How can church leaders lead in a way that is meaningful, sustainable, interesting, and makes an impact? In this interview, Heidi Brooks, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management, a leadership and organizational behavior expert, shares how everyday leadership brings hope for humanity.
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Jessica Anschutz: One of your most popular classes is everyday leadership. What is everyday leadership?
Heidi Brooks: Everyday leadership is an acknowledgement that we all can make a difference in the experience of work. In this post pandemic time, we’re a little bit more sensitive to [the questions that ask]: What is work for? How do I feel about work? What is the experience of work that really makes me feel like work is meaningful, sustainable, interesting, and has an impact that’s aligned with the kind of legacy that I want to leave? It’s a time for us to pay attention to what we can do that creates the experience of work for ourselves and others that we want to have. Everyday leadership is for all of us, and, of course, if you have a kind of positional authority and you wear a “capital L” Leadership title, your everyday leadership impact is particularly important.
Jessica Anschutz: What are some of the principles of everyday leadership?
Heidi Brooks: Part of the idea of everyday leadership is that it comes from everyday impact. So, saying what you are about is insufficient. It’s about the impact that you have. For example, saying that we are a kind culture without people feeling like they’ve been treated kindly is insufficient for everyday leadership. We’re interested in impact more than intention, and we’re interested in being able to live into our aspirations from a perspective of what the actual experience that people are having is, and closing the gap between our aspirations for who we want to be and how we show up and experience work.
Jessica Anschutz: How would you advise church leaders, clergy, and laity, to think about their impact or to become more aware of their impact?
Heidi Brooks: One of the things to do is to get curious about what impact you want to have. What are the values, principles, and hopes that you have for your legacy as it lands today? If you want to be someone whom people feel listens to them, get clear about that. Secondly, get some information about whether that’s happening or not. It’s a little bit of the proof is in the pudding, but you need information. Your leadership is not in your statements about your leadership. It’s in people’s experience of your leadership. This involves getting some feedback and engaging in some inquiry about how people experience you. So, ask simple questions like: do people want to be led by me? It’s a simple ask. It’s a hard question to engage in from a place of real transparency and intrigue. It’s a provocative way to ask, but at the heart of it is a very important question. Do people feel drawn to you? Is there something that you’re up to in the way that you open space and create a conversation and invite people to follow you that’s compelling and intriguing? If so, what is that? Can you do more of that? If not, what’s going on? Get curious about that.
Jessica Anschutz: I appreciate your emphasis on curiosity. How might leaders be more curious?
Heidi Brooks: Curiosity is based on another kind of principle by which I lead, advise, and make this work real: we follow what we’re interested in. A lot of this work is based on a fundamental learning orientation that everyday leadership is in some ways about. Can we learn our way toward, and into, a future that we’re interested in participating in? That learning needs to be directed by the stakeholders. So, ask “what am I genuinely interested in? What do I want to pursue?” Letting that interest, that yearning for a future that you’re interested in creating, guide your actions is a fundamental orientation.
Unless for some reason you are devoid of all curiosity of all things, which is very unlikely for your audience because they are interested in things. So let yourself be interested, not in what you’re “supposed” to be interested in, but what you’re actually interested in. Follow the bouncing ball of your intrigue, even if it’s off plan, because sometimes we’re interested in things that are not on the agenda.
Students find themselves in math class [while being]interested in art. So, what do you do? We’re not always convenient for our own agenda. So let yourself be interested in what you’re actually interested in, rather than being on the “should” plan. Break some of your own rules because we can sustain interest when we are able to listen to our own interests.
Sometimes interest looks like a cognitive “oh, I’m interested in that.” Sometimes it looks like you’re agitated or bothered by something, which is a sign of interest. Sometimes it’s [that]you’re annoyed by someone’s behavior. Why? Because there might be a value or principle behind it that is agitating you because it’s being breached, but it’s also interesting to you. So, you can flip it and say, if I’m annoyed by disrespect, maybe I’m deeply interested in dignity. So, you can flip the questions and, you know, pet peeves are a great place to look for values because they are the things that are bothering you and that you’re bothered by. Especially when they’re kind of idiosyncratic or a hint about those things that you’re naturally not only most interested in, but perhaps committed to.
Values that are important enough to you to undergo some sacrifice or discomfort are an indication that you’re interested beyond the kind of mundane every day. If you’re willing to pursue at some personal cost, that is an indication of a personal value or a deeper interest. Surface interest might not be sufficient for the level of learning for provocative questions like, do people want to be led by me? This work can be challenging, difficult, and in your face when you really get to the heart of it.
