Kristiana Corona
Hi, and welcome to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I am thrilled to have you here. In this episode, I will be interviewing Tim G. Williams, who is a respected senior executive in finance that I met while I was getting my coaching certification. Tim is someone who shows up with wisdom, confidence, and this roll up your sleeves and get things done kind of attitude.
Here's a little bit more about Tim, in case you don't know him. He is an ICF certified coach. He's the owner and founder of Bonafide Leaders, a consultancy specializing in organizational consulting, executive coaching, and leadership development, working with leaders and executives in the business, technology, and nonprofit spaces.
Prior to this work, he served as a senior executive at Texas Instruments in a corporate career that spanned 22 years in which he partnered with all major functions of the company. And this is so fascinating... including design, product engineering, manufacturing operations, HR, procurement, legal, IT, investor relations, and finance. So imagine that.
Tim has a bachelor's degree in finance, an MBA, and a graduate certificate in professional and executive coaching. He served as a board member on both for- and non-profit boards and has been an award-winning MBA instructor at SMU's Cox School of Business for over 10 years. For the last 20 plus years, Tim has been privileged to work with leaders at Apple, Ericsson, Siemens, JP Morgan Chase, AT&T, and many others.
And what he likes to say is the work of Bonafide Leaders is really driven by his sincere passion to empower leaders, teams, and organizations to be their best. And I think you'll see that he absolutely lives up to that mission. So without further ado, let's dive into my conversation with Tim.
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Kristiana Corona
Hey, Tim, I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. Welcome to the Worthy to Lead podcast.
Tim G Williams
Thank you, Kristiana. I am equally happy to be here.
Kristiana Corona
So I, before the session started, I gave my listeners a brief overview of who you are in a nutshell, but I would like to kick off our conversation by going back in time for a moment. So to set the stage for everyone today, Tim is a highly successful seasoned professional in the finance world with more than 22 years of experience. You've held titles like Vice President, Controller, Special Advisor to the Chairman, President and CEO for a $17 billion multinational company. That is an incredibly impressive profile. But you told me that you came from rather humble beginnings. And as a kid, you had no idea that a career like this was even possible. So can you start off just by giving my listeners a glimpse into what it was like growing up for you and what you expected your life to look like?
Tim G Williams
Yes, Kristiana. So first of all, very kind of you to say those things. Again, a blessing for me to be in this position and I'm happy to be here today. You're right. I really didn't have any idea actually what life would look like years later from being a kid. I did have some dreams about different moments in time, like being in an airport, maybe having on a suit.
but I didn't know exactly what that meant at that time. So for me growing up, yeah, mean, my mom was a flight attendant for one of the airlines and my mom and dad split fairly early. I don't know the exact age, but I was raised by my mother with my brother at the house and we're just about a year and a half difference in terms of age. And so that's how I grew up. Grew up in the South, basically between the state of Texas and the state of Louisiana. And yeah, that was kind of how things got started for me.
Kristiana Corona
Nice. So as far as your circumstances kind of showed you, there was certain career options available. Like what did you imagine you would be doing at that point in time? Like what did that look like? So you said you saw a suit. You saw a business suit. What else did you imagine?
Tim G Williams
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, part of it was that I don't think I really had an awareness of like career and profession at that point in my life. I knew that people needed to have a job in order to have income. And I just felt like our situation was such that my mom was doing the absolute best that she could and was an incredible mother and provided for us. All of our needs were met, very few of our wants though. And as we made a transition from like seventh grade to eighth grade, we moved into this new neighborhood and went to this new school. And it was very obvious that the people around us seem to have a little bit more than we had.
