Creating a Professional Network: Rick Detrio’s Thoughts

It is completely common, even expected, for people to switch jobs and even entire career paths over the course of their professional lives. While loyalty is definitely still a value promoted and revered by the professional community, just where that loyalty ought to lie has changed. The emphasis is no longer on staying with a particular company or organization for 15, 20, 30, or more years. Rick Detrio, who expects to devote multiple years to a job but still has changed career paths many times, knows this all too well.

Instead of loyalty to a company or organization, the value is now on building longstanding, loyal relationships to people. The rapid advance of technology and electronic communication supports this shift in perspective, which is one of the reasons Rick Detrio maintains an active online professional profile on LinkedIn and Facebook. People build and maintain relationships with co-workers, employers, and employees as they move through their various occupations. Rick Detrio has found that as he switches jobs, so do many others, and it is not uncommon to run into a former co-worker at a new job, or to discover that an old boss is working on a new project.

For Rick Detrio, this professional network is invaluable. It keeps him in contact with those who he has built relationships with, allowing him to build foundations of mutual support that either end can call on in a time of need. It also helps to keep the faces familiar, even as the locations and the job descriptions change.

Rick Detrio on the Importance of Conversation

Rick Detrio is often concerned that the art of face-to-face human interaction is being lost. Having worked for many years in occupations that required excellent human interaction skills, he is used to carrying on a conversation with someone in any style. Professional business interactions, social conversations, sales transactions, and support are all areas that require a certain level of conversational adeptness in order to navigate them successfully. Unfortunately, so many things are automated in our current society, this ability is often lacking.

Rick Detrio feels that the skill of conversation is a vital one to reintroduce into society. He barely can begin to list the number of times he has found that human interaction has succeeded where technological interaction or impersonal communication have failed. As a Field Trainer with the DEA, it was often his experience that concepts his students could not grasp on their own by reading a book or by learning from a computer were successfully communicated once they could sit down and talk the problem through. Similarly, his work as a Service Consultant for Lexus further solidified the reassurance and competency that a human being can convey – feelings a machine are rarely able to replicate.

For this reason, Rick Detrio is always in support of face-to-face interaction. He believes that it is important to practice talking with others, just like any other skill. Honing conversational skills benefits you in all areas of life. It is just as important to be able to effectively communicate in a professional environment as a social one, and Rick Detrio believes that being able to do so will get you much further than always relying on technology.

Rick Detrio’s Favorite Things About Big Cities

Over the course of his professional career, Rick Detrio has had the opportunity to live in many large, cosmopolitan cities across the country. He has lived in Washington, D.C., New York, Miami, Tampa, and many other places. And, although living in a big city can definitely take some getting used to, Rick Detrio has found that living an urban life suits him very well.

One of Rick Detrio’s favorite aspects of city life is the easy of accessibility. Public transportation in urban places is almost always superior to more rural landscapes. For Rick Detrio, being able to hop on a bus or subway and get all the way across the city for only a few dollars is an invaluable benefit of city life. Not only is it convenient, responsible, and affordable, it saves him endless time in traffic or searching for parking – time that instead is allotted to exploring and enjoying the city.

Without a doubt, Rick Detrio’s favorite part of living in a big city is the huge diversity of people he encounters on a day-to-day basis. Naturally an outgoing, friendly person, Rick Detrio loves to make new acquaintances and form new friendships, even if they are only fleeting ones. Whether he is chatting with the barista making his coffee, or with his seatmate on the train into downtown, Rick Detrio is always able to find a common point of connection. His openness and friendliness have resulted in learning some very interesting stories, and even making a few himself!

Staying Connected: Rick Detrio Keeps His Family First

Rick Detrio is a busy man. Working for Morgan and Morgan, one of the most sizeable and all-encompassing law firms in the Tampa Bay area, makes a lot of demands on his time. Often, he has strange hours, or finds himself working on holidays he thought he had off. This type of hectic schedule is not new to him. Actually, it is a lifestyle he has grown used to ever since his job with the DEA started in 1988. During his fourteen years there, he had assignments in five different major cities across the country, not to mention overseas missions.

