How Empathy, Efficiency, and Effectiveness Create Impact with Rob Foley

Jul 10

“It’s more than being ‘nice’. It’s being genuinely interested in people, and I think that’s a posture. ”

— Rob Foley

Today on Beyond the Bar, Abby interviews Rob Foley, a multi-passionate leader, learner, and entrepreneur. He'll be sharing his educational, professional, and entrepreneurial journey from seminary to charcuterie boards, all the while giving practical insight on...

- living a humble and inquisitive life

- how effective and empathetic leadership propels meaningful work

- the importance of catalyzing resonance wherever you're at

“Our effectiveness is found in relationship with Christ, and Christ is the way that we are able to understand our most effective design.”

— Rob Foley

Read the Podcast

Intro: Welcome to Beyond the Bar, the podcast where coffee and conversation are a catalyst for growth. If you’ve been searching for that coffee-with-a-friend experience that leaves you feeling seen, met, and encouraged, you’ve come to the right place. So grab your cup, listen up, and together we’re going Beyond the Bar.

Abby: Hey friends, welcome to Beyond the Bar, I’m your host Abby. Today’s episode I’m extremely looking forward to, so I’m just gonna dive right into it and introduce you to our guest, Rob Foley.

Rob: Good to be here.

Abby: Thanks for coming on the show! I think that this episode is super funny if people knew the backstory so I’m just going to share it because this came about from us just bumping into each other around town and having a really fantastic conversation and then me being like, “Hey, this is kind of random, but would you be on a podcast that I’m starting?

Rob: Yeah, that’s exactly how it went.

Abby: So this is kind of fun because it’s pretty much capturing like, what happened naturally, and actually bringing it Beyond the Bar, so thanks for being here.

Rob: It’s great to be here. When you described what you’re doing, I wanted to be a part of it.

Abby: Thank you…

Rob: So thanks for having me.

Abby: Yeah. I think the best place to start would be, if you could just explain a little bit about who you are, your background, so people can get to know you a tiny bit.

Rob: Sure, so we live in Spooner, but we moved here not quite two years ago. My wife grew up here, her family’s still here, and we moved here from Denver, Colorado, where we lived for about 15 years and so we’re still, you know, there’s a lot we’re still figuring out about the transition here about a life in a smaller rural community. But I was raised in New Orleans, so I have a city background; my educational background, I have a bachelor’s in the humanities, so a combination of kind of philosophy, theology, political science, English literature, art, those kinds of things. And I think we’ll jump into that a little bit farther down the road. I have a master’s in theology that was earned at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. And then I’m currently working on a master’s in organizational leadership through Creighton University. And, uh, my wife Leah and I have been married for 17 years, we have three kiddos, age five, seven, and nine, and that’s who I am first and foremost, but so, my professional background… I worked for 15 years in the nonprofit world and then also higher education administration. I was the Dean of Students at Denver Seminary for five years and then before that was a part of the Department of Student Life there at Denver Seminary. And right before COVID hit, actually, I had expressed to Leah that I think I just needed a change. I needed a break from that.

So we switched roles, I became our at-home parent, and I started to launch into entrepreneurial endeavors. I restore vintage mid-century furniture and I still do that and just recently formalized that under the name Vintage ReNew. And then most recently I’ve added artisanal charcuterie boards and serving boards to that. So that’s kind of a nutshell of who I am and what I’ve been doing.

Abby: I’m really excited to get into it because there’s so much there. So I’d like to start with kind of the beginning: how did you go from being a kid in New Orleans, you said?

Rob: Yes.

Abby: …to deciding to go for those specific degrees. Because you don’t hear of a lot of people being like, “I’m passionate about that.”

Rob: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I have to give a big nod to my father, he was a leader, is a leader, but professionally- he’s retired now- but was, was a leader within his own right and what he did. We moved from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama when I was in high school. So he became a university president of a small Christian liberal arts school. I ended up going to that school and by that point in my life, given my background being raised in the church, and by that I mean the evangelical Protestant expression of church, I developed a pretty deep appreciation for church culture and values and practices. And I was drawn to explore the human experience through a different lens. And that turned out to be the humanities. So questions about meaning and purpose, how ought we to live were really starting to stand out to me. And around that time, too, I started to make a lot of critical observations about the church culture that, that I was raised in, and that I was still part of. Critical observations about cultural practices, leadership within church structures… a lot of questions started to surface. Like how beliefs bring people together but also push people away. What are the assumptions and presumptions that churches are making bout who they are and about the people who are not part of it? How does the story of Jesus get conveyed by those who are telling it and how is it being received by those who are hearing it?