And so when it came to career and professions, I think I started to understand a little bit because of those folks, my classmates and their parents and you know, just being a basketball player, they would come to the games and you start to hear, okay, office worker or businessman or businesswoman, what have you, started to understand nurse and doctor and things like this. But in my family, extended on both sides, there's really not a history of professional workers or even like college. That wasn't really something that's part of our family history. So the dreams that I had seemed almost to be disconnected.
if I think about it now. But the thing that was connected is that it was the airplane. And I spent a lot of time as a kid in airports between DFW and Atlanta. We spent lots and lots of time in airports on standby, trying to get on flights, going to go see my dad, those kinds of things. And so I think maybe that was a connection with the airport. And then the suit, I think I envisioned myself somehow being in business and sports and there being some kind of connection.
And I didn't know what that meant, like being a general manager of a professional like NBA team, that would be the ultimate dream at that point in life. Or maybe a sportscaster or maybe a sports agent. I just didn't know how those things would connect themselves, but those were some of the dreams that I had when I was younger.
Kristiana Corona
I think that is so interesting that the airport played such an important role for you. Like just opening your eyes, like seeing the different things that were possible in the world around you and traveling from such a young age. That's so fascinating. so somewhere along the lines there, there was some spark inside of you, like some sort of possibility that was ignited. Was there any moment in time where you really felt - Okay, this is something that I could achieve or like there's a pathway here for me.
Tim G Williams
A little bit. I had an uncle who had some success. I knew that he was in business. I didn't know exactly what he did in business, but I knew he had like some nice cars. And I knew that he had a nice house and he lived in a nice neighborhood and he dressed differently than the rest of my family. Right. So these kind of things definitely made an imprint.
And so I think him being someone who I could look up to, someone who went to college. Actually later he got an MBA. This is something that I think made an imprint on me because I wanted my circumstances to be different. I didn't want to not have my wants. I wanted to be able to have needs and wants. And what happened over time is, and actually this is a good reference point. So in my podcast, some years, not years back, but a couple months back. I did one called the Four Seasons, I think it is, or four levels of every leader's growth journey. And in my view, there's steps that each of us go through, level one, level two, level three, level four. And what was happening for me is that I was just getting pieces of what would later come together to be a full story. But yeah, I saw my uncle, I saw that he had some success and I thought, man, that would be kind of cool if I could figure out this business thing. My mom started bringing home the paper. And so I would look at the newspaper and I would look at sports numbers, whether it's baseball season, basketball, it doesn't matter. I would just look at all of the stats and I was enamored by stats. So I realized that I like numbers. And then I would look at the money section, if it was USA Today or if it was the Dallas Morning News or some other local paper, I would just try to look at, what is this Dow Jones thing and S &P and what's a commodity and try to understand that stuff. And I was just interested. I wanted to understand how money worked, the flow of money, the cycle of money, how is it that some people have it and other people don't? What's the correlation with education? Like I just didn't understand that stuff as a kid, because there really weren't those resources around. But I thought that if I learned that stuff and because I guess the impetus that my mom put on education, I thought that maybe there was a connection there. And I think that's probably what was the start.
Kristiana Corona
Hmm. I love that. So even as a kid, you kind of identified like even though I don't have that entire career path lined up for me, I don't necessarily know all the steps. You were in that phase of just discovery and figuring out like, hey, I like numbers or I'm curious. I want to dive into this more. There's a connection there. Like you started to establish some of those connections. I love that. And you've mentioned to me before that there were some pretty important pieces to your growth and development as far as figuring out your self -worth and encouraging you to really have an impact no matter what you were going to pursue. And you mentioned basketball being one of those things, so I'm very curious to hear about that. And then also diving into your mom's influence and the influence of your faith and how you were raised and how that really helped to create a platform for you. So maybe start off with basketball. Tell me more about basketball's influence, because I hear the word basketball and I just hear it throughout your journey and I want to know a little bit more.
