Name: Rob Garris

Title: Executive Director, Trinity Leadership Fellows

Organisation: Trinity Church in New York City

Robert (Rob) Garris is the Executive Director of the Trinity Leadership Fellows program and Managing Director of the Leadership Development initiative on the philanthropies team at Trinity Church in New York City. These interconnected initiatives develop the leadership capacities of people of faith, empowering them to serve urgent needs in their communities and congregations.

Rob has built innovative international education and professional training programs at universities and foundations for more than twenty years, working for Schwarzman Scholars (a leadership development program in China), the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves on the boards of education-related companies and non-profits in the U.S. and abroad. Rob received his Ph.D. in European History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he specialized in immigration and urban policy.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Rob's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

Patience.

My transition from being a Ph.D. student focused on solitary research into leadership roles required me to make enormous adjustments in terms of patience with the pace of progress and in terms of learning how to make progress collaboratively with teams instead of as a sole actor. By nature, I’m an impatient person, most of all with myself. When working in isolation on a written product, like a dissertation, the speed of my progress was largely within my control.

As anyone who’s worked in a leadership role in a team or organization knows, real success depends on trust and relationships, and that takes time. In fact, moving too fast without getting a team on board with a vision and with a collaborative work culture can be counterproductive.

Both in terms of my own success and learning from the remarkable success of leaders whom I worked for at Columbia, Schwarzman Scholars, and Trinity, the best leadership occurs when there is still drive and vision coupled with a keen awareness of people, communication, and relationships.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

Gradually. Leadership literature often makes the point that leadership is a practice or a behavior, not a job title. There was no single point in my career when I transitioned from follower to leader. Working in the academic world, at Johns Hopkins and Columbia in my case, requires building trust and confidence with the faculty, who are the ultimate decision-makers in most academic institutions.

Building that trust takes time, and only after trust is in place can a person even hope to begin to lead. Universities may be at the far end of the spectrum in that timeline, but the need to build trust to step into leadership is true of any human institution. This has proven true in my current role as Executive Director of the Trinity Leadership Fellows. I am a layperson with a background in education in public, international, and non-profit policy programs.

To successfully find, design, and direct a leadership training program for clergy and other people of faith, I had to demonstrate a deep alignment of values and establish trust over time in order to successfully launch a new form of leadership development for people of faith who want to serve urgent needs in their communities. Seeking shared values as a basis for leadership is not only my personal approach but also the foundation of the program I lead. Shared values serve as inspiration, but they are also an anchor for enduring trust when inevitable difficulties emerge.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

My day is structured to be sure I have time split between focus on myself and focus on others; time to plow through tasks and time to think big.

5:30 am: A slow, quiet start with yoga or meditation, and then things speed up. I have a quick coffee, a scan of news headlines, and then some form of intense physical activity. That might be a six-mile run in Central Park, High-Intensity interval training, or weight training at the gym with a buddy for accountability.

Arrive at work: Check in with colleagues in the office (or virtual office), see how they're doing, what they’re planning for the day. Work morning: After touching base with colleagues, I take a quick time for myself to set my agenda and priorities for the day and the week, then I focus for an hour clearing quick tasks and responses. Meetings, of course, take up much of the rest of the day, and I prioritize which meetings I take in terms of what advances my team’s goals.

Work afternoon: More meetings, of course, but at least one block of time to focus on something that requires thought, quiet, writing, or reading. Something that keeps my mind and energy focused on my team’s big-picture goals.

Evenings: This is time for friends and my husband. Recharging, relaxing, and learning from people whose interests and careers are different from mine are central to my well-being and also to my ability to engage with a wide variety of people in my professional life. These are people who expose me to new ideas, adventures, and ways of seeing the world, and who communicate and make decisions in different ways.

This diversity of viewpoints and learning how to navigate lots of different personalities make any social group more interesting and, in the workplace, make for stronger and more resilient teams.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

For much of my career, in role after role, I focused on external things (results, goals, plans, resources) or other people (colleagues, stakeholders, vendors, business partners) but not on myself. I would analyze and assess everyone and everything around me without turning that critical lens on myself. Through some difficult moments of feedback and coaching, others brought this blind spot to my attention.

Around the same time, as my work shifted from more traditional academic fields into leadership development, I began to read literature on emotional intelligence, in particular, the work of Daniel Goleman.

