Interview with Jill Garrett

Rachael Heffer, YFC, interviewed Jill Garrett for the Sophia Network

Tell us a bit about yourself
I live in Leamington Spa. I’m married with a daughter who is in her last year of university. In terms of leadership, I was a secondary head teacher in two very large secondary schools, the first when I was 31. I then moved to do leadership research with the Gallup Organisation and became their managing director for Europe. Eventually I left Gallup to work as a director of Leadership Development at Caret, where my job is coaching leaders as individuals or working with whole leadership teams and boards, helping them to be more effective in leading their organisations. I work with a whole mix of people and I love what I do!

What do you enjoy most about your work?
I love opportunities to see people rise to the challenges of leadership and to make a difference to the people that work for them - not just in their work but in their whole lives, because if work’s good then life as a whole feels good. But also to make a difference to the people that they are there to serve. If you do a really good job in your work, then not only your colleagues benefit, but your customers do as well

How has being a mother impacted your role as a leader?
One of the things that is really important is that leaders are real human beings. As life goes on, if we are really alert to what is going on around us, we can become more human, and more who God wants us to be. Motherhood exposed a whole area of emotion and experience that I never had before. I had my daughter, Laura, when I was still a head teacher and although I understood in my head, I never understood in my heart how passionately parents must feel about their children. I realised just how much they were trusting us when they brought their children to our school. It made me look at it in a very different light. Every stage that Laura’s been at helped me to be more aware of who I am, and to put myself in the shoes of other people who might not have had the experience.

I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve been able to work all the time. I just had six weeks off work when I had Laura, and then my husband left work to look after her. I became the main breadwinner and he stayed at home until Laura was 16. That kind of role swap is more common now, but going back into the mid 1980s, it was quite an unusual thing to do. We’d always felt that it was right with God, even though there were some raised eyebrows at church about the man that wasn’t the main breadwinner. It seemed to both of us that this is how God had made us and we were really happy with the decision that we had made. I’ve always worked hard to get that work/life blend right. I do work very long hours, but my family is a key priority – not just Laura, but my Dad and I have a sister who’s in a Mencap home in Warwick, and she comes home to my house for half a day a week. I adore being her sister. Then my brother was 11 when my Mum had a brain haemorrhage; she was in her mid-40s and then she was in hospital for 23 years, so I brought my brother up as well.

I think all those life experiences help to make you a better leader, because leaders need to be in touch with life. I also think it helps to put work into perspective. Nothing that happens at work is ever going to be as urgent as my Mum’s brain haemorrhage.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in your working life, and some of the biggest opportunities?
I think in some ways those life experiences have been great opportunities. I was just 26 when my brother came to live with us, and suddenly I was mum to a secondary-aged child. I became a head of year within six months of that at a school with 420 children in each year group so it was like having your own small school. I found that I absolutely loved it and I got on very well with the deputy head, who invested a lot of time in my growth and development. As Christians, we can miss the amount of time that Jesus invested in his disciples so that when he wasn’t there they were ready. That man invested so much time in me; through him I grew and developed and very quickly moved into a deputy headship, and then became a head teacher at a very early age. It was that mixture of life experience and being trusted with responsibility and being invested in – some of it was probably before I was naturally ready for it. But you see that with the disciples, don’t you, they were trusted with that responsibility of going out and healing people probably before they felt ready. It really stretched me.

My first headship was in an absolutely great school. It was a hard school but I had great staff. It seemed to me that if you took people with you, if you looked after your staff and excited them about the difference that they could make to the children then the school was going to be a much healthier place.

Did you feel that you had different leadership gifts or a different style of leadership to the men that you were working alongside?
I don’t know that I would make a distinction between men and women actually. There weren’t many women in senior posts in schools, quite frankly. I never thought about being a woman or about my age; I was just someone who was doing my job. The male/female thing didn’t enter into it. The hardest rung of the ladder is to get your first deputy headship and that was the point at which my gender was a real advantage. Not many women go for deputy headships, but they need a female deputy in a large school; so I got the first job that I applied for and that was because I was a woman; I’m under no illusion about that! The very first thing I was asked to do was to organise speech day and to do the flowers, and they didn’t ask me again because I was hopeless at that. I said that I’d organise a rota so that we could all have a go at the flowers!

Being a woman has never been a problem in leadership for me. When I moved to the commercial sector, in Gallup, it wasn’t an issue really. I might be unusual, but I have never really found being a woman a problem. If anything, it got me on the ladder very quickly. I think perhaps what was different was that my husband was prepared to say let’s look at who does what best, and lets shape our lives and our roles around that. It’s not a complete role swap. I don’t know how to put oil in the car and I certainly don’t do the garden. I don’t do the food shopping – Phil does that – but I do all the present shopping, so each of us has tried to work out the partnership by working with who we are.

