10-30-2026
At the Larsen Leaders Academy, leadership is not just about personal accomplishments that you can put on your resume. Ultimately, leadership is measured by the extent to which you, as a leader, help others develop and grow to become leaders. This servant-leader mindset requires humility.
In this “Lessons from Larsen” contribution, Purdue Daniels School of Business and Larsen Leader Academy alumna and current marketing and branding director for Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis Katarina Nikolovski discusses humility in depth. She talks about the importance of listening. As our students learned on our recent immersion trip to Gettysburg, people do a poor job of listening. We often listen, but only to respond. We are thinking about ourselves and what we want to say, rather than genuinely listening to others.
Katarina shows us the importance of listening to understand. When we understand someone we can truly help them develop and grow. True listening is an act of putting others first. I love how Katarina connects listening with humility.
Brad Alge
Managing Director
Larsen Leaders Academy
Katarina Nikolovski
As I entered my sophomore year at Purdue, one of my favorite business school student organizations was going through a leadership transition. I had many ideas about where the organization could go next and was eager to share them with our new leader.
As he stepped into the role, he took the time to meet individually with every student in the organization, holding more than 30 conversations. He listened to what students enjoyed, what they hoped to accomplish and where they saw opportunities for the organization to grow.
By taking the time to listen, he showed that every student has a perspective worth considering and a role to play in the organization’s future. With years of experience at Purdue, he could have easily come in with his own plan.
Instead, he chose to start by listening.
He understood that the organization would be stronger when people brought their perspectives together, learned from one another, and worked toward a shared vision.
Five years later, I still think about the example he set. Looking back on my time at Purdue and ahead in my career, I’ve realized that what I admired most was his humility.
Humility is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean lacking confidence or minimizing your strengths. To me, humility is being secure enough in what you bring to the table that you do not need to have every answer. It means being willing to learn from others, change your perspective and recognize that the best idea in the room may not be your own. It creates an environment where people feel comfortable sharing ideas, taking ownership and learning through mistakes.
Humility makes leaders more effective because it allows teams to perform at their best. When people feel heard, trusted and empowered to contribute, they bring forward stronger ideas, take greater ownership and achieve more together than any single person could alone.
Purdue gave me opportunities to put that lesson into practice. Through leadership roles on campus and my involvement in the Larsen Leaders Academy, I gained firsthand experience developing my leadership skills, learning from mentors and peers who demonstrated that leadership could take many forms, and navigating situations that required me to adapt my leadership approach.
The lesson has become even more important in my career as my responsibilities have expanded beyond my individual contributions. I am learning that leadership is less about personal output and more about creating the clarity, support and environment that enables a team to perform at its best.
Sometimes leadership means stepping forward. Sometimes it means stepping back and giving someone else the space to step in.
For students preparing to enter the workforce, I offer three lessons I am still practicing today:
Taking initiative is not the same as leading well. Taking initiative matters, but leadership requires more than carrying the work yourself. Create clarity around the goal, responsibilities and what people need to move forward. Often the most valuable contribution a leader makes is creating clarity, not doing more of the work.
Create opportunities for others to lead. When you have experience and know how to solve a problem, giving someone else room to work through it themselves requires patience. Their approach may differ from yours, and that is okay. Ask questions, check in and let someone else own the outcome.
Focus on learning rather than proving. It is easy to feel pressure to demonstrate what you know. Effective leaders are comfortable admitting they do not know something, asking questions and adapting their position when presented with a better idea.
I am still practicing these lessons myself, but I know that I want humility to remain at the center of how I lead.
