What makes a good leader? For Heavy Duty Trucking's 2024 Emerging Leaders, it’s all about empathy, respect, humbleness, honesty, transparency, communications, building up others — and simply caring.

The Emerging Leaders award honors young professionals who are influential, innovative, and successful, who can point to outstanding accomplishments and leadership qualities, and who have a passion for the trucking industry.

To be considered for the award, nominees must be under 40 years of age and work for a for-hire, private, government, or vocational fleet.

Click on the honoree's name below to read their full profile:

This year’s HDT Emerging Leaders are:

• Xavier Alcala, Director of Business Solutions, Quality Custom Distribution (QCD), Frisco, Texas

• Samantha Bodnar, President, D.M. Bowman Inc., Williamsport, Maryland

• Emmanuel Carrillo, CEO, Talon Logistics, Chino, California

• Adam Cassidy, Director of Safety, Werner Enterprises, Omaha, Nebraska

• Tyler Dietrich, Director of Product – IT, Nussbaum Transportation Services, Hudson, Illinois

• Jason Douglass, Director of Retention & Recruiting, Stokes Trucking, Tremonton, Utah

• Chris Grato, Vice President, International Motor Freight (IMF), Port Newark, New Jersey

• Jessica King, President, Palletized Trucking Inc., Houston, Texas

What Leadership Means to HDT's Emerging Leaders

“A good leader is someone that people can get behind, someone that can truly drive change, but can make you the best version of yourself,” Bodnar says.

“You want to build up everyone around you. We always say around here, we want the next person to replace us eventually, because that means that we’re growing, and they're growing, and I think that's what makes a good leader.”

Carillo’s response echoes Bodnar’s: “Good leaders, they’re the ones trying to build up that next person and help them to succeed.”

Some companies, he says, don’t want to invest in their employees for fear of them taking what they’ve learned and going somewhere else.

“I’m not scared that they’ll leave,” he says. “I want them to grow. I want them to be the best for themselves and best for their family.”

Alcala says not only for himself, but also within the entire organization, there’s a push for “servant leadership.” He explains, “It’s really understanding what your team needs, what will support them in being successful.”

Help Employees Showcase What They Can Do for the Company

Dietrich says that also means giving credit where credit is due.

“Even just a small amount of taking credit where it’s not yours, or not sharing who actually did the hard work, is totally deflating,” for a manager’s employees, he says. “Even if it's an accident, it is your responsibility as a manager, I believe, to intentionally share who did the hard work and where the credit should go if you are receiving accolades for anything.”

One of the most important qualities of good leadership, King says, is being “willing to listen and give people an opportunity to showcase who they are and what they can bring to your business.”

There’s a saying, she says, that, “If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room,” and she takes that to heart.

Good leadership, she says, means “understanding what your people are really good at and where they can succeed, and then just letting them go.”

This approach does take a lot of time, thought, and planning, she says, “but if you have the right people in place that know the foundation and the core of your business, and that you have to do it safely, there’s nothing like it.”

Grato adds that mutual respect is important. A leader needs to earn that respect, he notes, but, "I expect you to respect me, and I will respect you back. I have high expectations, like there was expectations of me."

Tailoring Leadership to Individuals

“I think you have to have empathy and you have to be humble,” says Douglass — be willing to listen to other ideas and admit it if you’ve made a mistake.

Sometimes, that involves helping employees who are a little lost regain their focus. He believes in giving people the benefit of the doubt and looking at whether a problem is a training issue rather than solely the employee’s fault.

“There's a lot of things in this industry that people write off that could have been a training issue,” he says.

Cassidy points out that good leadership “can be many different things to many different people, potentially at the same time.”

Different employees, he says, need different types of leadership. He compares it to parenthood, where children react differently to instruction or discipline.

“I can treat people differently,” he says. “Treating people fairly is important. But if I can treat them the way they need to accomplish the mission, whatever that mission is, as long as it's fair across the board, then that's a challenge I should take on. I like to think I'm good at that.”

For Alcala, being open and transparent with your team also means tailoring those messages to the person.

“I work with our leaders to see how they learn and how they channel that information, and really cascade that down to their teams, understanding that Deborah learns differently than Kate, and how you can support that.

“Listening is probably the key thing to understanding how this person reacts to the information, what their process is and what they might do next. Just asking those questions, ‘How would you approach this?’ And then we could figure it out together.”

Heavy Duty Trucking’s editors launched the HDT Emerging Leaders program in 2016 to identify some of the up-and-coming leaders in the trucking industry and share their insights with our readers.