Was that a decision that you made in your marriage early on, and has that changed at different times?
We’ve both tried to release each other to fulfil different roles. If it was up to me we’d live in the middle of a town in a tall terraced house, but that’s not who Phil is. He loves the countryside and he loves craft, so we live in a village and we’ve always looked for a workshop that has a house attached. I’m not at home very much so in a sense he needs to be comfortable with where we live much more than I do. We’ve been married for 36 years so it must be working!

What are some of the main changes that you’ve seen for women in leadership over the last 10 or 15 years?
Increasingly, it’s becoming easier to be yourself. There was a period in the 80s and 90s when women tried to behave as they thought leaders should behave which was very male – all padded shoulders and toughness! Increasingly, and research has shown this to be the case, there’s a recognition that you do your best when you’re you - when you work with the grain of who God has made you. For me, emotion and being a real human being have always been a very important part of being a leader. I’ve always tried to build friendships with people in the workplace. To me there’s never been a contradiction between being tough and being a friend. You couldn’t be a parent if discipline and love didn’t work together. As time has gone on, women in work are more comfortable to be women and to be who they are, but I think that’s true for men as well. A lot of leadership research, particularly by Jim Collins, talks about the importance of humility; that wasn’t something that you saw in the 1980s and 1990s when leadership was very egocentric. That’s not the case now

What’s brought about that change?
There’s a lot of really good research that has gone on, helped by technology. The reason that the business world leads the way is that it’s easy to get the crunchy numbers. If you do good research in God’s world, then it only ever shows you what God said anyway. The mixture of humility and determination is actually just a mirror of what you see in Christ, alongside vulnerability and courage. Sometimes we make false distinctions between business and church; they are all organisations which are just groups of people. Leaders are those who influence people to follow them. Every organisation will be different, but there are common things that are required like honesty, integrity, being comfortable to be who you are, thinking about how can I really engage and enthuse people, how can I show them that I respect them, that their views matter, and how can we give them a vision of where we want to be.

What positive things do women have to contribute to leadership?
Because of the way women have socialised, it’s ok to show emotion. Women who get to leadership are usually people who work pretty hard and who have emotional intelligence. Increasingly there’s a lot of evidence to show the difference that emotional intelligence makes. It’s that mixture of humanity, humility and iron determination to make a difference. There’s a generation in leadership now who didn’t see much of their parents, or whose parents split up because of high-powered and high-pressured jobs. I think there’s a real reaction against that and a call for a different work/life blend. Because of the expectations that society puts on women, they are much more challenged by how to get that work/life blend right. I think it’s easier for men to get away with not getting that blend right. So women in leadership model what people would like to see, often better than men do.

And are bosses allowing space for that, or is there still a culture of very long hours?
It varies hugely, but not being stressed makes a huge difference to the way we work. Real talent is getting shorter in supply and people can choose where they want to work; they want to know that they will be well managed, they are looking for flexibility. I think women role model this more obviously than men. As a secondary school head with a primary school daughter, I was very overt about having time off to go to Laura’s school plays because I wanted my staff to see that that’s what I wanted them to do. I expect some male heads would have done exactly the same, but they might not have been so deliberate and overt about it. People welcomed it. Men on the staff would talk to me about their children and what was going on at home, perhaps in a way that they wouldn’t have done with a male head, certainly in the 80s and 90s, because it wasn’t so much the done thing.

Women often bring a more holistic approach to their work or ministry.
Yes, that’s right because society expects us to manage so much more and we have to juggle different areas of our lives. There are lots of things around at the moment that are more in favour of a gentler approach to leadership, a more humane and human approach to leadership. Research has shown, for example, that employees are more likely to stay engaged at work when they are able to say that ‘my manager cares about me as a person, not just as a worker.’

What challenges does that present to men?
There’s a lot more pressure on men to get to the top, than there is on women. Even though I am a Christian I understand the responsibility of being the breadwinner, which most women haven’t experienced. That pressure takes you up to another level in terms of needing to perform well, because it’s not just about the organisation, but it’s about the family that I need to house as well. I think men are under more pressure all the time. It’s only in the last 10 to 15 years that people have started to rate the importance of emotional intelligence – Daniel Goldman’s books came out in 1998 – and it shows the difference that emotionally aware people make. Most men in leadership now, those who are 40 plus, didn’t have their formative time when people were talking about those things. If we look 20 years down the road, we might find a whole different attitude to leadership among men. It takes a long time; I belong to a generation that’s not been good at passing leadership on early. I think the church in particular has been very guilty of that. People have got into leadership and they have not been prepared to multiply and become leaders of leaders; they have wanted to do all the leading themselves. If you look at an organisation like Al-Qaeda, one of the things that it’s brilliant at is decentralised leadership. If Bin Laden were to die, would it make a difference? Probably not. All the research shows that by giving away leadership, and that’s exactly what Jesus did – he retained the responsibility but gave away the authority – you multiply your impact. I feel it’s easier for women to do that in a societal sense, because women are brought up to expect that they will invest in people and listen. It’s not hard to translate that into the workplace.