Tim G Williams
Yeah, basketball for me took me a lot of places and opened up a lot of doors. So I played in high school and played in college. And we'll talk about that in just a second when I talk about some of those formative college year experiences. Basketball was everything to me. It really, really was. I'm not saying that just to say it, like it really was. I mean, I can very much relate to professional players now in their interview and they say, hey, you what did you love growing up? I just love basketball. I had a hat, basically a baseball cap. And on the front of it were some words, but all around it was orange. And if you looked at it from a distance, it looked like a basketball. And on the front of it, it said, basketball is life. The rest is just details. And that's exactly the way I felt about the sport, loved it, just loved to play it. After basketball practice, I would still come home and play with my brother for an hour or two in the summers. I mean, it would just be all the time, whether it was outdoors, indoors, it didn't matter. So my love for basketball was strong. If you look at my high school yearbook, you would think I was headed for the NBA, and we can talk about that in a moment. How that plan got interrupted. So that was basketball. It just took me across a lot of states. I traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, and all over the state of Texas, and just got exposure to a lot of different parts of life through the sport.
Kristiana Corona
Interesting. And I suppose, you know, the being that involved in basketball, there were certain disciplines that you learned through playing that rigorously and really being that committed and devoted. Like what were what were some of the key factors for you besides the travel and being exposed, you know, that were really cultivated by playing basketball?
Tim G Williams
It's funny you ask me that because that's not what I think of. Like I don't immediately think of, it taught me this discipline and you know, these other, but as I think about it in my mind, I think you're absolutely right. And one of the concepts I've been floating in my own brain is maybe a podcast in the future around connecting sports and leadership because there is a connection. And what I think basketball taught me more so than just discipline is it taught me teamwork.
It taught me how to get along with people. You don't choose your teammates except when you're on the black top and you say, okay, I want him and I want her, you know. But when you're a part of a team, a school team, a select team, you don't pick your teammates. You don't pick your coach. But you've got to figure it out together because you're working towards a goal. since the age of, I think my first basketball team was as a sixth grader. So I was 11 years old and played on teams competitively all the way, even after I was working as professional in what they used to call pro and amateur leagues. I was very committed until my mid 20s.
So teamwork, I think, is the biggest thing that basketball taught me and the ability to get along with people, the ability to deal with bad news or bad results when you put in all the effort, but you don't get the results that you want, whether that's individual or whether that's the team. I think it also helped in terms of understanding the role, right, that different people play on a team. And sometimes you're the vocal one, sometimes you're the quiet one, sometimes you're the person who scores, sometimes you're the person who passes. Everybody's got a different role and the team can be most successful if everybody does their part. And so I think more than anything else, that's what I learned from the game of basketball.
Kristiana Corona
Hmm. I love that. And thinking about, you know, just that team effort, I kind of think, like, as I look at your story overall, the amount of work that you put in, the hard work, like this must have felt like play to you because you loved it so much, right? But you also put in hard work and you wouldn't have gotten to the levels you did in basketball without some putting in the hours, putting in the reps, practicing, right?
Tim G Williams
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Kristiana Corona
I'm just curious like how that plays into just the work ethic that you showed throughout your entire life. Like did you think about that being an important part of this or did it just kind of come naturally to you?
Tim G Williams
That's a good question too. again, ordinarily I wouldn't think about basketball being work because I loved it so much. And that's one of the pieces of advice that I get to people a lot when they're asking for career advice is, it's the old phrase, right? Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life sort of a thing. And so what I would say is that it wasn't so much hard work through basketball. It was hard work outside of basketball. Meaning for sure I had to work really, really hard.
Kristiana Corona
Mm -hmm.
Tim G Williams
with the sport, but for the most part, I loved it. So it didn't feel like work. What I mean outside of court is that when I was again, going back to my early childhood, when I was 12, 13, 14, it seemed like the kids around me were getting allowances and there wasn't any allowance in my house. And I was like, mom, what's up with that? know, can we get some allowance? And so she would say, look, we only have so much. So if you want money, get a job.
Kristiana Corona
Come on, Mom.
Tim G Williams
And so I started working for the first time. think my very first job was when I was 13 in the summer and I dug ditches and trenches to lay down pipes, you know, on the yard and landscape here in Texas. Yes, very early in the morning because it gets hot pretty quick. And I realized real quickly, oh, I don't want an outdoor job, you know, and, and so.
