Finding Your Voice: Holding Onto Your Values and Staying Curious with Shawn Hegele

Shawn Hegele, Director of Strategy and Evaluation at Brooklyn Workforce Innovations recently joined Cortney Stapleton to talk about what she learned from her time as a social worker, how she developed a ‘roll up your sleeves’ leadership style, and speaking with authenticity.

Below are highlights from their discussion.

Cortney Stapleton, CEO of The Bliss Group: Can you share some of the experiences or people who have had the biggest impact on shaping your career?

Shawn Hegele, Director of Strategy and Evaluation at Brooklyn Workforce Innovations: I’ve been very lucky to have great bosses throughout most of my career. I started out as a social worker and a woman named Tatisha West was my supervisor at a crisis shelter which helped young adults who were experiencing homelessness. The environment was always changing and the young people there were in crisis so there was a lot of opportunity for chaos. Tatisha was so skilled at not only managing crisis but preventing it. She did that through building relationships of mutual respect and being firm but fair. She applied some of those skills to how she was as a manager too and I still take away some of what I learned in that role today.

For the last 13 years, I’ve been at Brooklyn Workforce Innovations and I’ve worked with Aaron Schiffman, who’s our founding executive director. In that time, I’ve really developed my own leadership style that’s really modeled off of his, which is based on mutual respect, empowering people that are on your teams to really stretch and grow, and also rolling up your sleeves and helping them out if things go sideways.

I’ve taken so much from not only my bosses, but my colleagues and the people that I’ve worked with as a manager myself, and I’m constantly learning from them.

Cortney: At Bliss we talk a lot about delivering impact through insight. Can you share some of the insights that folks have given you that had a significant impact?

Shawn: The thing that feels most resonant for me is really the insights and the data that exists out there about disparities in the economy, which has driven the direction of my career towards workforce development. There’s no shortage of data out there that exemplifies the work that there is still to be done at any given time. The black unemployment rate is still double the white unemployment rate, for example, and that is despite four decades of real gains in education access. So, we’ve seen black Americans achieve college and higher education at higher rates, both in absolute terms and relative to white individuals, and we’re still not making enough of a difference – there’s still people that are really being left behind.

The work that we do at my organization and that so many of my peer organizations and workforce development organizations are doing is playing a really pivotal role in making sure that people are getting not only skills, which is what you get from a traditional learning environment, but the kinds of support they need – things like legal assistance and financial coaching and sometimes cash support – so that they can get interview clothes, or boots, or tools to be successful the first day on the job. Those are the types of things that I think are needed to really make a difference for many Americans that are being left behind by our current systems.

Cortney: What do you really think it takes to make a company truly purpose driven?

Shawn: Speaking with authenticity about this topic is very important. Brands must really stand behind what they’re saying. It is more important now, not only for our youngest consumers and workers, but for everyone. There’s more transparency about what businesses are doing and institutional trust is at historic lows. So, it’s a time when there is a lot of urgency to act and a lot of visibility on what companies are doing.

Some of the things that companies can do are pay more attention to who their leaders are, what they’re paying attention to, what rooms they are in, who they are inviting into those rooms, and where the budget is going. Our budgets are our plans, and I think that applies to both philanthropic dollars, but also supply chain and what sorts of businesses you are getting your goods and services from. I think a business’s practices as an employer are also important to pay attention to. We’re all being called to be better employers to our staff and there’s more visibility and more dialogue around that now than ever before.

Cortney: What advice would you give to someone starting out in their career who wants to make a difference in the world or just in their workplace? It doesn’t have to be in the impact space, but what are some things that you would tell them or even tell your younger self?

Shawn: hold on to your values but stay curious. I got such an important piece of advice early in my career from an early executive director I worked with, Anne Udall, who really called me out for approaching situations with advocacy when I needed to approach them with more inquiry. I still take that with me today and think about it frequently because it’s not always an easy thing to do. It can be more effective to get the full lay of the land before you start envisioning and advocating for solutions.

I’m pretty optimistic about the youngest generation of workers. I think there’s a lot of passion and ideas that are coming into the dialogue that we’re having about change and impact. I hope that they hold on to that, especially as they advance into leadership roles, and they grow their sphere of influence.

Cortney: Do you have a favorite quote or a mantra or even a favorite firm belief to leave our listeners with?

Shawn: The thing that has come back to me throughout my career is really finding your voice. I think it’s something that has been challenging for me, kind of coming into my own as a woman and a professional. It is really an important part of how I operate now. For example, I think for years I was attending meetings and then after the meeting I was asking colleagues questions that I should have asked in the room but didn’t. I decided over time that I needed to be the one asking the tough questions about what’s behind something or what the true purpose of something was so that I can move the conversation forward and move the needle.