In honor of Logos Consulting Group’s 22nd anniversary, Logosfolk are sharing stories about our mentors – the people who invested in our success.
I have been blessed to have several incredible mentors who have shaped my personal and professional life. These mentors continue to guide and inspire me.
However, when asked to craft a tribute to one of my mentors, I recognized that perhaps the most noteworthy mentor to highlight is my first mentor and my first great teacher – my father.
Teaching in the Blood
I come from a family of teachers. My mother was an art teacher before she shifted her focus to working on her own art. My father is a teacher. His brothers are both teachers. Both of his parents were teachers. Some might say that teaching runs in our family.
However, for my father at least, teaching was something he worked hard to learn how to do well. For he was also shaped by his teachers and knew that there is a stark difference between a good teacher and bad teacher. As a result of his dedication to the craft, my father became a brilliant teacher – scores of students over the decades have shared this with me. And I have seen it myself time and time again.
By the time I was born, my father had already built an impressive career. He was a senior partner at a consulting firm for the first part of my life before he left that firm to build his own. As a result, he traveled a lot. When I was a child, he was on the road on average five days a week, traveling to serve clients across the country and around the world. When he was home in New York, my father, sister, and I would spend as much quality time together as we could.
However, quality time at home was sometimes a challenge. In addition to my father’s role at the consulting firm, he was also an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) in both the School of Professional Studies and the Stern School of Business. As the graduate programs he teaches in cater to the working professional, my father’s classes were almost always scheduled for a full day –9 am to 4 pm – on Saturdays. Between his various courses across both schools, teaching at NYU occupied most of his Saturdays during the calendar year. Therefore, to maximize quality time when he was home, I would accompany my father to his NYU classes most Saturdays. My sister would one day as well.
Sitting in the Back of the Classroom
From the age of 7 through to the age of 15, I sat in the back of my father’s NYU classroom, watching as he taught his students the skills necessary to succeed in their careers. At the time, he taught classes at NYU on strategic communication, crisis management, crisis communication, and communication ethics. By the time I was 15, I had gone through each his courses at least half a dozen times.
However, I was never just sitting and passively observing his classes.
One of the best qualities of my father as a parent is that he never treated my sister and me as just kids – whose thoughts, feelings, and opinions were unimportant given our limited years on earth. He always made clear that our experiences and our viewpoints mattered, that we had just as much right to speak our mind as anyone else regardless of our age. That we were equals, worthy of respect in both directions. He encouraged us from a young age to think deeply and critically, to be curious, to participate in the spaces we were in, and to advocate for ourselves.
Therefore, sitting in my father’s classes could never have been a passive experience. I worked through, sometimes silently on my own and sometimes collaboratively with students in the class, the same learnings and exercises my father would take his adult students through. My father and I would then talk about how the classes went after each session, what went well and what didn’t. What he could have done better.
And I connected with and built relationships with his students in the classroom. Some of those students would later become my colleagues and trusted friends.
First Coaching Client
It was not only my father’s academic classrooms that I had a chance to experience. Sometimes, when it was “Take Your Child to Work Day” or when he was training someone in a pro bono publico capacity, I would join my father when he would coach clients.
Once, when I was 11 years old, I joined my father for a full day coaching engagement in New York City on a day I was off from school. Armed with a Harry Potter book in case my attention wavered, I sat a little behind my father as he spoke to an esteemed religious leader who was preparing to deliver a sermon that would be recorded and uploaded online for people to watch. (It was 2002 – when this was an innovative and somewhat baffling idea.)
As the religious leader began to speak her sermon for the first time, I was enraptured. Harry Potter’s adventures with his friends were quickly forgotten as her words wove a narrative that was thought-provoking and inspiring. After she finished her first run-through, my father began to coach the religious leader on ways she could deliver the content more powerfully. I immediately recognized the guidance he was giving, having heard it in his classroom many times before and having gone through similar training alongside his students. As my father concluded his notes, I spoke up, “Could I add something?”
The religious leader looked at me, somewhat puzzled as I had been silent for the first hour of our time together. But my father said – “Of course.” So, I gave this esteemed religious leader – someone 35 years my senior – a piece of feedback.
And she took it. She listened to the feedback and incorporated it into her sermon. I then moved my chair next to my father’s and for the rest of the day we coached her together. For every round of rehearsal, my father would give feedback and I would give feedback. This religious leader became my first coaching client.
I am still her coach to this day.
Starting My Career
At the age of 15, my father’s firm was preparing to support the staff of a client organization, Religions for Peace, at its 8th World Assembly in Kyoto, Japan. As his firm – Logos – was still young and small at that time, my father and his colleagues recognized the need to hire more help for this event. He turned to me one day and asked, “Could you come and help us out in Kyoto?”
At the time, I was deeply interested in human rights and advocacy work. The purpose of the World Assembly completely aligned with my interests. He made clear I would be doing essentially grunt work, helping with smaller, often thankless tasks. I recognized the opportunity before me, so I said yes. I was hired as an administrative intern at his firm, and then went to Kyoto with him two weeks before I was to begin by sophomore year of high school.
Working in Kyoto marked the official start of my professional career. It was a formative moment as I worked alongside incredible professionals, some of whom I first got to know in my father’s classroom. And I was able witness senior religious and political leaders advance peace-building.
