Michael Park

Background

About Michael Park

In my very first job after college, at a busy Starbucks café and drive thru, I learned that true leadership isn’t about phenomenal delegation, business sense, or time management. Those skills help, but more than anything, leadership comes from working for your employees, removing obstacles from their way, and lifting them up and supporting them in ways that help them grow. The terminology and outline around “servant leadership” hadn’t been popularized back then, at least not in ways that made me aware of it, but that experience led me to adopt that mentality in all my future endeavors. If that boss called me tomorrow with a new opportunity, if it were even remotely within reason, I would take it. I know what type of leader he is because it’s the type of leader I try to be every day. I’ve learned many skills since those days, and I’ve gone on to form my own teams and lead them to impressive growth across multiple companies, industries, and markets. I practiced learning my team members to better allocate tasks in synergy with strengths. I developed the ability to push those team members to growth by encouraging them beyond their comfort zones. I have had plenty of exposure to budgets, expenses, forecasts, and stretch goals. But for all those lessons across my long career, there still hasn’t been one that proved more effective than quality leadership. On a more personal level, I like to think that I’m still a student, even years after my undergrad studies. My main degree is in philosophy for a reason because I love to learn. I have a passion for absorbing new information, deconstructing the critical pieces, and using that new knowledge to construct efficient solutions to difficult problems. I am an insatiable learner. I’m also an unabashed, incorrigible nerd. From a time where it very much wasn’t cool, I’ve reveled in watching it become something mainstream. I love fantasy and sci-fi literature, tabletop gaming including board games, RPGs, CCGs and TCGs, and video games across all types of genres and developments. Thanks to that philosophy degree, I can even have deep, detailed conversations about all the different reasons I like all those different things, so ask me about them!