Viktoria Kangas

Why It’s Newsworthy

This profile piece on Mark Murphy is newsworthy because he is a self made man that has accomplished a variety of work that can inspire and guide many. He highlights what he has accomplished in writing articles, being an author, business leader, and entrepreneur. Look into this man’s journey in his career as inspiration for work and drive.

Mark Murphy is a man who holds many skills and accomplishments under his belt to tell the world how he got to the place he is today. 

To backtrack in Murphy’s career, it began in the early 90’s where he worked on consulting.

“A lot of the work I was doing was very much focused on healthcare and helping organizations overcome financial challenges,” Murphy said.

He explains how in that stage of his life in order to have credibility and for his superiors to listen to him, he needed to have something other than what he said, like data and research. With this, Murphy tells how he would get in trouble from time to time.

“I tried to say things that I felt like other people were avoiding saying,” Murphy said.

Although he claims this was a risky move for him, he was able to learn that with the research that he conducted, he was able to back up his claims. This made some noise and that brought attention to his name. The early work he was doing gave him the foundation that was more technical and financial to aid him in building his company, Leadership IQ. He ended up leaving his company after it was sold to a healthcare conglomerate in the late 90’s.

“I decided that working for a 20 billion dollar company didn’t really fit my personality,” Murphy said. 

His uncomfortable truths did not fit into how the company functioned and after a year he said he needed to be able to express what he wanted with freedom and voice it out. The result of these actions and willingness to leave this part of his career ultimately gave him this freedom. 

“What I ultimately concluded was as risky as it was, the only way I was going to ever really have that control is if I just started my own thing,” Murphy said.

In 2001 he started what would come to be Leadership IQ.

 “The one kind of good thing about my industry is that writing books and being what they would call a thought leader is very much a part of what you do. It’s not unexpected in this space that you would write books and articles,” Murphy said.

 Most of his clients came to find him for who he was by reading one of the books that coincides with his consulting work. 

“Every one of my books so far has focused on some kind of survival where we have a solution to offer to an organization,” Murphy said. 

Mark Murphy’s director of client services, Jill Sutherland, opened up about what it is like to be his right hand managing the clients of Leadership IQ, editing for his articles and facilitating e-learning courses. As someone who works with him on a lot for the company, Sutherland describes Murphy as very approachable, down to earth, go with the flow, easy to speak with, and open and receptive to feedback, which she claims can be difficult to find in a CEO like the previous people she has worked with in the past. 

“He truly does practice what he preaches,” Sutherland said.

Speaking more on what happens at Leadership IQ, she speaks on how she believes on her Hiring For Attitude program. 

“Especially clients such as Ocean Spray who actually started hiring for attitude before I came on and they are still coming back every year to keep it fresh within their organization,” Sutherland said. 

Over the 7 years he has let her take on more responsibilities having some of the projects of her own, she has learned so much from him at a hands-on level.

“I know it is definitely something that Mark is proud of and I am definitely proud of also.” Sutherland said.