But I started that job and then I ended up working at Six Flags over Texas, you know, in a theme park, amusement park. I worked in the YMCA where I was a basketball official for little kids games. Like I did a bunch of different jobs. I did sales jobs where I sold knives. I did telemarketing jobs. I did sell Cutco knives!
Kristiana Corona
Mm -hmm.
Kristiana Corona
Wait, did you sell Cutco knives? Me too! Wasn't that the best job ever? my gosh, that's too funny.
Tim G Williams
Hey, only in New York, headquarters, right? Yes. Yes. So did a bunch of jobs. And those jobs, I think is what cultivated what later became an affinity for working hard. It's just natural to and my mom, again, going back to my mom, she inspired both me and my brother to be excellent at what you do. Don't just do something, even cleaning your room, like be excellent at whatever you're doing. And that has definitely carried over even to what I do now with the business Bonfire Leaders for sure.
Kristiana Corona
Hmm. I love it. So whether you're selling Cutco knives, selling tickets at Six Flags or digging ditches, you need to be excellent. There's no excuse. Yeah. I love it. So let's fast forward a little bit. You mentioned that you were the first one in your immediate family to pursue a degree in business and finance and also the first to get a master's degree. And just as a side note for everyone,
Tim G Williams
Yeah. Hey, why not? Why not?
Kristiana Corona
Tim didn't just get a traditional MBA. He got an MBA with three concentrations, of course, finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship, which is so cool. I love that. And you are also an MBA instructor, like we talked about, and a certified executive coach. So you really take things all the way. I think that's an awesome example of just setting a high bar for yourself and showing that excellence. And you shared with me that during that journey, there were very few Black men in finance and business. whether you were in school and then that trend that kind of carried on as you started your career. So what was it like for you being one of the few Black men that were in that field at the time?
Tim G Williams
Yeah, it was something I didn't think about all the time, but for sure it was present. If you go back a step, I ended up going to four different colleges. I didn't even hit that, but I went to four different colleges, chasing my dream to play in the NBA, play professional overseas. I have transcripts from six universities. This is just all undergrad.
Kristiana Corona
wow.
Tim G Williams
And I had 160 credit hours to graduate when normally for a four -year degree, you just need 120. Why? Because all those classes you take at all these other places don't always transfer over. So when you talk about doing things the hard way, that feels natural to me. I'm not afraid of going through a tough, difficult path. And the same was true when you asked this question. So at Texas A&M,
Tim G Williams
I don't remember in any of my finance courses ever seeing another black male or female in any of my finance courses within my major. Now, your initial accounting course, your marketing course, your initial finance course were in these huge lecture halls. Anybody who was a student at a big university and A&M is one of the very biggest at the time and even still to this day in terms of campus size, easy to get lost as well as enrollment.
And so those were like three, 400, sometimes 450 people in one lecture hall. I'm not talking about those intro classes, but in my finance major courses, I don't ever remember being in a class with another black person. So I had already had that experience of being the only. Going to TI, right, fast forward and I graduate. Now I'm at Texas Instruments.
One of the things that we all did, I'm sure, back in the late 90s and certainly today is you're gonna Google, go to the website and see the faces on the website. There were zero black faces on the website. In fact, I can tell you with pretty good memory, if there were 12 people, 10 of those people were white males. That's what you saw, that was normal. There were no black board members, there were no Hispanic board members.
There may have been a female. I remember one who was president of Brown University at the time. So that's just kind of the way things were. And I guess because that's the way things were, it really didn't faze me from that perspective because I was sort of used to it, sadly, maybe you might say. But once I got in, there were a few.