So, graduated from college, started to work for- this is gonna date me- that was Singular Wireless, back then, now AT&T, selling cell phones, and I saw in that work an opportunity to kind of survey people, survey my customers, so for those who seemed open to it I just started asking them questions, open-ended questions. Like “What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘church’?” Or same question except, “Christian” or “Christianity”; “What does faith mean to you?” And I would ask follow-up questions based on their responses and that really provided me with a perspective about how things that were important to me were being perceived by the general marketplace. So that’s really the, was the primary provocation for pursuing theology. I wanted to be a bridge between the church and the marketplace. And so I went on to study theology.

Now fast forward, I mentioned I worked 15 years in nonprofit and higher education. And this gets into what prompted me to study leadership, which has kind of always been a part of my life, given my dad’s roles nd what I was able to observe from him and that, you know, inspired me to be curious about. But it just was part of systems and led by people along the spectrum of effectiveness, from strong and healthy to poor and weak. So I’ve felt the exhilaration of good leadership and I’ve felt the sting of bad leadership. And I want more of the first. And I want to part of cultivating healthy, good, effective leaders and leadership within organizations. So taking from my experience, I want it to be equipped more formally to do that, and so that’s what’s led me to studying organizational leadership.

Abby: I love that. There’s so many questions I have with all you just said, but I’d like to start by going back to, you talked bout kind of starting to get questioning of the culture you grew up in, but it doesn’t sound like that really came out of like, rebellion, or, or like, lack of belief in what you had been raised in. It sounds like it just came out of like genuine curiosity and an ability to believe in something but then step back from it and wand perspective on it. Could you speak to that a little bit because I think that’s really rare. You don’t hear about that frequently.

Rob: Well I think when you believe in something at a gut level, it’s hard for you to step away from it and turn your back on it and it’s easier to assume it can be more effective, and that’s, I guess, the posture I took toward church life and church culture. Being a Christian in general, there’s a lot to it. It’s complex and also very simple, right? Follow Christ. But there’s a lot of complexity to that. People have a wide swath of beliefs that we’re trying to dissect and tease our way through from a day-to-day basis. So I wanted to understand how then the church and me, how I could be more effective at helping people to connect with purpose and meaning, which I believe is found in relationship with Christ. But in order for people to listen, I think they have to be heard And so I wasn’t observing a lot of that in the church structure and culture that I was part of. There’s a lot of interest on telling, and I think there still is. So I started to pursue people, voices, authors that started to explain and explore what it looked like to take a posture of asking good questions and listening, not just with your ears, but with your heart. And that’s how I believe you draw people out: you create resonance, and then you position yourself in a way that they might want to hear your story too. So I guess that’s, that’s how I approached what I was observing in the church. I just wanted it to be more effective, and I wanted to be more effective in my affiliation with it.

Abby: I think that that is incredible in itself, because again, I think a lot of people can get frustrated by issues they see, and some people just become frustrated and like that’s where it stops. There’s no… they’re not doing anything to be a part of positive change. They’re not asking themselves any hard questions of, “Am I participating in the problem?” And so there’s, there’s a lot of times where people can just, they can see issues but they just stay there and they just become like almost an echo chamber of those frustrating issues, which solves nothing. So I love that from a very young age, even though you had grown up in something and you weren’t doubting it, you just, like you said, were like, “How do I make this more effective? How do I be more effective?” And then you took a dramatic career path with, you know, a lot of education and a lot of, you put yourself in positions where you could learn that, even if it was selling cell phones.

Rob: Yeah, well hopefully I have. No, I think that, you know, there’s opportunities to be uncovered wherever you are, and the greatest source of information around us is other people. And so the way to mine for that information is to ask questions nd often open-ended questions. Invite people to give their perspective. I have found when people are asked questions about things that they might have input on, it helps them to feel valued and validated as someone who has something to offer. And as I later discovered, there’s gentleman whose books I’ve really appreciated, he’s kind of “the guy” in organizational psychology, his name is Edgar Schein, and he’s written a series of books with the title, with the notion of being humble. There’s humble leadership, there’s humble consulting, but the book that really stood out to me is a book he’s titled “The Humble Inquiry”, and the subtitle is “The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling”, and I thought that that, I mean, that just resonated deeply with me in terms of it helped to make sense of the things that I observed about the culture that I’d been part of. What I felt, felt, didn’t know, but felt, were obstructions to creating resonance between people groups, and so when I discovered his work, I just dove into it, and, and it connects with a lot of the stuff that I’m continuing to learn in the program I’m in right now.

