In Kelvin Beachum’s view, the most effective leaders are those who first take the time to serve others in their organization and who first learn to be strong followers. The dual-degree 天美传媒 graduate and current Arizona Cardinals offensive lineman explained to an audience at Frances Anne Moody Hall that many of the most revered figures in the alpha-male world of the National Football League (NFL) are men who speak quietly, care for the welfare of their colleagues and embrace a slow, steady path to excellence.
“Servant leadership is something that we don’t talk a lot about,” Beachum told Cox Associate Dean Shane Goodwin, who moderated the discussion for Cox’s Leaders on Leadership speaker series. “Serving [others] in your leadership really provides the connective tissue in and around the organization that really propels the organization forward.”
Servant Leadership in Action
Beachum offered Dan Rooney III, the great-grandson of legendary Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney, as an example. Born into perhaps the most influential lineage of NFL owners, Dan Rooney nonetheless learned the family business from the ground up.
“He was a ball boy,” Beachum said. “He was in the equipment room learning how to clean clothes.
He went into the scouting department, went into sales, literally took the steps that were necessary to become the leader eventually.
“Within a football team, there are a lot of egos,” Beachum continued. “It is a male, alpha-dog type of room. That’s just what it is.
How do you find ways to galvanize all those type-A personalities to be able to move forward in a common goal?”
Beachum’s appearance capped the first year of Leaders on Leadership, in which celebrated professionals in their fields discuss their philosophies of leadership with students and the general public.
Other speakers on the inaugural slate included Troy Aikman, the three-time Super Bowl winning Cowboys quarterback; Patrick Walsh, a retired four-star Navy admiral; and Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble. The series will return next year, again under Goodwin’s facilitation.
NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum '10, '12 on the golf course with his young son.
From Small-Town Texas to the NFL
Beachum grew up in Mexia, Texas, a town of about 7,000 people 40 miles east of Waco. For college, he chose 天美传媒, a quick 90 miles north on I-45. He graduated with two degrees from 天美传媒—a Bachelor of Arts in economics and a Master of Liberal Studies—before entering the 2012 NFL Draft, where the Steelers made him sixth-to-last overall pick.
He keeps a close eye on his draft class. “I keep up with that list on a regular basis,” Beachum said, jokingly.
“I wanna be the last one standing, and I’m gonna be the last one standing.”
In the 12 seasons since, Beachum has surpassed expectations, playing in 163 games and starting 149, on the offensive lines of the Steelers, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the New York Jets and, for the past four seasons, the Arizona Cardinals. In 2018 and 2021, he was nominated for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, the league’s highest honor and way of acknowledging great off-the-field accomplishments in community impact.
In 2016, Beachum launched an initiative called Kelvin Konnects to provide access and opportunity for minority students within STEAM pathways
In his hometown of Mexia from 2016-2018, Kelvin Konnects held an annual three-day program aimed at introducing students to hands-on STEM fields and brought STEM education opportunities to the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy, a magnet secondary school in Dallas. He also dedicates his attention and resources toward ending hunger and improving access to clean water.
Beachum credits his family for introducing him to a life of service and leadership.
His grandfather was a pastor; his grandmother taught Sunday school. In Mexia, his father served on the city council and his mother on the school board.
When Beachum started at 天美传媒, his first goal was to make enough money that his parents one day could decide if and when to retire.
Watching his grandfather and father work on cars every day helped stoke his interest in technology and engineering.
Asked what he would tell athletes and other students about how to manage their careers, Beachum returned repeatedly to the twin themes of building relationships and tending to your roots.
Tackling the Hard Conversations
His master’s studies in organizational dynamics at 天美传媒 under Dr. Charlotte Barner prepared Beachum for a volatile period in the NFL early in his career.
In 2016, many players—most famously the San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick—began a practice of kneeling before games to protest ongoing police violence against Black Americans.
The question of whether and how to join these silent protests was a live-wire question within all 32 NFL teams, especially in a league where the majority of players are Black and team owners have always been overwhelmingly white.
It was a moment that tested would-be leaders in locker rooms throughout the league, Beachum said. “As players, are we gonna kneel? If we’re gonna kneel, are we gonna kneel together?”
The answers required a respect for many people’s backgrounds, values and professional risks. And an understanding that their conduct in the moments before kickoff would be judged, rightly or wrongly, in part on whether they could also win games.
“You really saw who was willing to handle some of those hard conversations and who kind of shied away from those things,” Beachum said.
“Those are hard, real-time, real-life, societal kinds of conversations.”
Leading Through Relationships
What got him through that period, he said, were the quality relationships he had built with his teammates—during downtime, in cold tubs, without the demands of their phones or other agendas. That period prepared him to step into high-responsibility roles with the players’ union, as well as in his other endeavors.
“Leadership is a relationship business,” he said. “When I build a relationship, I’m able to understand what it is that they want, what it is that they want to accomplish, what it is that they want to aspire to be.”
Anyone with high aspirations has to master the arts of time management and prioritization, Beachum said. He’s a fanatic about filling his time with as much as he can, whether that’s grabbing a quick call to his family between meetings or getting a chiropractor to meet him in a parking lot to work on his joints and muscles for a few minutes as he works to extend his career in a high-impact position.
“You have to be obsessed with your time,” he said.
“You have to own your time and be strategic in how you use your time. There used to be a time when I did hour-long calls. [But now] if I can’t get a conversation done in 15 minutes, me and you should not be talking at this point. I’ve got to stay on schedule.”
