Lamie echoes. Beginning his career with AgReliant Genetics as a temporary worker/operating detas- seling machinery, Lamie worked long hours for six months before being offered a full-time position with the company as a warehouse employee in 2005; a year later he became the loca- tion’s warehouse manager. “The hardest part (of making the transi- tion to a management position) was that some of the employees who work at our locations have been temps for 10 or 11 years — everyone wants a full-time position,” Lamie says. “So there was some thought of ‘Who is he to tell us what to do, he was a temp too.’ “There is a really fine balance. You don’t want to be ignorant of how you are perceived, but you also want to make sure that you don’t get to the point of thinking you are someone that you are not and fooling yourself.” Lamie says education and mentorship are tools that have best served him in navigating his career. With dual bachelor’s degrees in history and religion, Lamie wanted to build his business acumen and began work on a graduate degree in organizational leadership soon after accepting the warehouse supervisory position. “I started learning about Myers-Briggs and how people learn in different ways,” he says. “It was a good lesson for me to assess my learning style and figure out that it was up to me, as a manager, to learn how to best reach each person on my team. It was a good lesson in stepping back and learning what clues and signs people are giving to figure out how to connect. Leadership as a whole, I think, is about stepping back and learning what sig- nals people are giving and using those signals to streamline the communication process.” Managing Professional Growth Like Thomas, Lamie shares that his role with AgReliant Genetics has changed about every two to three years and has required his family to move multiple times. Those moves to new locations, meeting new people and experiencing differ- ent management styles have been instrumental in Lamie’s own management preferences. Lamie says that a struggle, but essential compromise, of man- aging at a higher level is stepping back and allowing supervisors JUNE 2019 SEEDWORLD.COM / 17 to figure out what works best for their management style. “I have run the warehouse, maybe in a different way than the operation is run now, but with my transition back to this plant, my job wasn’t to come in and change things to ‘my way’ but to help guide, coach and help every department find ways to be more efficient,” he says. Gunderson teaches that providing thought, innovation and change leadership, and, often times, simply leading a team, are all equally important in effective management. He says that it’s difficult for new managers to understand that the time they dedicate to mentoring is a productive use of their time. “For so many managers, they are used to being high achiev- ers,” Gunderson says. “They can see sales numbers or a new product in R&D, but it is a whole lot harder when you are men- toring. The payoff is often times in the future, and it can feel like you aren’t accomplishing anything, but that time dedicated to mentoring is really important.” For Lamie, the motivation to mentor came from outside the Left: Mark Lamie serves as AgReliant Genetics’s assistant location manager. Right: Lori Thomas serves as Syngenta’s NK sales trainer.