Abby: Yeah, yeah. So in, you, you did the theology, Master’s in theology first, which led you to the school where you had a position there in an administration and was kind of the Dean of Students, so you were highly involved in an organizational structure; like you have a background in dealing with people and being a leader. Could you talk bout that a little bit, in your experience there?

Rob: Sure. So my role really was in- I’ve kind of broken down into three dimensions. One was management, the other is consulting, and the other is administration. The management part of it was, I managed the team, I managed the student life department. So that was bout four employees and another handful of student workers and dozens of volunteers. Denver Seminary, on one hand, is a smaller school comparatively to a lot of, you know, like a state school, but it’s a large seminary- about a thousand students- and so we kind of lived in that purgatory realm of never having enough funding or resources to do what we needed to do but making the most of what we did have. And so I managed that team and we provided all the extra-curricular and some co-curricular services and activities for students. We managed the chapel program, REZ Life, all of the resources online that addressed what students would typically struggle with and obstruct their successful progression through school. Ultimately, we didn’t want students to drop out, we wanted them to achieve their goals, but we also wanted them to perhaps take a break if they needed to, and we were there to help guide them through that. The consulting part was, my role as Dean of Students was, I was the person that sat across from students in a one-on-one type of situation who were experiencing crises or struggles at a deeper level. I was the person to help create plans or pathways for them in an individualized way that would help them continue through school, so a lot of that fell into the realm of, you know, personal loss if there was a death in the family, if there was deep vocational questions they had or struggles with their faith; anything and everything that would fall into that catagory. And then administration was then part of the organization. That’s where I was part of a lot of executive level meetings, think groups of how to strategically tackle an issue the school was facing… I also managed international students and I processed their documents for them to come into the states and study. I was part of the Title IX team, so adjudicated a lot of grievances and any disciplinary issues that might have come up. So it was, yeah, it was a wide swath of things.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: And now, looking back, when you’re in it, you’re just doing it. And then when you’re out of it, you look back and go, man, that was, yeah, I had really cool opportunity to be a part of some interesting facets of an organization.

Abby: Which now, as you’re studying organizational leadership, what cool perspective? ‘Cause you didn’t just have management experience, you didn’t just have relational experience or strategy or, you know, like you said, administration, which are- all become different facets of operating teams of facilitating relationships and they come with different, like total different things to consider. So you maybe, you probably didn’t know at the time, but at the time you were really getting like practical training before you went on to study that.

Rob: Definitely. As I mentioned a little earlier, my work in non-profit, five years I spent with a non-profit group called the Christin Ministry in the National Parks, and then the 10 years I spent at Denver Seminary, it was kind of almost like a master’s in itself, right? And I think anytime you’re in an organization, if you open your eyes, open your ears, and try to learn and extract anything you can from what’s happening around you, you learn from it. And just like anywhere you go, there’s, there’s good leadership and there can also be bad leadership. Even good leaders can make bad decisions sometimes. So I don’t mean to just categorically say, you know, this person was a bad leader and this person was a good leader. People without a lot of leadership experience can make incredible decisions and healthy decisions. I think that there are patterns that people demonstrate that put them in the catagory for me as maybe being more effective than others, and those are the leaders that create resonance on teams; synergy among the people who work together. There’s also an individualized response to healthy leaders. At least in my experience, the healthiest leaders that I’ve been under helped to create a sense of efficacy for me. And I guess what I mean by that is, I was able to see the value of my work and the meaning in it and I wanted to be part of it more and more and more, versus the times I’ve been in situations where the systems haven’t really been all that effective or the leadership structure hasn’t been effective. That' disintegrates synergy, disintegrates efficacy. It, kind of, the, the validation and the meaning that you’re able to find in your work. So yeah, to your question, those are all the things that I was, I was in, and part of, and so now as I’m out of it and doing this program, I certainly look back and extract a lot from those experiences,

Abby: Yea, I’ve done, or I’ve been in the process as I’ve been in the role in a smaller sense of leading some people. I mean, I have a small, small team, but then just trying from the beginning to go, “Well, how do I be an effective leader and how do I lead different people and different personalities?” ‘cause that comes with different things. And one of those things in spending some time reading and researching is that they say that today’s workers and the generations that coming up, they need to understand why they’re doing something. They need to be motivated by it. So to kind of speak to that, at least what I’ve read, that’s like really important if you’re gonna be a leader in today’s culture. It’s no longer about just going in and checking in and getting a paycheck and leaving. It’s about, like, “I want to be, I want to see the bigger purpose in this.” Nd if I don’t and I don’t feel it, then I’m going someplace else.

