Bradley Olin on Mentorship, Courage, and the WACUBO Mentor Program
We build strategic plans for our institutions — multi-year, carefully aligned, revisited every quarter. Almost none of us build one for ourselves. That gap is where good mentoring lives, and it's where Bradley Olin spent the past year as a mentor in the WACUBO Mentor Program.
The idea Bradley keeps circling is bracing in its generosity: you can't want someone's growth more than they want it themselves. It can sound like defeat. He treats it as the real skill — learning to tell the person who is only waiting for someone to convince her she's ready from the person who genuinely doesn't want the next thing, and offering the first not a shove but the nerve to step. He and Howard get into why the technician who excels rarely becomes the manager who thrives, why transparency beats the false comfort of certainty, and how a finance officer taught himself to stop scripting his presentations and start trusting the room.
It's a short conversation caught almost by accident at the WACUBO Annual Meeting, hours after a momentous morning in Bradley's own life. Its through-line outlasts any single career move: change is emotional long before it is operational, and you can't project-manage your way through the unknown. You can only know your own values, leave room, and find the nerve to begin.
Links & Notes
WACUBO Mentoring Program — the year-long program Bradley mentored in, for aspiring CBOs and CFOs in higher ed
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith — the book Bradley credits for the technician-to-manager reframe
“Higher Ed’s New Crisis Managers,” Lee Gardner,The Chronicle of Higher Education — the piece on the rise of interim CFOs that Howard references
Toastmasters International — where Bradley found his footing as a speaker before starting a club at his institution