Men in my life mentors, one who worked at the company who was probably seven to 10 years ahead of me, who I thought was going places. And we ended up forming a relationship and that helped. It helped a lot. Just having someone you could confide in, trust in, who was sort of ahead of you in terms of the journey that you were on and to be able to relate to each other besides just the business of work, but just personally, because we had similar backgrounds in terms of how we grew up as well. So that's a long answer to your question, but that's how I dealt with it in those early years.
Kristiana Corona
Yeah, I hear that topic come up a lot when we think about, you know, hiring and people wanting to come in and see a role model, see someone who, you know, is ahead of them, like you said, that you can aspire to be, right? And if we don't see that kind of role modeled for us, it can sometimes be for some people a limiter, like it can feel like, well,
Tim G Williams
Mm -hmm.
Kristiana Corona
Am I going to be able to get ahead of this company? I don't see anyone else like me doing this. But it wasn't a barrier for you. And you really were able to thrive in that situation. And I love that you kind of called out there was someone that I could connect with. There was a person who I was able to come alongside you during that time so that you weren't entirely alone. I'm curious, were there anything else, other aspects for you that really helped you just to have this sort of unshakable self-worth going through a time like that where maybe you did feel a little bit alone.
Tim G Williams
Yeah, so we touched on it very briefly earlier, which is my personal faith. So as a kid, I grew up in the church, as we like to say in my culture. I grew up in the church. Whenever the church doors were open, I was there. And we went to all different kinds of churches growing up from, or my friends did. So Methodist churches where you just sing hymns most of the time. And Catholic church where it's quick, you're in and to like the Black Baptist Church, to the Church of God in Christ, where it's all day long. I so I experienced all that. Plus some of the closest people in our life are also Muslim. So that exposed us just to different belief systems and the fact that we can still be friends even though we might have different religious belief structures. So my faith was something that was put in me, I would say, by my mom.
But as I got older, I realized that I needed to have my own belief and my own faith. And as I got to be a young adult, that began to grow, know, I joined a church and really began to get plugged in. I was discipled by my pastor and a group of 11 other guys. So it was a time where outside of my day job, I was cultivating a sense of identity and purpose about why I'm even on this earth, why I'm on this planet, what am I here for? What am I here to do? Read a great book called Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren and a number of other good books that begin to just deepen my understanding of who I was. My mom did a great job. She also put men in our lives when we were younger and then I was growing as a young man and those things were shaping me. So I think when you talk about being unshakable, I don't know if it was that strong.
But what I would say is that it didn't faze me being the only guy or only a few guys who looked like me in the company who were pursuing what I was attempting to pursue.
Kristiana Corona
Hmm. When you think about like how you present yourself at work and maybe some of the struggles that others might run into when they're faced with this situation, what messages were you hearing on the inside because of that faith, because of that confidence that had been developed over time? Like what were you able to tell yourself in those moments?
Tim G Williams
Hmm. Just run your race. Just run your race. Here we are in Olympic season, so that's fresh on the brain. But for real, I mean.
Kristiana Corona
Perfect.
Tim G Williams
There's one particular person I can think of who I mentored and that person later worked for me for a number of years. And sometimes we just get sidetracked. Brilliant, smart, go -getter, engineer background, technical, but also has strong soft skills, but we get distracted by the noise. And my message to this individual, to myself and to many others is just stay in your lane and run your race. Now.
When it comes to working in a big old corporation like some of the size companies that we work in, whether it be Target or Amazon or Texas Instruments, these are big companies. to some extent, wise advice would say, yeah, you got to also let people know what you're doing too. And I don't disagree with that. I didn't understand that at the time when I was earlier in my career. I just put my head down. I was just trying to do great work more than anything else. That's what kept me, kept me focused.
Kristiana Corona
Yeah. I like that advice though, like run your own race because how many times in life do we find ourselves in situations where we are comparing ourselves to other people, constantly comparing, right? Like I just think, I think so often we're thinking, well, why don't I have that title or why don't I have that opportunity? How come they didn't ask me to go, you know? And if we're so focused on what we don't have that doubt can really creep in honestly so easily. But I think the advice around running your own race to me really looks like, hey, you have a focused outcome that you're driving towards and you are in control of getting to that outcome and you're capable to do it. So there's this inherent belief that like I can get to the end of that race.