Rob: Yep, yeah. If you can’t see me, I’m nodding, very. Yeah, you’re hitting on something that is all over the leadership literature and scholarship right now, and again, I go back to Edgar Schein. The books he’s written hit on that. Humble Leadership actually and Humble Inquiry. He dissects relationships into different tiers or levels, and one of the levels he addresses is the, kind of the classical transactional leadership that was what you’re talking about: you go to work, you’re paid to do something, and we expect you to do it, and that’s the transaction. We get the benefit of you doing it, you get the paycheck, right, transactional. And he’s arguing that, just like you said, that’s evolving, and in many ways has already evolved. I men, I’m Exhibit A, and for me in my life that’s what I wanted.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: That’s what’s propelled me along in my journey, is, I want to be connected with meaningful work. I want to, I want to know that I’m involved in something very purposeful and that goes beyond the transactional level.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: So, I think that that’s something that is incredibly important. It’s definitely worth pursuing and studying. Anyone who wants to be part of leading or managing, I think, has to be open to that reality.

Abby: Yeah. I’d be curious about your perspective on this because I think one of the things that I’ve come up against is, as you’re diving into all of this, or this, this has been my experience, is you’re going, “Okay, well…” I’ve always had a much more like relational bent than I would say I’ve had s much strategic. And so as you start getting into how to be a good CEO, how to be aa good leader, how to run a company, you start to hear a lot about strategy, a lot about systems, a lot about operations, which feels counterintuitive and productive sometimes to relationships. But then you read that the most effective, the most successful are the ones who are very strategic, very systemized, and relational, which I feel like you can speak to, so I would just be curious on that integration and how you do it well.

Rob: That’s a great question. If it was easy to figure out, I don’t think there’d be so many books out there about it (Abby laughs). So let me maybe speak from my experience at seminary. I was in charge of a lot of policy and procedure, right? So students would come to my office or be sent to my office if they were running up against something, they were maybe making a request, or something they did was in violation or challenged the established policies and procedures of the school. A lot of the times, also, students would come into my office and explain how they got a type of response, a certain response from another area of the school that simply quoted what the policy was. There wasn’t personability behind it. And as they came into my office, I discovered quickly that I was able to get a lot farther with them if I didn’t start with what the policy was or the procedure, but that I sat with them and listened to what was going on. Again, I kind of mentioned earlier, you listen with your ears but also your heart. So there’s- the study of empathy is gaining momentum, I think, in the realms of leadership and management, and it ties into emotional intelligence. And empathy is one of the four domains of emotional intelligence and I found that I would eventually be able to pull policy and procedure out, but because of the resonance that I created by sitting and listening and asking follow-up questions and clarifying questions, once again, the person across from me felt heard and they felt validated. Maybe they were still not right and they still couldn’t do what they wanted to do, but they were much more open to receiving that answer or that feedback. And so I think, I think being empathic and having an empathetic posture might kind of help a leader fit into that middle ground, because at the end of the day, if you are responsible for managing policy and procedure and strategy, you have to be able to say, “Thus far we’ve come and no further.” Like, “Sorry, we can’t do that,” or, “Hey, we need to do this. We have to go this way.” Teams that have experienced leadership where they can, they’ve been able to connect with their leader or their manager in a way that has been empathic where they feel that they’ve been heard, I think, you know, think of your own life. Are you more inclined to join up or follow someone who’s done that or someone who just tells you what to do all the time?

Abby: Right.

Rob: You know?

Abby: Right.

Rob: So I think that’s an important part also, of finding that balance of a leader between the people you’re managing and where you need to go.

Abby: Yes, yes. I love what you said about empathy because I think that’s so true, like you have to care about the person first. You see that everywhere in anything you read about leadership. The counter to that, and I know sometimes my own tendency is, the busier you get, the more pressure there is to accomplish things, the less, you know, what feels like competent workers are available. Like, all these things of, the less dollars you have, you know, you kind of said that like, you’re, you’re up against so much sometimes. And there’s only a limited amount of time in the day and empathy takes time.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: And being in relationship takes so much more time than pulling out the policy book and being like, “Well, this is the policy, so it’s a no,” and then like, or, “You were wrong,” and then like, like, “Let’s just move on.” It’s probably not the best option, but I so understand the bent to want to do that, because it’s so much more efficient. Maybe not effective, but sometimes it feels so much more efficient, at least in your calendar.