Jessica Anschutz: I appreciate you naming pet peeves because approaching them with a spirit of curiosity rather than a spirit of annoyance can lead to greater productivity.
Heidi Brooks: Also more, deeper yearning. Follow that. See if you can get in touch with what you’re yearning for. Yearning sits right next to learning. Get involved with your own interests. I trust humans to be interested in things that are worth following for hope for humanity. It’s very different than a defensive energy and more life giving. When I teach the everyday leadership course, we start with an invitation to notice your daily activities and start to do a very bald differentiation of what things were enlivening and what things were depleting, and then to understand, why? Were they depleting to you personally, or depleting to some stakeholder group that you care about?
Jessica Anschutz: That’s a great distinction. I’ve heard you talk about moments that matter and how these moments happen during our everyday lives. How can church leaders approach everyday experiences so that they are moments that matter?
Heidi Brooks: You asked me to talk about the principles. I’m not doing a very thorough job with that, but we are getting to them moment by moment. We’ve discussed, impact, values-based curiosity, and yearning. Now we’re starting to talk about micro moments and moments that matter. We tend to think about leadership in large grandiose scope with a “capital L” and positional authority. What I’m trying to do with everyday leadership is talk about everyday moments that matter. If we tend to make leadership about legacy, and I do think it’s about legacy, then we also need to be about what we’re about in the smaller moments. There are ways in which when we send emails, greet people in the hallways, open a meeting, introduce a person, these are all micro moments of leadership.
Why are they micro moments of leadership? The way that we build our impact, the way that we build our relationships, the way that we become known, the way that we let ourselves be known, reveals itself not only in the big stage moments when you are “on,” but also in the smaller moments when people are getting to know you. Those moments also matter and accumulate into how people experience your leadership. Some micro moments are typical, like the ones previously named, and some of them are more idiosyncratic to the way that you lead and the way that your work is shaped and those I consider everyday junctures. Some of those are more particular.
People talk about water coolers. I don’t even know if people have water coolers these days. That’s a kind of everyday juncture where you tend to have a lot of interactions. So, what are the everyday junctures? For me, it’s a podium in the classroom. A lot of students wind up casually talking with me before or after a class or in an advisory before we’re really in advisory mode and engaged in the official kind of delivery or a formally structured event. There’s a lot of back and forth about how we’re going to act on the aspirations that the client has for themselves. Those are all everyday leadership moments for me, including the contracting and getting to know each other.
Jessica Anschutz: As you think about these everyday moments, how can folks start to be more attentive to those moments and their experiences in those moments?
Heidi Brooks: So, we’ll start to fold back—a kind of stance of curiosity about your impact can also be applied here. How did that meeting go? One thing is to not just rely on yourself to have good questions, that’s a thing, but to make it a communal behavior. If you can make it a norm that you ask, what a meeting was like for people, it helps people pay attention, so it’s collective curiosity.
Curiosity isn’t just an individual phenomenon, but it’s a norm in your group. Then you have socialized behaviors that become more of your organizational culture that both typify your personal leadership, but also become the way that the community expects us to behave. So, the way that we do things around here becomes your culture and your norm—that becomes a little bit more powerful. Groups are more powerful than individuals because we’re so social. If you can, make what you care about a social norm. A lot of everyday leadership isn’t individual, it’s collective. So here we have an invitation to think not only about ourselves, but about our collective leadership.
Jessica Anschutz: Church leadership is ministry done in community.
Heidi Brooks: At the end of the day, leadership begets leadership. That’s particularly true of everyday leadership and when it is a community that’s healthy. It’s a provocative statement. What does it mean to be a healthy community? I think a healthy community promotes leaders that are good for a set of values that this community wants to lift up. Rather than a very individualistic orientation, a community that really winds up very oriented towards certain individuals. I worry about the collective leadership vibe in that collection of people. Of course, there are some positional responsibilities that must be upheld by people for clarity and for division of labor. So, I’m not arguing against structural components, but I am raising up the question of what healthy and effective collective leadership is. I think part of what we see is that it raises up and welcomes leadership that works from lots of different quadrants.
Jessica Anschutz: I really appreciate your group approach to leadership, because so often I think leaders view themselves as an individual, which is important, but not how they relate to the whole.