The timing was perfect. At a critical point in my growth, a coach and that literature helped me recognize that a leader (or any person) needs to understand themselves and the emotional energy and biases they bring into a group BEFORE they can begin understanding group dynamics and the emotional engagement of others.

This emphasis on introspection and self-awareness as an anchor for collaborative leadership deeply informs the program I run now. Introspection as self-awareness and introspection as a way of prioritizing deeply held values.

The Trinity Leadership Fellows spend the better part of a week engaged in group work that helps them examine how their personal characteristics, their values, and their faith shape the ways they engage with others and influence their approaches to leadership.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

I’m going to stretch this response to include two: Move Fast and Fix Things by Anne Morriss and Francis Frei. This book was valuable for me because it was such a contrast to the ways that I previously thought about creating change in the workplace. This is a much-needed book that makes the point that leaders and innovators can be successfully and creatively disruptive while maintaining a focus on people, relationships, and teams.

It’s an inspiration and a way of leading that taps into people’s strengths instead of treating them as obstacles to be moved quickly and forcefully. Prior to this book, I had embraced moving slowly as an important and necessary stage of building a team and getting buy-in to a vision.

This book has inspired me to do so in a more urgent, fast-paced mode that still preserves relationships and a focus on people. Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence. Goleman (and others) have written a great deal on emotional intelligence, and I don’t want to reduce complicated literature to one point. But for brevity’s sake, what I love about his work is the principle that leaders must understand themselves and learn to regulate their own emotions before they can do the hard work of exercising emotional intelligence with their teams. This book and body of work (along with an emphasis on values as the basis of action) deeply informs the leadership development program, the Trinity Leadership Fellows, that I’ve built.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Dream Big. In my work with Steve Schwarzman creating Schwarzman Scholars, a global leadership program based at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and with John Coatsworth, the Dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs during my final years at Columbia, both pushed me to set audacious goals and inspire other influential people to get on board with making something big happen. John Coatsworth inspired influential donors to liberate graduate students in international policy from crushing debt that prevented them from pursuing career paths in public service, massively expanding the scholarship endowment of Columbia’s international policy school.

Steve Schwarzman had a dream of building an educational space in China that would bring together young leaders from China with their peers from other countries to learn together in a blended Chinese and Western educational environment. His bold vision drew in movers and shakers from the political and educational spheres inside and outside China and made the Schwarzman Scholars program a success in a matter of a few years, with dynamic young leaders from around the world learning from their peers, and international leaders in government and business, at the heart of China’s top university.

Inspired by their boldness and capacity to get influential figures on board, a few years later, I worked with leaders in the Church and in education to build a Fellows program at Trinity Church in New York City that many people counseled would not be feasible. Seminary programs already existed to help faith leaders explore their theological and spiritual perspectives on the world, and ample secular leadership programs prepared people with practical skills and philosophical perspectives for successful leadership. Many people felt it wasn’t possible or even necessary to blend faith with practical leadership training.

But with tenacious networking and advice from the highest levels of the Church and from prominent figures in leadership training; with support from leadership at Trinity; and ultimately a welcome endorsement from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, we launched a leadership program that offers practical, grounded leadership and management skills, anchored in faith, to people who are inspired by their faith to serve their communities. The program is now thriving, with demand far outstripping space in each cohort and alumni regularly reporting back that the program has, in immeasurable ways, strengthened their capacity to serve.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

Adaptability.

Launching a new program in the midst of a global pandemic taught me valuable lessons in the importance of being adaptable. I arrived in my new role late in 2019 and hit the ground running in an environment where everyone was eager for quick results in launching a new and urgently needed leadership program.

When the pandemic hit early in 2020, all plans were, of course, thrown off and hit a wall. My impatient side anticipated a massive setback.

Instead, after the initial crisis in New York City was past, it became clear that shifting to new modes of working, communicating, and connecting had bought time and created a new level of comfort with digital forms of convening. This made it possible for us to consult, listen, and engage with people at all levels, people who might otherwise not have been consulted in a rapidly launched program.

We gained insights into the practical and people skills that faith leaders needed, we recognized the value of blended in-person and online leadership training, and we had time to design a more introspective, values- and people-focused leadership program than we might have otherwise done.