Julia Hamm

My superpower really is my network and my relationships with people. I am not a deep subject matter expert, but my most valuable assets are the people that I know. Even if I don't know the answer to a question, I'm almost always able to connect people to someone else who does know the answer to that question. I'm able to help people just connect with others, whether it's from a business standpoint and helping people to grow their own businesses, or personally, helping people when they're looking for new career opportunities and trying to think about who else they should talk to. People often turn to me to really access my network and take advantage of that.

I'm a visionary by nature, and I had an executive coach that I worked with many years ago who really worked hard with me to focus on putting in place processes that helped figure out how to actually turn those visions into execution. That advice was incredibly valuable because as a visionary, if you can't make your ideas happen, it really doesn't matter how good your ideas are. The broader advice is really taking time to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are, and figuring out how to address them. You don't necessarily need to turn your weaknesses into strengths, but what processes or people do you need to surround yourself with in order to minimize your weaknesses in a way in which they make sure that your strengths actually can be fully leveraged.

I think it's about, especially if you're young and at the point where you can afford to take a risk, don't be afraid to take a risk. The time to take a risk is when you're young and when you don't have a lot of responsibilities and you're the only person you're having to take care of. So take career risks early, and push yourself to try things that maybe feel a little uncomfortable, and learn as you go. You don't have to know it all heading into a position, you just have to have confidence that you have the capability to learn what you need to know.

Like any services business, the client services part of it can certainly be a challenge. You're always juggling a lot of different priorities, not only across multiple clients, but then across all of the different responsibilities of the position. So really being able to make sure you're honing in on what's strategically most important, and allocating time to those things, and delegating down the other things that I'm not sort of uniquely suited to address.

For me, definitely balance. It's both work-life balance, but it's also a balance of perspectives. I always want to understand everybody's perspective on things, as opposed to just thinking I know the answer and committing to something without understanding the full suite of perspectives around the table. Transparency is also very important to me. Sometimes maybe I'm overly transparent, but I really believe that it's important to help people understand the big picture, to understand the why of how things are being done and why things are being done, and not withholding information unless there's a real reason from a privacy standpoint or a legal standpoint. I think it's best to be as transparent as possible with people. The other value I would say is fairness. I really value fairness. I'm not going to argue with decisions as long as I feel like they are fair and that somebody can articulate why the decision was made and really demonstrate to me that there was a fair evaluation of the entire situation.