More than 150 University of Michigan students and faculty gathered in the Tauber Colloquium Monday evening to listen to Catalyst Brands CEO Marc Rosen discuss how executives lead teams through uncertainty. The event — an installment of the Leadership Dialogues speaker series at the Sanger Leadership Center — was facilitated by JetBlue co-founder Mike Barger, assistant clinical professor of business administration.
Michelle Austin, Sanger Leadership Center managing director, opened the talk by thanking the Michigan Fashion Media Summit, Ross Retail Club and Michigan Marketing Club for their partnership in hosting the event.
Rosen began the conversation by speaking about unpredictability in the workplace, encouraging attendees to view uncertainty as an opportunity for growth.
“We all want to have this perfect prediction of what our life is going to look like, what our career is going to be and have all those things be laid out,” Rosen said. “A lot of times, those things are unpredictable and it’s a lot of times these unpredictable things and these non-linear changes take you to new and different places and actually open up new growth too.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Business graduate student Danielle Maduka said she appreciated how Rosen shared his own experiences with uncertainty and the benefits of embracing those moments.
“I think we as human beings sometimes don’t like that some parts of life are non-linear,” Maduka said. “People kind of always want to know what the next step is, or at least I do, so what I really liked about the talk is how he’s encouraged me to embrace the non-linearity of life.”
Rosen then told the audience about one of his previous roles leading a retail technology team at Walmart, where he used group therapy to bring high-performing individuals together into a cohesive team.
“They all had good individual goals, but when you put those goals on a piece of paper, you saw that they were actually competing against each other more than they were collaborating with each other,” Rosen said. “What I did then is we went to therapy. We worked together. … And we made a lot of changes. Once we got that team performing, everybody thought it was working here, all of a sudden they figured out that the potential was way up.”
Business graduate student Mohiika Rastogi told The Daily she felt she could apply Rosen’s discussion about the value of therapy when managing teams to her own career.
“I loved Marc’s candor,” Rastogi said. “The fact that he, being in a position that he is in, and vouching for therapy was something very refreshing. You don’t really see a lot of CEOs of multibillion dollar companies coming out every day and talking about the importance of therapy. Even though I will not be in a place to influence the culture of an entire organization, I’m going to try and have that kind of a setting for my team for when I become manager.”
Rosen also emphasized the importance of prioritizing the team’s needs over individuals’ to ensure the best results.
“You got to put the team first,” Rosen said. “Unless we actually deal with the team and how the team is working, and put in place that trust and those relationships and that accountability of people working together, the team is never going to perform.”
Barger said collaboration could be connected to the Michigan Model of Leadership and the skills students are encouraged to develop as taught by the University.
“That’s really how we try to think about the curriculum here across the University of Michigan,” Barger said. “It’s not so much giving you checklists of things to go do … but more giving you a tool set to deal with whatever you happen to run into.”
Rosen said he uses his “insights model,” a model he said is similar to the MMoL, with his teams to understand both their own and team members’ working styles.
“(The Insights Model) has some things that are sort of analogous to the way that the Michigan Model works,” Rosen said. “What we really do is (help) everybody to understand … their own personal style and what their preferred model is, but also what their stress model is and what that looks like. … When I know what your stress behavior is, then I understand why you’re reacting the way that you are and I know how I can react to that to work with you better.”
Maduka said she attended the event because she is currently reflecting on the type of leader she hopes to grow into.
“As someone who’s graduating with her MBA in a month and a week at this point, I’ve currently been very introspective about this type of leader I want to be in the world,” Maduka said. “I’ve been looking for a lot of leadership advice and leadership perspectives from current leaders. I wanted to learn more about Marc and how he got to where he was and what leadership insights he had for us as students.”
Daily Staff Reporter Grace Park can be reached at gracepm@umich.edu.