Rob: Yeah. Well I think the two words you just used there- efficient and effective- I would argue that efficiency can often be a greatest enemy of effectiveness in some ways, right? Efficiency is more aligned with productivity. Effectiveness isn’t always productivity, necessarily, and I think we’ve come in our society to really join those two words.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: Where effectiveness is, I believe, goes much deeper. Productivity can be a byproduct of effectiveness, but effectiveness goes into values, it goes into how a culture is being cultivated, etc. etc. So yes, productivity is certainly one aspect, and certainly if you’re part of an organization, there’s a line, and I don’t know ow you draw this line. At least for me, it was kind of more of a feeling. If we just weren’t getting something done and we needed to poke, right? Like, I needed to poke the dragon, so to speak. Like, “Hey, look, we got to get going.” But my effectiveness in getting my team jolted was always a result of the effort I had put in to relate to them personally. Without that, the poking the dragon, I don’t know that it always then produces an effective outcome or the results that you’re looking for. But when people feel like their work is meaningful, they’re better. At least me, I say they, I’m better able to receive constructive criticism or feedback that may point to the fact, “I need to do a better job.” Okay, well let’s do it. You know, let’s jump into it. But if I’m always being told what to do or there hasn’t been formed a relationship between me and the person who’s managing me, I find that I dig in my heels a bit. I’m much more resistant to that change.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: The other thing that, as you brought up, right, we’re all juggling a lot. So this kind of gets into “how is change created…” or even progress, you know, attained, when you get so busy. There’s another book, I guess, two brothers, Chip and Dan Health, they’ve written, I would recommend reading anything that they have. They’ve written several books, one called Switch. And in that book, they address this idea of change. Something they wrote that really stands out in my memory bank is that “change is hard because people are tired.” And so what often looks like resistance to change or laziness is often exhaustion. And so that was, that reminds me that there’s also a perspective that I have to take as someone on the side of the table that’s trying to know, like, “Why isn’t change happening? Why isn’t change-” I can get frustrated or impatient with it and it might be because people are just juggling a lot, and so if I’m busy, the last thing I want to hear is like, “I have to do something that’s a really big change.” It just feels too overwhelming. But if someone comes to me with more of an incremental change, I can do that. I can do that. And incrementalism is a strategy within change process. And so as I think of a community, maybe, let’s take, for instance, as a community, a lot of people are doing a lot of things, they’re stretched, they’re thin. There’s a lot of juggling. So of course, when I think of what something can be in my ideal world, I start with the big idea. But that’s overwhelming. So how do you create, you know, how do you create resonance with this vision for change? Then you break it down into incremental steps that people can digest and it’s much more palatable. And Abby, I would say a lot of the work you’re doing, I mean, I would highlight you in our community as someone who’s taking incremental steps that over time accumulate into a large change. And it happens as you’re doing it and you often don’t see it until you look back and you go, “Wow, we’ve come a long way.”

Abby: Thank you.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: Thank you, I appreciate it. It’s definitely my heart and passion, similarly. So when we start talking about change and making an impact, ‘cause I think going back to what you said about like, effective and efficiency, effectiveness, I think is tied to impact. Efficiency really isn’t as much. Like, you can be really efficient at something and it doesn’t mean it had any impact. Just because I like efficiently did it or I did it really quickly. But effectiveness is significantly tied to impact, and one of the things I’m passionate about and Redemption is built around is this idea of impact. Coffee is kind of our foundation, community is how we go about it, and then impact is the goal, which we had talked about when we bumped into each other of like, “Yeah, I want to be a part of that.” I think it’s really easy to be somebody who, like you said, wants to be about positive change, but when you are changing anything or trying to fight for change, there’s resistance that comes up to it and so that process can be difficult and it’s been difficult for me. I’m from this town, like I didn’t really ever live super far anywhere else, I’m from here, born and raised here practically, and decided this is where I wanted to like, plant my roots and do my business, and not because I thought my business was going to be the most efficient here.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: I actually didn’t know if it was gonna be effective here either. But I wanted to be about impact in this place because I care about these people, and I think when change is tied to relationship, like you said, that’s where you can see, it’s maybe not efficient, but I think it can in the long term, like you said, be effective and that’s been the goal, is, “I care about these people.” I care about them. It’s why I picked here. That was the reason. It wasn’t because it had all of the perfect things even to make my business necessarily successful. I could go do it someplace else and I know it would be more successful in dollars. I know that. I’m not sure if the impact would be as successful, but because for me it was about relationship and it was about seeing change and being a part of change, but that’s just hard.

