Booking “Desperate Housewives” was a key moment in Eva Longoria’s career.
The soap opera star further cemented her place in Hollywood across eight seasons as Wisteria Lane’s Gabrielle Solis before pursuing a career as a director, producer and entrepreneur.
During her time on set of the ABC dramedy, Longoria learned crucial career lessons. After working with dozens of directors on “Desperate Housewives,” Longoria tells CNBC Make It that she got to see leadership qualities she admired, and others she didn’t want to emulate.
One idea she refused to adopt: The director is always right.
“I find that not to be the case,” says Longoria, 51, adding that the lesson has served her beyond Hollywood.
Filmmaking and entrepreneurship are about collaboration, she says, including hiring and consulting people who are smarter than you, and hearing from people who’ve been through similar experiences — whether they’ve succeeded or failed — and learning from them.
“So that [idea] of, ‘Go at it alone you and only you can make it happen,’ is not true,” Longoria says. “There’s a village of brains that you should be tapping into.”
Longoria, who has a new partnership with the tech-device company Lenovo advising small business owners, says mentorship has played a big role in her growth as a director and leader. She says some of her best mentors are people she’s never met or isn’t close with personally.
“One thing that I learned is: You don’t have to even know your mentor” to learn from them, Longoria says, adding that finding someone you admire and studying their work, reading their books, or listening to their interviews can be forms of mentorship.
“I love Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker, and I’ve never met him,” she says. “I love Oprah and everything she’s done. I’ve met her, but I don’t know her [well], but she’s been a mentor to me.”
Seeking out and making the most of mentorship comes down to resourcefulness, Longoria says, which is one of the top qualities she looks for when hiring or partnering with people.
“I love people who figure it out” and are willing to “do what it takes to get to the end solution,” she says. That doesn’t mean knowing how to do everything, she says, but at least knowing what questions to ask and who to pull in in order to get to an answer.
Resourcefulness means “more than [being] Harvard-educated or Ivy League-educated,” she adds. “Do you have the capacity to figure it out?”
Meanwhile, one of the worst qualities that signals a red flag to Longoria is assuming to know the answer without doing the work to ensure it’s right.
“Assumption is a very dangerous thing, and so you really need to clarify [and] ask the questions” with humility, she says. “Don’t be afraid to [tell] people: I don’t know that. I’m so unfamiliar with that. Can you walk me through how that works?”
These lessons have served Longoria well in her career in Hollywood and beyond: Aside from being an award-winning actor and director, she’s the co-owner of two soccer teams, co-founded the liquor brand Casa Del Sol Tequila, authored a cookbook and founded her own philanthropy to address economic opportunity gaps for Latinas.
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