Heidi Brooks: I think that’s an old paradigm that we need to grow out of. Leadership is not about the leader, it’s about all of us. Leadership is about the group. It comes through the leader, but it’s not about the leader. Our very heroic individualistic mindsets really set us in the wrong direction and a lot of our practices, teaching, and learning about leadership has been too individualized. Leadership is really about groups and social processes.
Jessica Anschutz: How might leaders begin to take on more of this group perspective? Are there steps that you would encourage them to take or things you would encourage them to focus on?
Heidi Brooks: Curiosity is related to reflection. So, the bigger picture on curiosity is reflective practice. Are we looking at what we’ve experienced, what we’ve created, what we’ve done, how we’ve behaved, and the impact that we’ve had from a place of reflection? That’s most powerfully done as a group practice. So, do some collaborative reflection, which has deep origins in a spiritual basis. Can we collaboratively reflect on who we intend to be? How is that going? Now, what helps that process tremendously is voice. So, create an environment where people can say what they’ve experienced, and it becomes discussable with some sense of psychological safety. Amy Edmondson’s been doing a lot of work in this arena. We can not only ask the question but must listen to what people have to say in response in a way that creates a norm of reflecting collaboratively that is a positive experience of our community. Some people think getting feedback is about an anonymous survey, and I guess you can get feedback from an anonymous survey. But I’m talking about creating a more courageous dynamic in our communities where we can make discussable some of the kind of edgy material that might be 10% out of our collective comfort zone. Our avoidance of difficult conversation is only making our worlds smaller and keeping us away from the information that we need to create a future that is more robust, rigorous, and responsive to the dilemmas that we have today.
We must learn our way forward. The kind of existential or spiritual crisis that we have about being human well in a very confusing and confused world needs us to meet it with openness, courage, and collective reflection that opens some possibility of experimenting and learning our way forward. We may not know the answers, so we need a reflection process that allows us to be curious together and then experiment together, and very importantly, the next step, to fail together.
When we have some failure, that’s worth it because we’re experimenting in the direction of our values. We can hold that kind of failure with dignity and honor because it was worthy failure. When you innovate, when you’re trying something new, there’s going to be failure. So, if we cannot let that be fatal, then we might be able to discover what’s possible and the edges of what’s possible.
Jessica Anschutz: Sometimes it’s taking first initial step of taking the risk.
Heidi Brooks: And then staying around for it to clean up. Risk taking and recovery go hand in hand. They’re fundamental, everyday leadership skills, individually and collectively. So, ask hard questions. Ask easy questions. But the easy questions are easy. Asking the hard questions is really where you wind up needing your everyday leadership skills, which have a lot to do with reflection. Driving towards yearning and values and staying around to listen. Encouraging voice, listening to people with responsiveness (in terms of the impact of those conversations), and letting it be a process rather than a problem to solve and to check the box.
Jessica Anschutz: Reflection is important. When I was engaged in full time parish ministry, I found that churches had their routines, their patterns, their annual events, but there was never any sort of evaluation or reflection about what went well and what didn’t go so well. How might we do this differently in the future? What did we learn in doing this?
Heidi Brooks: It’d be amazing if church leaders could ask those kinds of questions, and then let us have the attendant crises of not getting answers that we want. Because churches and church leaders have, at least conceptually at their fingertips, some of the tools to be able to be imperfect and still pursue a life worth living.
I get more worried when church leaders need it to look good and/or go with simple solutions. We’re having like pretty fundamental challenges in being human well. We’re just fundamentally confused about what this means. Can children have enough food and an education? Can we not be at war? It’s getting pretty base here. Can we love thy neighbor? We are failing on fundamental dimensions and I’m not sure that other leadership disciplines are as well positioned to answer the fundamental existential crisis about what it means to be human well as our church leaders.
We need spiritual leaders to ask and answer the questions right now. It’s hard to do that conceptually if the practices of the way that you run your congregations and your gatherings don’t reflect an integrity of the practice. It’s not just at the pulpit in sermons, it’s also in the way you have everyday interaction with your congregants.
Jessica Anschutz: So, if folks aren’t already doing this work, where do they start?
Heidi Brooks: It would be amazing if they created some learning circles in their spaces, but it’s important to know how to do the work well. I’m a big fan of finding a learning community where the leaders of this kind of work in your setting can practice. You might start by finding an external setting where you can have a powerful experience so that when you try to come back home and implement the practices, you have a community of practice to go to that pulls out the best of who you are and where you can take your dilemmas. One of the most common questions is “well, I behaved differently, and people didn’t know what to do with that. They expect me to be the same. So, when I came back talking about reflective practice here and now and getting some feedback, they were so shocked about my behaving differently that I wasn’t quite sure what to do.”
