Leadership Is About Mentorship
By: Jorge Gómez, Director of Business Management
Being a leader isn’t about managing others, but instead, it’s about helping our employees be the best version of themselves – being a servant leader. We can do this by facilitating our employees’ career paths and creating an open environment for them to showcase the value they provide to Jabil.
In other words, we as leaders should be mentors for our employees, which in turn, gives us this important but rewarding responsibility to promote their achievements and abilities to grow within in the company.
Listening is the first step in understanding what the people on your team need and is the only way to identify common interests the employee has with Jabil. From there, I find the next step is to determine the best projects and scenarios where that employee will be exposed to opportunities to gain new skills and expertise.
I like to sit with my team and understand their larger goals, working with them to brainstorm creative ways to achieve those. Together, we discover what competencies they have in their current role, create a succession plan to master those competencies and define a personal development plan to round out their profile, skills and experience. This is how we can practice servant leadership, a topic also mentioned by Ying Guo in her Joules article.
“I’m grateful to watch her grow and succeed, as I am with my employees, and it’s why I find mentoring to be rewarding.”
In the end, this is what opens new career possibilities for the employees and add value to Jabil. One example of mentoring I’m proud of is the opportunity I had to help Paloma Barazza, Controller at Guadalajara and 2018 STEP Ahead Honoree. We had met when she joined Jabil Chihuahua as a cost accountant, and through projects together, we developed this reciprocal relationship where we mutually coached each other through our various roles over the years. While Paloma was deciding on some professional growth opportunities, I encouraged her to face the new challenge confidently, and now, she’s the Plant Controller at Guadalajara. I’m grateful to watch her grow and succeed, as I am with my employees, and it’s why I find mentoring to be rewarding.
Personally, I’ve had many mentors, including my number one: my dad. I still go to him for advice and to gain his wisdom. Professionally, my mentors have been diverse and from many disciplines, including Anthropology, Business and Finance. Each of their contributions have enriched my career development more than I could have ever imagined. It’s important for people to have a variety of mentors who help create well-rounded experiences, so their skills and competencies can continue to grow diversely, as well. This practice has served me well in my career, and I hope to continue to share that with those around me.
Rita Craig, vice chair of the Florida Commission on the Status of Women, began the morning by sharing her decades of experience creating impactful business solutions, initiating the conversation around goal-setting. She focused on the importance of creating measurable goals in order to demonstrate achievements and build a successful career. Rita emphasized taking risks and learning from those outcomes is one of the best ways to develop: “Own your lane on the road to success – own it, be passionate about it and become that go-to person, the subject matter expert,” Rita shared. 
Last Updated: August 29, 2018 by Jabil Joules Leave a Comment
Two Unique Careers Bridged by the “M” in STEM
By: Stephanie Barker, Director of Information Technology
Much like what Ali Ishaq spoke to last week on the blog, my career path to Jabil also was not direct, as my previous work life was in Tampa’s public school system. How did I find my way to Jabil’s Information Technology department then? Surprisingly, I found there to be a lot of overlap in the skills needed in both the Education and Manufacturing industries.
Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is applicable to many career fields, and it’s often not an immediate connection in people’s minds. For example, I started my career as a teacher for students with learning disabilities because I always had an interest in the psychology of behaviors and understanding how people learn. Then, I progressed to the role of vice principal where I led an elementary school through change based on data-driven decision making and financial management.
After 17 years in the school system, a close friend and Jabil proponent sensed I was ready for change and helped me realize my skills and knack for data-driven changes would serve me well as a project manager. I was always proficient with technology, having an innate passion for innovation, and that’s when I came to Jabil and saw firsthand how STEM is truly everywhere, especially in manufacturing.
I transitioned my project management skills and simply switched my focus from organizing school directives for students to driving progressive, futuristic organizational change through IT and operations for employees. The commonality is using data to make decisions, drive tasks and processes around the change, and manage the human behavior around those changes.
In other words, the similarity between my careers was the ‘math’ portion of STEM.
In education, we used data and scientific methods to solve issues like raising the bottom quartile of reading scores and understanding what programs or tests were successful in schools; whereas at Jabil, we use data to correct quality and efficiency problems on the manufacturing floor and with products we produce. Data is something that can be found in almost any profession, and STEM can’t exist without data and analytical skills.
Math tends to be the forgotten STEM subject, and I think it’s important schools and companies alike focus efforts on supporting the field because big data, statistics and understanding trends are crucial to every industry, every company and almost every job.
In my experience, I’ve noticed that often times students don’t get to see the connection between math and how it’s used in the ‘real world.’ It’s great that Jabil supports local high school robotics teams across the country and organizes Tech Tuesdays at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital to teach the young patients to the wonders STEM.
We all need to work together to continue to uncover the fascinating aspects of math, so students can see all the possibilities out there waiting for them in the workforce, whether it’s in education, manufacturing or something else entirely different!
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