Whether or not I win, I don't know, but I can get to the end of that race and do excellent work if I just stay focused on that and don't worry so much about what other people
Tim G Williams
Yes. And I got to make a quick plug because I just happened to listen to a podcast dealing with comparison. I think it was from 2023. There's a guy named Ryan Leak first name Ryan, last name Leak, L -E -A -K, maybe we'll put it in the show notes. He interviewed Nona Jones. Nona Jones worked at Facebook for a lot of years, great communicator, technologist, and she wrote a book on comparison. I forget the name of the book, but the podcast is gold. For anyone who's struggling with the ability to run your own race. They both are very transparent and vulnerable about their own struggles. Even though they're highly, highly successful people, guess what? This really never goes away. This feeling of comparing ourselves with the Joneses, as we like to say, it really never goes away. And I'm not gonna say I wasn't guilty myself. mean, in those first seven years, I was an individual contributor.
And as I looked around my contemporaries, people who kind of came in about the same time, it looks like we were all having some success. got ourselves in the formal mentoring program. We were being asked to go recruit on campus. You start to get the signs that maybe we got some good things happening here. As I looked at my contemporaries, by about five years in, they had all been promoted. And I'm looking around going, hmm, what's going on? You know, and so if I would have stayed there with what's going on, that couldn't really sidetracked me. But I'm grateful that I was able to refocus and just remember to stay in my own lane, on my own race. And if I do great work, eventually it'll be noticed and I'll get my opportunities too. Although my wife would be the first to tell you that I used to belly ache and complain and whine. I'm like, I don't understand. But it all came together and it always does.
Kristiana Corona
In hindsight, it's so much easier to go back and say like, things did work out, didn't they? So you were an individual contributor for seven years. You, at some point in time, transitioned to leadership. Can you talk a little bit about how and when you became a leader, what that was like?
Tim G Williams
Yep. So I'll talk about it from two perspectives. One perspective is outside the walls of my company and the other is inside the walls of my company. So inside the walls of my company, was I became a first time supervisor of people having my own team, managing them, directing their work, etc. Seven years in to my career. Outside of my job, there were some other experiences that I had that I thought helped prepare me along the way. One of those was being a big brother, just being in my home as a single parent, being raised in a single parent home. By about the time we were 11, 12, 13, I remember getting a key and I was responsible for getting my brother home, making sure, you know, we got dinner started if we needed to. I took on that responsibility and maybe I took it on too seriously, but I felt like it was mine. And so that was one thing that happened.
In high school, my senior year, I became co-captain of the basketball team. So now I've got to lead by example, make sure if we're doing conditioning, I got to be first, second or third. I can't be middle of the pack. I've got to lead verbally. Hey guys, let's get you together. I've got to encourage. I've got to get on them when we're not performing to our level. Then my junior or senior year of college at Texas A&M I was asked to be the pledge class president of my business fraternity.
And you know, they say everything in Texas is bigger and everything in Texas A&M is even bigger. So I don't know. I don't know what pledge classes look like at some places, but this pledge class was at least 50 people and they asked me to be the president. So now here I find myself as having a vice president for internal affairs and vice president for external affairs and VP of fundraising and all these different roles and responsibilities and now reported to me.
Kristiana Corona
is even bigger. I love it!
Tim G Williams
That was the first time I had any kind of a structural kind of command and lead, you know, type of a function. And then I'm outside right after I got finished with A&M I became a head coach of a select basketball team. So I'm coaching high school kids. We're traveling all around the state of Texas, Austin, San Antonio, all around North Texas, and then going to Las Vegas every year.
At the end of that three year period, half of my boys, half of the 10 got college scholarships to play basketball. So was pretty intense. Parents concerned about playing time and how come you put him at the small forward, he should be a shooting guard. All of those dynamics I was dealing with as a 24, 25 year old. And then, oh, I was a mentor in the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program. So for five years, I had a little as they call them and I was the big.