Rob: Yeah, I’m, again, if there, if it was very easy there wouldn’t be so many books about change. I know it’s a fun little experiment is to go on Amazon and type in, you know, “change process”, or, you know, Google books about change. It’s, I mean, so many are out there, have been written, they continue to be written, so it’s, there’s not a formula to it, right? Relationships aren’t a formula. I think they’re our best practices, but you’re exactly right, it’s hard, and it’s something that, you know, I’m grappling with every day, is, how do you create change. I think at the end of the day we need each other, and you’re exactly right, impact is the result of effectiveness. But relationships are how we are guided through that process. As I think about, at least my educational background: humanities, theology, leadership… that’s a rubric, I guess, that I’ve pursued towards effectiveness. So, human- let’s start with theology. Theology teaches us, it’s about the eminence of God. What His design is. Humanities, it reveals how people have reached for that design through literature, art, music, the written word, performance, right? There’s, it’s all around us. People are reaching for significance, for design, for meaning. Leadership, I would argue, effective leadership is what catalyzes the intersection of those two things. And so, you, that involves people. It’s relationships. And sometimes people just need a partner to show them what beauty looks like.

And once again, I would say, I would point to what you’re doing, the relationships and the community aspect of what you’re doing. It may not feel like big change process to you; but what you’re doing is you’re creating environments that offer people a different perspective, but they’re also experiencing it together. The literature would argue, and I’m really paraphrasing here and reducing this down, something complex down to really simple here, but culture is formed from shared experiences. And so if a leader or any person, you might not think of yourself as a leader, but if you’re wanting to change culture, if you’re aiming to, right? What I would argue, how do you get people to care who seem to not care? That’s a cultural, that’s a cultural thing.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: And it takes a lot of time to change, but how do you change that? You create formats, platforms, and environments where people can have shared experiences, and as a leader, you format those experiences to champion the change that you want to see happen. So I would argue the bright spots have to be celebrated. In this community, in Spooner recently, a gentleman, Ryan McKinney, was, he won a national teacher’s award. He’s the PE coach at our middle, middle school. I mean, that, that is amazing.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: That is a bright spot that needs to be celebrated extravagantly because he is representing, he’s representative of something that we want to have happen in this community. So that’s an example of how do you celebrate that.

Abby: One of the things I love about that specifically you bring up, and I’ve known Ryan, Mr. McKinney, but I’ve known of him and stuff and one of the things that I think, you need to celebrate the large successes, but I think it’s easy to see those sometimes and then go, “Well, that was one-in-a-million little moments that were in relationship,” and so like, it’s easy sometimes to see people doing the bi thing and go, “Wow,” like, “they’re just so talented,” or “they’re just so awesome,” and people just follow them. And it’s like, Ryan lives his life in little moments of serving people and being about positive change. He has started like multiple programs at the Spooner Middle School. He’s fundraised for money. Like, I’ve seen him manage and dive into middle school boys’ traumas and situations and, and love on them. He’s a coach for like everything you possibly could be. So like, you start looking at his life, not just the moment, and like, yes, celebrate the moment. But when you start breaking that down and you look at his life, you go, “No, this person is like, ‘In the little things, I will be about positive change.’” And a lot of that is never glorified. A lot of that is never recorded, or sometimes praised.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: You know, you don’t even necessarily get a thank-you for all of those things, but it leads up to that. And so it’s like, if you want that moment of impact? Which he got and by all means deserved, but if you want that and you want to be that kind of person and make that kind of impact in your community or in your, in your home or in the world, you have to start looking at your little, like your little moments. Like your daily life choices.

Rob: Yeah, you know, it’s funny you mentioned that, as part of my program, one assignment we did couple weeks ago, the assignment was to find, to find a TED Talk that, it had to do with the assignment, I actually, forgive me I don’t remember what the assignment was, but I remember the TED Talk and it’s about a gentleman who was talking about, he called them “lollipop moments.” And the TED Talk is entitled, “Everyday Leadership.” The quick story was, he was part of a leadership group welcoming new students, kind of an orientation at the school he went to. And I think he was graduating, and a young lady came up to him and said, “Hey, you’re the reason why I came here, let me tell you a story about the effect you had.” She said, “I wanted to come to school here, but I was so scared, and my parents said, ‘Well, let’s just go for orientation. If you’re feeling like you don’t want to be here, you know, well, we can say we gave it a try and we’ll go home.’” So she explained how they were kind of, they were in line, and this guy, the guy giving the TED Talk, came out, and he was dressed funny, right, but he had a big basket of lollipops and he was handing them out and he came to where this young lady was and he actually handed a lollipop to a guy standing behind him and said, “You need to give this lollipop to the beautiful young lady in front of you.” Kind of creating a moment that was relatable and kind of funny. So So he ended up giving the lollipop to her. So this young lady’s conveying the story and saying, “What you did right there, you broke down my fears. You helped to create resonance that I didn’t know existed within me. Oh, and by the way, we’re still dating. I’m dating that guy.” So the TED Talk kind of said, a year later, he got an invitation to their wedding, and he said, “It was so funny. I didn’t really even remember that situation.” And he talks about, that’s the kind of power all of us have, is to have lollipop moments. How do you catalyze resonance with people in everyday situations? It’s just like what you’re talking about. It’s those incremental decisions we make. Maybe it’s as simple as smiling at somebody and going, “I’m glad you’re here today.” Or saying, asking, “How is your day going today?” And actually genuinely being interested to listen. We never know what kind of power and impact those moments have. And again, it’s about building it up over time and the accumulation of those things, whether we believe it or not, but they do have an impact.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: And I think those definitely go over, you know, it’s looked over a lot. And sometimes, you know, it can, it can sound kind of cracker jack, “Be nice!” It’s more than being nice. It’s being genuinely interested in people, and I think that’s a posture. If you’re interested in leading or being part of change, you have to be genuinely interested in the people who will be part of the change process. You have to be genuinely interested in who they are, what they’re doing, how they’re doing. That to me is what creates the resonance that breaks down barriers.

