Did Our CEO Evan Hackel Create His Leadership Philosophy when Working a Summer Job?

The answer to the question in the title of today’s post is no, Evan Hackel did not completely develop his philosophy of Ingaged Leadership when he was a student working a summer job.But even back then, Evan was considering his experiences, looking for bigger lessons, and starting to think in ways that led him to create the philosophy of Ingaged Leadership that is attracting new followers every day. . . and even to write his book Ingaging Leadership.How Do We Know?Entrepreneur recently invited fifteen successful entrepreneurs, including Evan, to answer this question . . .What was your first summer job and what did you learn from it?The result was an article that just appeared in Entrepreneur, entitled “What 15 Entrepreneurs Learned from their First Summer Jobs.” We hope you will take the time to read this terrific article and to think about the important lessons that entrepreneurs learned while working their early student jobs.Evan reports, “My first summer job was raking leaves in a cemetery” . . . What did Evan Hackel tell Entrepreneur about his first summer job?“My first summer job was raking leaves in a cemetery,” Evan said. “The other workers never worked at all – unless someone was watching. I had tremendous peer pressure not to work. The experience taught me how important culture is to creating an atmosphere of effective work and to inspect what you expect.”We think that quote tells a lot about where Evan was in his thinking, even back when he was a student. We also think it offers a glimpse into the thought process that led him, years after that summer job, to write his groundbreaking book Ingaging Leadership. What Is Ingaged Leadership?Ingagement is a philosophy for leaders who believe that it is not enough to tell people what to do, but to ingage their minds, creativity and even their emotions and their hearts.Ingaged leadership starts with a belief that when you align people and create an organization where everyone works together in partnership, that organization becomes vastly more successful. You can learn all about it by reading Evan Hackel’s new book Ingaging Leadership:We also encourage you to start thinking about the lessons you learned back when you were working your first jobs. We’ve been doing that and discovering that those jobs gave us key insights into what we believed about business, how we liked to be treated by employers, how we liked to work, and more.