Kristiana Corona
Mm -hmm.
Tim G Williams
So we were matched up for five years. So I was doing all that stuff outside of work. And I was doing it because I had an interest in it and because people asked me to do stuff, not because I was like, let me go develop some leadership. However, that was, as you can imagine, definitely building some leadership capabilities. So now you go inside the walls of TI. And I remember my first opportunity to lead a project team was when I was voluntold by the CFO to lead this diversity team in the room in front of everybody is like, can I say no? No, I can't say no.
Kristiana Corona
That's a yes sir moment.
Tim G Williams
He said, I think you, right. So I did that. And for two straight years, I led a team that reported out our findings and did road shows all around the finance and operations organization. That's like 700 people. And I got to present to the CFO and their direct reports every single month for two years in a row. And there were some other things that were happening. The point is outside of TI, as well as inside of TI, I was developing skills and abilities. And so when they finally gave me the opportunity to be a leader, I was excited. And I felt like I was ready. That doesn't mean that I was great at it, but my belief was high. So I went in excited and optimistic.
Kristiana Corona
Well, I think what's so fascinating about that is, you know, sometimes people think, wow, can you, you know, how do you get those opportunities? How come it was just given to this person or just given to that person? But really your story shares that you put on a lot of pre-work there. Like you were working that pathway of leadership for a long time and volunteering for a lot of things and putting yourself in a position where you were leading or mentoring others, in many different facets. And so when it got to the point of leadership, it wasn't a new concept. It wasn't like your first time jumping in and experimenting with it. Like you kind already had a track record there.
Tim G Williams
Plus, I had motivation. All my contemporaries had already been promoted. So I was super excited to have a shot at demonstrating the ability to lead. Like I said, the hunger was high. I don't know if the ability was high, but I was definitely excited about it.
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Kristiana Corona
I hope you enjoyed part one of my conversation with Tim. If you're just dying to know what happens next in his leadership journey, don't worry, I've got you. Part two is coming next week. You're going to hear everything about what got him from his first manager job all the way to the VP level and beyond.
Tim's going to share some great advice and strategies that you can apply to your own leadership journey. So you are not going to want to miss it.
Looking back at the formative years of Tim's career that we covered in the episode today, it's amazing to think that even though that NBA career didn't end up being his end destination, that he was still able to take that amazing work ethic, that drive, and his love of numbers and turn it into a career in finance that would change so many lives.
I asked him afterwards how he handled the disappointment of having to give up that NBA dream that he had pursued for so many years. He told me that the harder he worked to make it happen, the more the doors closed around him. And that at some point he realized that this was not the dream he was meant for. He chose to pivot his energy towards something that was working, and that was his finance career.
But here's what he said, "my pursuit to be a player at the professional level was not a loss. I've taken my love of the game, my passion for the sport and all of my experiences and turned them into being a coach." He talks about serving as a youth basketball coach and being able to transfer everything that he learned in that journey on to his students, which has been so meaningful.
And even though this wasn't his plan, he ended up being able to use every one of those experiences to help him learn how to be an effective leader.
One of my other favorite things about the conversation with Tim today was this topic of committing to excellence, no matter what you do. So whether he was selling Cutco knives or digging ditches or perhaps volunteering or leading a basketball team, he was always operating at this higher level. Doing his absolute best, no matter how small the task, led him to consistently operate at this higher level. And he said that when you do that, the opportunities will come.
I can't wait for you to hear the rest of Tim's story next week as we talk about the rest of his journey towards becoming an executive. In the meantime, you can go to find the links and the show notes for this episode at worthytoleadpodcast.com/7.
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And I would love it if you would share this with the other friends and leaders in your life who need to hear it. With that, I wish you best wishes on your journey to being the worthy leaders I know you are. Bye for now.
