Larry Angelilli says 80 percent of what he does every day as CFO of MoneyGram International hadn’t been invented when he was a student at University of Detroit.
Angelilli, who earned his MBA in 1981, challenged Detroit Mercy students and a group of high school students on campus to rethink their definition of “leadership” during a program by the University’s Institute for Leadership & Service.
“A lot of people think being the boss is being a leader, but leadership is the opposite of being someone’s boss,” he said at Thursday’s Leadership Slam.
At MoneyGram International, a public global remittance company doing business in 200 countries, Angelilli oversees all global financial functions including corporate finance, tax, accounting, SED reporting, treasury, risk management and investor relations and oversees a staff of more than 350 people in eight countries.
“I work with people from different cultures from around the world, and what you have to understand as a leader is that what works for some people doesn’t work for everyone,” he said. “You have to understand and account for those cultural differences.”
And those differences aren’t just across culture, they are often simply a matter of respecting another person’s individuality.
Angelilli remembers, as a first-time boss, cleaning an employee’s workplace while she was away because he thought it would make her more productive. Instead, it upset her, but he learned a lesson that he took with him to future leadership roles.
“Telling other people what to do is actually the worst part of leadership,” he said. The best part of leadership is supporting employees as they uncover their own leadership characteristics and succeed.
Among other advice he offered students is to keep growing in your field, something he says has helped him throughout his career. He also told students that success, he said, comes from doing what you enjoy.
“I know a lot of people think finance may be boring, but it’s fun for me,” he said, encouraging them to take their own enthusiasms into account when choosing what to study at college. “You can’t pursue your education without having a base confidence in your life that you like what you’re studying.”
He also told students to not be afraid of failure, because it can be a way to grow. In fact, he says he doesn’t even like the word “failure.”
“To a lot of people, the word ‘failure’ seems like ‘the end,’ ” he said. “I wish people would use the word ‘setback,’ because it’s not the end. I’ve been passed over for promotions and lost jobs, but these are only setbacks, they aren’t the end.”
Last, and perhaps most important, he told students that a good leader understands that someone, somewhere, is looking at them as a role model, and that they should act accordingly, because tomorrow’s leaders are being created by today’s.
The Leadership Slam is one of many programs offered to students by Detroit Mercy’s Institute for Leadership & Service. You can help support this type of programming for our students by donating to the Campaign for University of Detroit Mercy here.
