Three University of Georgia leaders shared candid reflections on authenticity, values and accountability as part of the Office of Academic and Community Engagement’s Lead@3 spring 2026 speaker series, offering insights into what impactful leadership looks like in practice.
Each semester, Lead@3 features three speakers who deliver individual talks focused on women’s leadership in higher education and beyond. This spring’s speakers — Sheila J. Davis, assistant to the president; Michelle Elliott, director of the Archway Partnership; and Cara Winston Simmons, director of the Office for Student Success and Achievement — recounted their leadership journeys and the lessons that have shaped their approaches.
During her Feb. 25 talk, Simmons admitted she didn’t confidently call herself a leader until much later in life, even though she had been leading through various jobs and volunteer roles for years. Part of her hesitation came from not seeing herself reflected in leaders around her. She said participating in the Women’s Staff Leadership Institute at UGA in 2017 helped her clearly recognize herself as a leader.
“It helped me see myself as a leader not because I became someone new, but because I finally had language and confidence for who I already was,” she said.
Simmons also said that while there is always room to grow and evolve, your “core self” is the foundation for effective leadership. She described how leading from who you are instead of leading as someone else creates authentic, rather than performative, leadership.
Elliott, who spoke March 10 with Archway Partnership operations coordinators Angel Jackson and Sharon Liggett, named three core values that she and her team developed on a retreat in 2021: teamwork, flexibility and trust.
“I have them on a sticky note on my desk. It’s the first thing I look at every day when I come to work,” Elliott said. “We are operating on trust, teamwork and flexibility every day.”
Elliott likened core values to muscles that a person knows need exercising even when they don’t feel like it. She credits the core values that she and her team developed with grounding them in their work.
“When we hire a new team member, we take it very seriously. We want someone on our team who lives these values, and I think we are very productive and high-focused because of this,” she said.
In her April 22 talk, Davis, who has worked at UGA for 33 years, shared three key leadership lessons that she has learned over her career: leadership is not about a title but rather how you show up; leadership is about being an example for others; and leadership isn’t something that you achieve once, but something you choose every day.
“Some of the most important leadership happens long before a title ever comes,” Davis said. “It shows up in how you support others, in the way you take initiative and how you build trust.”
Davis also emphasized that leadership becomes apparent in how a person handle mistakes. She shared a time when she accidentally omitted important names from an event invitation list and faced a choice to either minimize, deflect or own her mistake. She addressed the issue quickly, corrected it and developed processes to ensure it didn’t happen again.
“Leadership really shows up in how you respond when things don’t go perfectly. Making a mistake doesn’t define you, but how you respond to it does,” Davis said.