Heidelberg students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered on Wednesday evening for the fourth annual Lessons in Leadership event. Created by Professor Trish Berg and supported by the John and Patricia Adams Foundation, the series brings outstanding organizational leaders from across the country to campus to share their insights and experiences in leadership.
This year’s guest was Kristen Hadeed, founder of Student Maid and author of Permission to Screw Up. Kristen immediately drew in the audience, especially students, with her humor, honesty, and vulnerability.
Kicking off the night
School of Business Dean Todd Harrison opened the evening by highlighting the intentional planning behind the series and thanking Trish for her vision. Trish explained why Kristen’s message stood out, saying, “Kristen is so dynamic and so vulnerably honest about what she’s been through. I knew our students would learn something important from her.”
How one cleaning job became a career
Kristen began her talk with a story that had the audience laughing. At 19, she wasn’t dreaming of entrepreneurship. “I just wanted to buy a pair of jeans,” she said. A single cleaning job quickly grew into a business that employed hundreds of students.
Her early leadership years brought challenge after challenge. She told the crowd about securing a contract to clean 800 apartments in 21 days, only to watch 75 percent of her crew quit on day three. “I was sitting in an air-conditioned clubhouse eating a Caesar salad while everyone else was out cleaning in the heat,” she admitted. “I thought leadership meant sitting where people knew where to find you … but that’s not leadership at all.”
That moment changed everything. “If those people hadn’t quit, I never would have learned how to lead,” she said. “It was the screw-up that completely shifted my life.”
Why fear means you care
Much of Kristen’s message focused on how students navigate fear. “Fear is a compass,” she told the audience. “If it scares you a little, it means you care.”
She urged students not to wait for fear to disappear: “Real courage is moving anyway, even when the fear is still there,” she said.
The room took part in her resilience résumé activity, reflecting on moments that challenged them and the lessons those experiences taught. “We forget other people have hard things too,” she said. “When we talk about it, we learn we aren’t alone.”
Being human makes you a better leader
Kristen shared how she once believed leaders needed to appear confident at all times. That changed when an employee told her, “You never have a bad day. I could never be like you.”
“That was the moment I realized I was making leadership look unattainable,” she said. “She was comparing herself to a version of me that wasn’t even real.”
Now, she emphasizes honesty, openness, and acknowledging mistakes. “People don’t trust perfect,” she said. “They trust real. They trust human.”
She encouraged students to build identity capital by saying yes to opportunities that help them learn. “Even if they don’t look like what you imagined,” she said. “Especially if they don’t.”
Closing with courage
Before opening the floor for questions, Kristen left the audience with a message that captured the heart of her talk and set the tone for the discussion that followed:
“Give yourself the permission to screw up. Those moments are not the end of the story. Most of the time, they’re the moments that launch you where you’re supposed to go.”
— by Kaidan Mathias, MBA ‘26