Manny Contomanolis, Director of the Mignone Center for Career Success at Harvard University, shares how career services professionals can become thought leaders on campus.

Manny discusses why thought leadership is so important and provides strategies for becoming a thought leader, such as asking hard questions, leveraging external trends, and being a good storyteller. He encourages career leaders to make time for thought leadership and to seek support from others in their network.

He also emphasizes the need for career leaders to stay up to date on external trends and to connect them to their institution's goals and values.

“The ability to pull that information together, to curate it, to tell a story that's of interest to faculty, senior leaders, and other stakeholders and make it relevant to the particular institutional setting, and related to the activities that the office is undertaking is incredibly powerful, and is a very visible sign of thought leadership,” Manny said.

He also shares how career services leaders can use their thought leader status to advance the work, mission, and goals of the career center.

“One of the tangible ways thought leadership contributes is the way the office and team are positioned in the broader way that the university is thinking.

For example, being pointed out as a center for excellence, as the office that accomplishes what needs to be done and does it well. All of these things influence funding support. They influence relationships and where career services can be involved or brought into discussions, especially when they go beyond just career services to impact and touch on other areas of university life.

It's that feeling of pride that the office feels collectively, and that individual team members feel for being part of that organization,” Manny said.

Resources from the episode:

• Manny’s LinkedIn profile
• Harvard University virtual career center (powered by uConnect)

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