And his brother, their families were sharecroppers at post-slavery and came to own 21 acres of the land that they sharecropped as a family and passed down through the generations. Well, my family owns some of that land today. We grew up on some of that land. And that's where my father built the home that my mother lives in to this day. And you start to think about ownership.
What does that mean to be able to have an asset that was part of the story for how they were able to send my sister to college as the first person in our family to go to college? And it spins from there, critical decisions that somebody made along the way. How do you respond to what happens to you in life?
And that's part of a story that I'm proud of, that I certainly think that I have grown from, not in spite of, but because of that story.
I would tell you initially upon making this move, that wasn't the case. It certainly has been an asset to me professionally throughout my career. All the tenants of talent management, of good human resource discipline, engagement of people, But I considered it in a way to say, you know what, that's something I may want to do at the end of my career.
Today, that is such an integral part of how do you build successful teams, deep and broad benches of succession plans, redundancy in organizations, expand organizational capacity. And so I thought about it in terms of businesses that I run. So up until this point, I've always run a revenue generating business.
And out of some very good advice from a leader and a sponsor and a mentor, I began to document not roles that I would want to do in the future, but what was the what. specifically in planning my career, what did I want to continue to be able to learn? What were different ways I wanted to continue to be able to contribute to the success of the organization? I wanted to continue to be challenged.
I wanted to broaden in my role. And then what were specific aspects of leadership and business that I enjoy? And so that was the list. And by the way, there was also a short list of, here's some things that I'm least likely to get fired up in the morning to go do. And I think both of those were important, but what they enabled me
sponsors and advocates to be able to do was help me think about fits for what ultimately would be the next phase of my career. And so it wasn't until, by the way, like a lot of people, one of my biggest failures I think at the time is when you begin to think about jobs, Jobs change, morph over time, may or may not become available.
But it became a very different exercise to say, how would I relish the opportunity to spend my time? What would fill my tank, so to speak, when it comes to my purpose, what was important? And that's what ultimately took on the complexion of this role to be able to head the academy, which wasn't on my radar. It's something I thought about at some point in the past, but it wasn't on my radar until
But being faced with an opportunity to go back through my list and said, this is exactly what I would love to do.
That was a moment of discomfort, to be quite honest. And I remember asking a particular sponsor, well, why would somebody think that was the next logical step? Or what would make you think this is something that fits? And without missing a beat, the person said, I'm going to take you back to the list that we talked through a year ago. And why this couldn't be a better opportunity.
Because amongst the things on that list was, I wanted to be able to experience more, learn more of the organization. Well, it happens to be not only do I get to work with this amazing group of folks that support 35 different organizations, support functions, businesses around the company, but all of the line of business heads are my biggest clients for organization today.
So to be internally connected to organizations hasten or accelerate the pace of learning is extremely exciting to me and to be able to build bridges, quite frankly, across these vertical academies that support our organization globally. and capitalize on those relationships amongst my leadership team that are even stronger today that I mentioned.
The ability to apply a strategic lens with leadership bias across really did create open doors for me to be able to think about and ponder this differently. I will say it also helped that I just a couple of months before I had read this book by Steve Magnus called Do Hard Things.
It has four pillars in it, but two of the ones that stood out particularly was the ability to respond instead of reacting. Actually, I'll give you three. To transcend discomfort. That was the moment right there. And then the third one of actually the first one in those pillars was to ditch the facade and embrace reality.
Which forced me to think about, here are all the things I don't know today that I want to learn and how this opportunity can connect to accelerating the closure of that gap. And so it was bringing me back through everything that I read in a different way that I had initially had applied to a different perspective.
realm but it was now square in front of me i couldn't have been more excited and honored from that point to be able to work with the people i get to work with today and build new strategies in the way that we are
Super question. I'll tell you three things. Number one, big difference in sponsors and mentors. I think a lot of people have mentors. The mistake I have given some folks feedback on in the past is don't treat that like a check the box.
Your goal is to have that be two-way, is to develop a relationship of trust where you can honestly expose what you're struggling with, what you're working with, because you're going to miss the ability to really capitalize on the real value that they have to bring.
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