So, it’s important to have a community of practice where you can ask questions and that anchors you in a place that is inspired by your future self. What do you want for your community, yourself, your people, and your family? Let that vision of the future inspire a set of behaviors that will take you in that direction.
People are often inspired by current behaviors or tethered by current behaviors like “I have to be who I have been.” It can be difficult to try new things, but trying new things is just new things. We can lighten the burden of trying new things. A community of practice can really help you experiment in public and be anchored with a version of your best self and with an aspiration of the future that you can articulate to others. So, I’m a big fan of community of practice and journaling. It helps to socialize it with your own learning community.
Jessica Anschutz: I think some of our leaders are using these tools in other ways. For example, they may be journaling for spiritual reflection, but not leadership.
Heidi Brooks: Journaling is such a huge partner to the reflection process. “What is my impact today?” is a great journaling topic. Maybe choose three people whom you want to impact. Ask yourself “what was their experience?” and get curious about it. Of course, journaling is not enough because you have ideas of your impact, but the information about your impact lies with the other person. So, a lot of this needs to be interactive. Getting information about your impact from other people is part of what we were talking about with leadership being social. You need information to the extent that you can create conversations where you get that information. It’s another part of the collaborative reflection process.
Part of what I’m teaching and doing at Yale is setting up learning environments that raise up a more courageous community where more of these everyday interactive dynamics become normative. Of course, groups must learn to do this together. They must learn to make it okay to create enough sense of connection and collective shared purpose and ways of enacting it for a courageous community to have enough psychological safety and commitment to that purpose to pursue awkward conversations. It’s not like hard conversations become not hard, but you become more skilled at holding them collectively. Then what would be a hard conversation elsewhere becomes less difficult because the community is more skilled, more courageous, and more committed to shared learning and knows how to help each other through.
Jessica Anschutz: Are there resources that you would recommend for those who want to engage in these hard conversations?
Heidi Brooks: I hope that my podcast, Learning Through Experience, is a resource. I am interested in revealing some of the methodologies behind learning through and from our everyday experience and how a learning orientation is a real foundational principle in everyday leadership. Also, how learning itself is an approach to leading in confusing and overwhelming times that we do not know the answer to our future. We’ve got to have a learning orientation to be able to discover what we really want and how to practice into it.
I’m a real fan of Amy Edmondson and her most recent book on intelligent failure. It’s highly relevant to what we’re what we’re talking about. There’s are so many things out there like journaling as an individual practice and being part of a group that encourages thought and encourages collaborative reflection. I would love to see church leaders start these things up. You can come and do some learning at Yale in the programs that I teach. We have a facilitator community that people can apply to be part of and hopefully some more things on the way. So, keep an eye out for what we’re doing at Yale and the program that I lead.
Jessica Anschutz: I am so grateful for this time today and for the work that you’re doing and your willingness to share your work with our leaders. As we wrap up our time together, what would your hope be for folks who are listening to this podcast?
Heidi Brooks: I hope that people are hearing what I think is one of the best things about leading, which is to find other leaders who share your aspirations for learning our way into a world that’s more enlivening for each of us and for all of us, and how actually finding those other leaders and sharing a process of learning about how to lead in a confused and overwhelmed world is in itself enlivening for people who really care. I think we need company on the journey. We need to normalize our own learning and striving process. We need for that learning process to not only be accompanied by relevant others, but to encourage and embolden us to take the work back home and see if we can spread the magic, which is really paradigm shifting and work of great courage.
I don’t see how we’re possibly going to make our way into a more a livable world with less war and less strife where we can feed the children with bigger hearts and broader minds without our being able to make that true right here in our own environments, in our own hearts and minds, in our own communities, and here in our own congregations. Make it real in your world. Invite yourself to be part of a more courageous community that’s about learning for you. If you can do that with others, then it’s more possible that you can do that in your formal and positional authority in your congregation, your church, and the way that you gather people.
Jessica Anschutz: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Brooks.
Heidi Brooks: You’re so welcome. Thanks for inviting me in Jessica.
Related Resources
- Leaders Don’t Need All the Answers by Clay Scroggins
- Now is the Time for Risk-Taking Leadership by Bill Wilson
- 7 Mindset Shifts that Can Reshape Your Church’s Future by Lia McIntosh, Jasmine Smothers, and Rodney Smothers
Photo by Prixel Creative on Lightstock