Abby: Yeah, I love that so much. and like you’re saying, I, this is something I had to learn for myself because I think in my naivety and youth and stupidity, actually, and probably some pride too, was in, you know, in high school and looking to graduate and I just wanted to get out of Spooner. Like I just wanted to go someplace where I could have impact, and to me like now I chuckle at how ironic, but I was so like, “I want to be about change” and “I want to make a difference” and “I want to have impact” and “I want to”, you know, “do big things”, and God’s just super cool because He, through hard circumstances, brought me back to Spooner and now I love it but He changed my heart posture to be one where, I went to school for a bit, came home, felt like a failure, all of the things, and I was working at the same coffee shop I was working in high school, and I remember looking at Robert Ortmann, the guy who owned it, and thinking, like, “This is just dumb. I’m doing the same, I’m doing the same thing I’m doing in high school,” but then I looked at these people I respected to my right and to my left and like these people I was working with and I felt like the Lord said, “Are they wasting their lives? Are they not having impact?” And I went, “Well, no!” Like these were people I looked up to, these were people I learned from, and I went, “No, I wouldn’t say that at all.” And it was like it was telling me, “Why do you think that you are any better or different than me?” So serve a cup of coffee well, serve it differently, serve it so that it can have impact. And if you do that, if you just serve every cup of coffee being about like, “I want this to be different than any cup you’ve received before,” that’s enough, and that started for me and like the Lord’s obviously taken that and He’s built on it, too. But it started in me that necessarily thing that you’re talking about, where it’s like, you have to, you have to if you want to be about positive change, you have to believe it’s in the little moments. You have to believe it’s in the most insignificant things.

Rob: Yeah. I love how you just explained your, your “Aha!” moment, I think, you know, if you’re inclined to, like me, I think of how it could be, you know? I guess I’m an idealist in some ways and also a realist in other ways. And I have my moments of pessimism as well, but I think of how ought things to be and I can get really impatient and frustrated with the apathy that I perceive around me. And I think what you described, Abby, right there, is, I mean, the need for our spiritual lives to be attuned to what’s going on around us, too. And by spiritual lives, you know, I’m not meaning New Age type of deal. I’m meaning, like I said earlier, I believe that our effectiveness is found in relationship with Christ, and Christ is the way that we are able to understand our most effective design. And, as you said, and I would agree wholeheartedly with, effectiveness is about impact. And that’s the “Aha!” moment that you just talked about, is, how do you have impact right now within your agency. I’m, you know, that’s my daily struggle, we moved here not quite two years ago. I don’t feel like I have a role here yet. I, we moved here for, for my wife’s job, and I am still trying to figure out how to, you know, get my, my woodworking, my furniture restoration business going here. It’s a much different marketplace than in Denver. A lot fewer people, or at least they’re much more spread out, and the style preferences are a little bit different. But I have to think that that is still a way that I can have impact within my agency. So that’s, again, behind my business model of Vintage ReNew. This idea you have of “redemption”, this idea I have of “renew”, it is focused on the formation and development really of people, and what I would venture to say you’re hoping is happening around you to the people with whom you come in contact because of the impact you want to have.

Abby: Yeah, yeah, no totally, and this is something we actually talked about when we bumped into each other and connected over, was this fact that we think that a lot of people like furniture that needs someone to come and bring it back to life. A lot of people are living life that way; unfulfilled, lonely, not connected in relationship, a lot of things are going on in life. Maybe wanting at some sort of level purpose or impact or relationship and not knowing how to get it, not knowing what to do about it. And there- an overwhelmed-ness that you spoke to before, busyness and overwhelmed-ness, and kind of, that’s just what the American culture breeds. And it can be really disheartening and then I think as you look, and maybe this is just, I don’t want to offend any like Midwestern listeners, but I think there’s a cultural kind of thing here that I’ve encountered with some people, a mindset of like, “Well, that’s what it has been, so that’s what it will be,” which can create a hopelessness in people, of just like, “This is what it is.”