After working as a press room intern and assistant photographer for the 8th World Assembly of Religions, I came back to New York and started my second year of high school. However, I remained an administrative intern at my father’s firm, mainly doing administrative tasks for the next several years as he built his firm.
Over the next several years, as I finished high school and went to college, I took on additional internships that aligned with my interests and where I could expand my professional skills. I had the chance to work at places such as Millennium Promise, Brodeur Partners, Disaster Chaplaincy Services, the Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York, and Freedom to Marry. (This is where I would meet and be blessed with more incredible mentors.)
However, I also remained at my father’s firm part-time. But now, my skills had grown, and I was committed to building my skills and proving what I could do as a professional. I spent hours upon hours on my own studying more deeply subjects such as communication, leadership, strategy, pedagogy, journalism, business, neuroscience, psychology, and more.
The Logos team would begin tasking me with research projects to support their client work. My father would at one point ask me to be the lead researcher and editor for his book, The Power of Communication: Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty, and Lead Effectively. (I would go on to edit another four books by him, and three books by other authors over my career so far.)
It was in this stage that I began to refer to my father by the name his colleagues and clients used whenever we were engaging with each other in a work context – Fred.
During this seven year period, my role at Logos morphed from administrative assistant to research analyst to analyst and then to consultant – actively serving clients. My last project of note before I left the firm was to manage all written communication and craft and execute a social media strategy at the 9th World Assembly of Religions for Peace, this time in Vienna, Austria.
Building My Career
I left Logos at the close of 2013, having just graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree from a dual bachelor’s-master’s program at The New School. I was in the final stage of finishing my graduate studies at The New School, as well as a graduate certificate program at Starr King School for the Ministry.
My original plan had been to go into a career in international affairs. However, by the time finished my bachelor’s, I concluded that I was being called to do something else. I didn’t know what I was being called to do exactly. I knew that teaching, equipping others to step into their potential, was part of what I was looking for. I also knew I wanted to do something that made an impact, that did good in and for the world. Therefore, I decided not to finish that master’s degree and instead focus on figuring the next steps in my career.
And so, I went off on my own. At first, I began doing freelance consulting to pay the bills. I was then hired to run the communication department at Religions for Peace, as the staff knew me from working at those World Assemblies. At the time, the organization was developing a new strategic framework and communication plan. While there, I was responsible for managing communication during high-profile public events such as the global Interfaith Summit on Climate Change, which brought together senior religious leaders from around the world to convey faith communities’ concerns and proposals to the UN Secretary General’s Climate Change Summit.
I then became an interim communication consultant at Starr King School for the Ministry, initially brought in to help the school through a crisis and a leadership transition. I was also tasked with helping to build a communication department for the school. Building up communication departments from scratch became something of a niche for me, as I would later build and run the communication department for the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York City.
I also decided to build my own crisis management and strategic communication consulting firm, working specifically with non-profits, NGOs and INGOs, social action campaigns, and religious and educational institutions. I’ve had the joy and privilege of working with incredible leaders and organizations through my firm, as well as build relationships with partners and professionals I would mentor that have also transformed my life. At times, my firm would partner with Logos on specific client projects.
And then, in December 2019, Fred asked to meet with me one day. He asked me to come back to Logos for at least a year. At the time, there were internal transitions beginning to happen in the firm and there was a need for someone to come in as a consultant who could immediately serve our clients well. I agreed to come back, so long as I could keep my commitments to my own firm’s clients as well.
Of course, we had no idea how the world would change within the next year, or how Logos would ultimately need to adapt to our COVID-normalized world. I certainly did not foresee that by December 2020, I would be the firm’s Chief of Staff, overseeing Logos’ operations and managing the full team.
Today, almost 11 years after first leaving Logos and nearly five years since returning, I can say with confidence that I could not have predicted the shape my career would take up to this point. I can also confidently say that this path led me to exactly where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I am meant to be doing right now.
And none of it would have happened had I not first sat in the back of my father’s classroom.
Teaching at the Front of the Classroom
In February and March of this year, Fred was scheduled to teach in two different NYU programs on the same days. He asked me to cover two of the six full day sessions of his Crisis Communication course in the School of Professional Studies MS in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program. This was one of the classes I sat in on as a child at least a dozen times (and another half dozen times when I first worked for Logos). Today, I regularly teach this content to clients and students across the country.
And so, 26 years after first sitting in the back of that very same classroom, I stood at the front of the room as teacher.
Talk about a full circle moment.
My father and I have held many relationships with each other over the years beyond our familial relationship. He is one of my mentors. He has been my teacher. I have been his teacher. I have worked for him. He has been my client. I have been his client. We have partnered together. We are teaching colleagues. We are professional colleagues.
I would not be where I am today – who I am today – without my father. It was not only the early exposure I had to this work, and the opportunities that exposure led to, that have shaped my career. It is how he modeled what it meant to build a career of and in service of others. It is how he empowered me to think deeply, to be curious, and to invest in my own learning. How he instilled within me the skills necessary to succeed in my career, the same skills he teaches to his students and clients and that I now instill in my students and clients. How he always treated me as an equal and a thought partner, affirming that my voice and viewpoint mattered regardless of my age. How he showed me what it is to pay it forward, to invest in others, and to be a great teacher.
And so, for all these things and for so much more, I say to my first great teacher – Thank you, Dad!
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