The awards a profession chooses to celebrate say a great deal about what it values. Fleet management is no exception.

Each year I marvel at the nominations for the three honors that Automotive Fleet bestows at the annual AFLA Corporate Fleet Conference: Edward J. Bobit Professional Fleet Manager of the Year Award, the Fleet Visionary Award, and the Automotive FleetHall of Fame.

Together, they represent every stage of a fleet career — from professionals just beginning to guide the future of fleet management (Visionaries) to leaders whose influence has been felt across decades.

Reviewing the nominations each year, I’m left with the same question: What separates great fleet managers from everyone else?

If there were a simple answer, I’d tell you. Each year, I process scores of nominations, which helps me realize there isn't a common career path, management style, or formula that embodies a winner.

Like past years, this year's nominees come from different industries, oversee fleets of hundreds to thousands of vehicles, and face very different business challenges. Their accomplishments and approaches are different. But they all share a common mindset — transformation.

Dominika Leja is leading one of North America's largest corporate fleet electrification efforts. Jason Grubbs transformed fleet from a procurement function into a strategic business advantage, while David Hayward turned fleet into an enterprise capability through stronger governance and operational discipline.

Tyler Teter demonstrated that serving more customers doesn't necessarily require more vehicles, using technology and analytics to reveal capacity already in the fleet. Hall of Fame nominee Mark Petersen spent more than four decades transforming not only fleet operations across multiple organizations, but also the profession as a whole through leadership, benchmarking, ethics, and mentoring.

(I’ve only brought up a few of many examples from the nominations. I encourage you to read their stories in the Fleet Manager of the Year, Visionary, and Hall of Fame reports.)

What's especially striking is that this mindset spans generations.

Fleet Visionary finalists are still early in their careers. They are experimenting with AI, analytics, telematics, and new operating models while mastering the fundamentals of fleet leadership. At the other end of the spectrum, Hall of Fame nominees helped establish many of those fundamentals.

Throughout careers spanning decades, they built fleet organizations, led industry associations, mentored peers, and guided the profession through incredible change. Between them are the Fleet Manager of the Year finalists, applying years of experience to today's challenges — electrification, supply chain disruption, sustainability, safety, and increasingly complex business expectations.

Different generations, industries, and business challenges, but all with the same mindset.

One can wonder whether today's Fleet Visionaries would have thrived in an earlier era of fleet management defined by paper logs and fax machines, or whether today's Hall of Fame nominees would have built their careers in an industry of connected vehicles, artificial intelligence, and online business life. The answer to both is yes. Every generation of great fleet leaders has faced their own defining challenges and transformed them.

Tomorrow's defining challenges will certainly be different. The issues evolve with the times, but the willingness to embrace them has always defined exceptional fleet leadership.

The common thread among all nominees is that they didn't wait for the profession to change. They became part of the reason it did. See you on Sept. 28 at AFLA!