Heidi Brooks

How can organizations foster the new kind of leadership – adaptive, insightful and inherently human – required in today’s complex AI-driven world? According to Yale SOM senior lecturer Heidi Brooks, Ph.D., it’s vital to blend technological integration with the essential human qualities of empathy, creativity, and ethical decision-making. In this energizing and thoughtful presentation, Brooks offers an interactive blueprint for leading effectively in an era marked by both technological advancement and significant uncertainty. Going beyond practical use cases for AI, Brooks blends her insights from decades at the front lines of leadership education at the Yale School of Management to showcase how to integrate AI without losing sight of the human elements that underpin successful organizations. Managers emerge with the knowledge to transform uncertainty into a strategic advantage, fostering a workplace that values resilience, adaptability, and the courage to embrace technological paradigm shifts.

The scale, pace and complexity of modern institutions place demands on leaders that extend far beyond their trained subject matter expertise. Today’s managers are now stewards of dynamic workplace systems, and outdated ideas of management crafted in the 1950s often do not serve current organizational forms. According to Heidi Brooks, Ph.D., of the Yale School of Management, while administrating systems remains essential, the success of leadership increasingly hinges on meaning-making in a complex world, creating a sense of belonging in a divided world, and unleashing potential in a reactive world.

Everyday leadership is about impact through the way we lead and interact with others. Brooks, host of the transformational podcast Learning Through Experience, which is drawn from her top-rated Yale School of Management course “Everyday Leadership,” illustrates how we influence others in moments and micro-moments. By taking advantage of these key opportunities for “everyday impact,” leaders can unlock newfound collaboration and innovation within their organizations.

In engaging and thoughtful presentations that she customizes to suit any organization’s individual needs, Brooks reveals how to promote understanding of how and where these moments occur in our daily lives and how our everyday experience crafts our organizational culture and success. Highly flexible and responsive to individual organizational needs, she also discusses how to align interactions with values and intentions by crafting everyday moments that matter. An especially warm presenter, Brooks’ central focus is to increase the ability to understand and upgrade “everyday leadership” effectiveness while adding new skills and mindsets to leaders’ personal toolboxes.