Is there a certain style of leadership that is prevalent in the church at the moment?
I think that many of the people who have become prominent spokespeople or leaders in the church are very good speakers. Speaking and vision are very close first cousins. Therefore I think there is an over emphasis on vision. You don’t need lots of visionaries or lots of vision; what you do need are people who will get the show on the road, who will give those ideas legs, and look at what it means on the ground and the processes and systems and structures that need to be in place.

I’m not sure that people who are really good at nurturing and growing and pasturing get nearly enough recognition. In the Bible, although he did grow Timothy, Paul probably wasn’t a great developer. He was very much a go out there and get it kind of person. He drove a motorbike or sports car, not a people carrier. But Barnabas was different. If there hadn’t been a Barnabas we would never have got a Mark’s gospel. I think Paul himself would never have got to where he got without Barnabas. I don’t think we do enough recognising of people like Barnabas or of developing them. And yet Jesus spent so much of his three-year ministry on growing the disciples. People who are naturally pastoral or developers of people are not usually the people who get onto platforms or who talk or write about leadership.

What are the biggest threats to women succeeding in ministry or leadership?
I’m very conscious that women often have to have time out to look after their families Therefore it’s likely that women rise to leadership later, and bring a maturity and I think that ageism is a terrible thing. Because people are going to live for longer and be healthy for longer, I think women will have the capacity to give and give and give longer than they have in the past. Ageism is not restricted to gender, but it’s the new sexism and we need to watch it. Women are at a disadvantage if they are taking time out to have children, but as I’ve said, having a family adds to your emotional intelligence and to your capacity to be a better leader.

Another threat is that women still don’t have the networks. There’s no doubt at all that being well-networked helps you to get to where you need to get to. By the time you’re my age you have lots of networks, but women tend not to be as well networked as men. I think they need help with networking.

Why do you think that is?
I just don’t think that they exist. If you look around London at the number of men’s clubs that there are, and then the number of women’s clubs… It’s starting to happen, but because of history men have got a very big start on women.

Therefore, and this is my last thing, women who are my age have a bigger responsibility than men, to grow the next generation of women, because there are more men in leadership who can grow other men and there are fewer women. Women are often more comfortable working with other women. It can be harder for younger women working with older men in that mentoring role. I hope that my generation of women would be generous in terms of the amount of time they can invest in young women.

What do you think are the training needs for women in ministry and leadership?
There are two very different approaches to this. Coaching opportunities for women are important, as they are for men. Every leader needs the opportunity for someone to invest in their particular style of leadership and their unique gifts. You can only lead being who you are; you can’t lead being who you are not. Having one on one time to build and develop that is quite important.

The other thing is that all the people I see who are visionaries and who are recognised on the platform… there aren’t many women. How many women evangelists can you name? I can’t believe that God hasn’t put those women there. They just don’t seem to have the opportunities. So if we spot young women in evangelism, we really need to go with them.

I’ve talked about four areas of leadership: Process and systems; pastoring; values; speaking and visioning. Only the last of those is really valued and you don’t see many women there, so they aren’t considered to be leaders. That for me would be the area of focus in the church. I think women do some great pastoring, but are not recognised as leaders because pastoring and disciple growing is not recognised as a leadership activity. Visioning is over-egged but not many women have those opportunities.

We need to spot the young women who have the ability to present. Bring together a group of young people and ask them to present on anything – how to wrestle a crocodile – and you’ll see who can do it. We’re not looking for the right things.

What’s your closing word of advice to young women in ministry.
To be really optimistic about the future opportunities for evangelism in the UK, for women and for men. I think we’re thinking very differently about evangelism and discipleship than in the last 50 years. The sacred/secular divide is beginning to tumble; whether you are in the workplace, school, home, there are opportunities for you to lead in the place God has put you.

Also it is becoming culturally acceptable to be real about who you are, in the way that it wasn’t a generation ago. I would encourage young women to go down that self-awareness route, to recognise who they are and to work alongside other people to manage that and to give their best for God.