Success Labs Leadership Profile: An Interview with Devin Lemoine

Devin Lemoine joined the Success Labs team 19 years ago and now serves as the company’s president. She has partnered with local and global organizations to develop their teams and talent during times of growth, change and transition.Devin is an expert in leadership and succession planning and can often be found facilitating leadership development initiatives and succession planning with senior teams and conducting workshops and speaking to professionals and organizations on those topics.Read on to learn more about Devin’s approach to leadership and developing better leaders in this leadership profile.

What's your leadership philosophy?

A simple question: Why would anyone want to work with you or for you?I think it’s in answering this question that we have the opportunity to reflect and grow. Of course vision and strategy are huge, but the real business of leadership is whether people will want to go down that road with you.

Which business leaders do you look up to and why?

I admire business leaders who can think beyond the day-to-day and who are creative and intentional in their focus on people and strategy.

What's the hardest and best leadership lessons you ever had to learn?

The hardest: Realizing I should take my own advice. I struggle with the same challenges other leaders struggle with: getting distracted from the important things, taking enough time for strategic planning, being a leader people want to work with and for, etc.The best early leadership lesson/advice: From my father, trust myself that when new initiatives, challenges, or problems come up, no one has the perfect answer or approach or knows exactly what they’re doing, so I should jump in and not be afraid to throw out a first idea, approach or plan. That advice has enabled me to take risks and put myself out there earlier in my work and my career and that has made all the difference.

What's the most common weakness you see in leaders and how do you help them improve on it?

In these days of global competition, rapid technology changes, lean teams and intense pressure for quarterly results, it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day and not take time for the two most important things: your people and the big picture.The best way to improve is to value them, to put them on the radar, to carve out time for them like you would other important goals and objectives.

Describe a client whose leadership growth has especially impressed you?

Recently, I’ve had two clients who have partnered with Success Labs to get in front of some really interesting business challenges. One is a manufacturing firm that we're working with on a knowledge-transfer strategy and another is a global manufacturing firm we're working with to develop a structured transitional leadership process to help a group of recently promoted young leaders with "just-in-time” leadership training and 90 day development plans to get them off to a great start with their new teams and new responsibilities.What impresses me about these clients is their proactive vs. reactive approach to creativity, leadership development and people strategy. Leaders who get out ahead of the curve and create teams, strategies and cultures that are forward-thinking, nimble and competitive always impress me.Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, La. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.