 

Having to travel so often and keep irregular hours can be hard on an individual who values his family as much as Rick Detrio does. As the years have gone by, he has become an expert at still managing to keep his family a priority, no matter what work throws at him. Even during those times when work demands he miss a holiday or other important date, Rick Detrio finds a way to make it up to his family.

One of the ways Rick Detrio keeps his family a priority is by devoting all of his attention to them when they are spending time together. He has often been frustrated by co-workers who insist on bringing their work home with them; for Rick Detrio, being at home or with family means the work phone stays away. This is especially true for vacation times. Whether it is just a weekend away or his annual family reunion, Rick Detrio makes sure that during those times, family is the only concern he has.

Rick Detrio on Finding a Way to Give Back

Opportunities to perform acts of kindness and charity are everywhere. All across the world, from your local neighborhood to the country thousands of miles away, there are people who need assistance of some kind. As a local and global community, humans need to support each other in order to bolster the species as a whole. And, while the capitalist nature of American society may make it seem like it’s every man for him, Rick Detrio knows that even in the most cutthroat, competitive environment, there is a way to make a difference.

The trick to it, according to Rick Detrio, is to take the interests you already have, and find a way to use them to help others in some way. Charity does not have to be donating to the commercials you see on television or picking up trash in the park. For some, those activities are very fulfilling. For others, not so much.
Rick Detrio stresses that this is not something to be ashamed of. Rather it is just a matter of finding what works for you. If you hate to cook, then volunteering at a soup kitchen is probably not a fantastic idea. But if you hate to cook and also happen to hold a degree in graphic design, then offering to make flyers for that same soup kitchen makes a lot of sense. Or, you can follow the path of Rick Detrio, and make your career your act of kindness. By pursuing a lifetime career in the legal world, Rick Detrio feels he is always able to support his community in some way.

Rick Detrio Believes in Justice

As kids, most of us had a deep and abiding love for superheroes. While a lot of that love certainly had something to do with our inner desires for superpowers and adventure, superheroes were still responsible for teaching or enforcing many of the values and ideals that our society holds most dear. These are values that we carry from childhood into our adult lives. Since we are all individuals, we take different lessons to heart more than others, and this was no different for Rick Detrio.

While he might not specifically point back to superheroes as his childhood influence, Rick Detrio has always had a deep and abiding care for the notion of justice. Having seen how illegality, unfairness, discrimination, hatred, and countless other vices have negatively impacted the lives of those around him and his society as a whole, Rick Detrio decided early on that he would dedicate his professional career to helping eradicate these problems. Rick Detrio believes firmly in the concept of a just society, and works tirelessly to achieve that dream.

Fighting for justice can take many different forms, and Rick Detrio knows that not everyone gets to be a superhero. Sometimes, just doing your job can be enough – especially if your job involves investigating evidence and facts behind legal cases of personal injury. One of Rick Detrio’s favorite aspects of his current job with Morgan and Morgan is the law firm’s dedication to finding the truth and delivering the fairest case possible, with the best possible outcome for their client.

Target Awards Excellence in Rick Detrio

With a resume that includes the DEA and Morgan and Morgan Law Firm, it might be surprising to some that Rick Detrio also has a history with Target Corp, the one-stop superstore that you can anywhere in the country. Although it is true that Rick Detrio was still involved in the executive side of Target’s business, it still might seem somewhat out of place.

The truth is that Rick Detrio wanted to spend some time building a relationship with a more family-oriented business model, one that placed customer service as its highest priority. Customer service and community involvement have always been strong interests and values of Rick Detrio’s. For him, working with Target was an opportunity to flesh out those values, and give back in a different way than some of his other career interests.

While there will always be a need to catch offenders and pursue justice so long as crime exists in this world, Rick Detrio knows that he has more to offer the world. Working with Target was an opportunity for him to involve himself with a different type of business model, which was a refreshing change for him. The four years Rick Detrio spent working with Target were not only a great change of pace, but also a chance for him to show how he can excel in other areas. Target easily saw this excellence, and was happy to award Rick Detrio for his service with a Rookie of the Year award in 2007 and a District Assets Protection award in 2010.