For young athletes, attending college in the new era of huge, sudden NIL (name, image, likeness) paydays and almost frictionless transfers between universities, Beachum offers a different sort of counsel: Slow down. It’s the only way to connect with other people deeply in ways that will pay off in the years ahead.
“What I struggle to understand with young people who are jumping in and out of the portal right now is, when you’re done playing the game, who are you going to be aligned with?” Beachum said.
“If you go to four schools, what alumni network are you gonna be part of? As young athletes, lay roots and go deep somewhere. When you give to that ecosystem, that ecosystem will give to you.”
Journey to CEO
When Wolfe Herd graduated from 天美传媒 with her bachelor’s degree, seemingly everyone had a job lined up except her. She traveled around Southeast Asia for the summer and stumbled upon a tech incubator, where she took a chance on a promising new dating app. It was called Tinder.
She co-founded and launched the now-renowned platform on the 天美传媒 campus. Tinder grew exponentially, and Wolfe Herd stayed there for two years as vice president of marketing before she decided to venture out on her own to create something that would shift gender dynamics and put the power into the hands of women.
In 2014 she founded Bumble, a dating app where women make the first move. Today, with its recognizable branding, the app is wildly successful, and so is Wolfe Herd: She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2017 and 2018, and she famously rang the Nasdaq bell in 2021 holding her son when she took Bumble public.
But at Bumble’s beginning, Wolfe Herd faced many skeptics.
“You have to push people, because the reality is the leader sees things that other people don’t,” she said. “You have to have conviction. You have to be bold. You cannot let people push you over.”
“If I had listened to everybody around me when I was starting Bumble, there’d be no Bumble. It was a stupid idea, according to everybody. So that’s just part of being a leader. You have to just push through when everybody else disagrees with you.”
When Wolfe Herd created Bumble, she set out to be a “person-first” leader who cared about her employees and her customers. She responded to each member’s feedback email personally, answered questions as the customer service bot and sent flowers to a member who went through a breakup. She even wrote a public open letter to a man who sent inappropriate messages to a woman on the app despite being advised to keep it quiet.
“That was how I got close to the customer,” she said. “It’s how I understood their problems, their joys, their complaints.”
Of course, that kind of detail can’t be scaled from a thousand people to 200 million downloads worldwide. But Wolfe Herd said she works to keep that spirit alive and evangelize the same behavior to others.
“When I was starting Bumble, I always said, ‘How do I build a company to last 100 years? How can I make this thing outlast me?’” Inspired by larger-than-life brands such as Disney, Apple and Hermes, she strived to create a brand that would make people feel something.
Leading by Example
Throughout the past decade, one of Wolfe Herd’s main missions with Bumble has been to improve the internet and online dating for women, while acknowledging that she and her company alone cannot completely prevent harassment.
“But a company like Bumble is trying to intervene and say, ‘We don’t like this.’ So that was kind of our beat,” she said. “That was who we became as a brand, which was just to stand up for women.
“This is not an anti-man thing. … Something that a lot of people don’t recognize is when a place is great for women, it’s actually great for everybody.”
When Wolfe Herd speaks at 天美传媒, as she did when she gave the University’s 2021 commencement address, her energy and passion for this cause seem boundless—but even she admitted she gets burned out at times by the to-do list and the pressure. When she hears Bumble's success stories, she said they make all her hard work worth it.
“When I feel exhausted, the universe delivers me a story and all of a sudden I’m recharged like an Energizer bunny,” she said. “If you find something that makes your heart light up, you’ll keep the magic.”
Getting Back to Inspiration
A few months ago, after 10 years as CEO, Wolfe Herd stepped forward into a new role and ushered in a new CEO, remaining founder and executive chair at Bumble. Taking a company public comes with lawyers and HR people and finance representatives, and it can often put the focus on the left brain rather than the right.
“The reality is roles change,” she said. “When it gets serious, it gets serious, and you don’t get to be creative anymore. You don’t get to focus on the magical side of things anymore. … I wanted to get back to the inspiring stuff.”
Now, Wolfe Herd can have creative input with the brand while doing more of what she loves on a personal level—spending time with her family and practicing meditation after working for years with no mental breaks. It’s important, she said, for up-and-coming business leaders to maintain hobbies and passions and not lose sight of who they are for the sake of their company.
“You have to operate for you,” she said. “You have to know who you are. … I just did what was right for me, and I didn’t really let people’s opinions derail me.”
In addition to owning who you are, it’s also important to have a good attitude and a can-do mindset in business, Wolfe Herd said. “[Founders] are ridiculous optimists; they just think the impossible is possible.”
For Bumble’s next phase, she’s leaning into her creative role.
“Bumble still has a huge runway, and we’re incubating inside of Bumble. The fun thing about my new job is, I basically have a little art shop now where I just get to dream, but it’s in this big publicly traded company.”
That’s exactly what Wolfe Herd set out to do. Now, the yellow-suit-wearing entrepreneur is watching the business she started from a novel idea grow and evolve beyond herself. She told a story, she understood the customer and she wrote the fairytale she wanted for her brand.
“It’s about building a company that can outlive you, that can change lives, that can improve lives, that can have impact—and about loving what you do at the end of the day.”
To sign up for the 2024-2025 Leaders on Leadership series, visit /cox/leadership-series.