Rob: Mm-hmm.

Abby: And, I mean, I can attest to this, when I, when I decided to move back to Spooner, it didn’t really feel like a decision because I didn’t have a different option at the time, well, and then eventually it became a decision, but at first it felt like it was the failure mark, like, “Oh, I picked Spooner.”

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: And you know, I don’t know if you feel this either, you came from like Denver, Colorado, like, that’s a big city, you know, lots of things are happening, super trendy, you come to a place and it’s easy to feel like, “What did I just settle for?” And it took a lot of the Lord working and doing things and bringing conviction and changing my heart to realize, if people are my impact, they’re everywhere. And so then I can be effective and have impact wherever my feet are at as long as I’m in relationship and doing life with people.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: And I think you have to get to that point. You have to get there, and then that’s hope-filled, and, and then you can do that kind of work of, you can, seeing somebody in the form that they’re at right now and you can go, “I see where you’re at, but actually,” like, “let me help you get where you’re going.”

Rob: Yeah, yeah, so you said a lot there, there’s a lot, I think you’re hitting on a lot of challenges, I certainly have felt that challenge, but I guess one thing, let me put your mind at ease: I have been all across the country and spent time in a lot of different places. There are cultural obstacles everywhere, wherever you are, and I’m from, from the South. There’s cultural obstacles there. I now live in the Midwest, there’s different cultural obstacles. Again, I think Chip and Dan Heath were on to something of, I think it’s easier to settle for the status quo and to kind of get in a rut of “what is” because it’s tiring to try to change it and to think of creating or being part of creating a new path. So, I think of, kind of, what is a, what does a tour guide do, you know? Ushers you through the given exhibit, so to speak. They’ve already been through it. They’ve already put thought into what you’re gonna see. And they’re excited about introducing you to what you’re gonna see. I think that, that is a leadership quality. It’s kind of what you’re talking about. You’ve put a lot of thought into what Spooner can be. You put a lot of thought into, “What are the challenges and obstacles that Spooner experiences that obstruct, obstruct its ability to get to where it could possible be?” And as a tour guide, as a leader, I think it’s, you know, maybe, maybe a responsibility you have to usher people through. And again, I think it may not be, it sometimes could be a big, big change, a big, you know, huge sledgehammer change, but most often it probably is going to be an incremental change, a mid-sized change, right, as people start to grasp the vision for themselves. But I think a big part of that is, you get the movers and shakers together, you get the dreamers and innovators together, if anyone’s, you know, listening and going, “Okay, but what are the practical steps? How do you start? What do you start with?” I think you have to find others, and this is something you and I both said when we ran into each other, which was, call it serendipity, call it providence… I felt like I’ve been thinking a lot of these things by myself. So when we ran into each other and you started to voice back to me thoughts and questions that I had been asking, I thought, “Oh, yes! Partnership!” Like, this is how things create momentum; a snowball effect. A snowball gets bigger as it starts to roll and it gains and attracts other particles and it gets bigger. I think you have to find other people who are as curious and willing to explore alternative options as you are. They might not always be right and they might not always work, but the likelihood of something working increases exponentially. When you don’t snowball, it’s pretty likely there’s a 0% chance that something’s gonna happen. The more people you get together to think about and consider what things could be, the higher it is, the more likely it is that something’s gonna come out of that that can impact the community and change it.

Abby: Yeah, yeah. I love that so much. One of our big things in Redemption is community. So we’re all about impact, but kind of like you’re saying, I think that happens in community. It happens when you’re in a relationship. It’s really hard to be about change, and people have done it, but it’s really hard to be about change alone. And so, if you want to have greater impact, be in relationship. Get around the people who, like you said, are thinking the way you’re thinking, or maybe bring different perspectives but have the same vision and same goal, they’re moving the same way.

Rob: Yeah, yeah.

Abby: You want people with different perspectives, actually, and with different skill sets, but you want to be moving the same direction, so finding those people, getting in the same room, like you said, setting a vision, and then being like, “Well, how do we get there?” So much more likelihood of having greater impact than if you were just gonna set out course by yourself and be like, “Well that’s were I’m going!” You know? So taking the time to go find those people, to build relationships… It’s a lot of work, kind of like you mentioned earlier, it’s a lot of work, and there’s problems that can arise in that because you are dealing with people, but the payoff at the end? So much more likely of it being larger than if you just went on the road by yourself.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, and the word that comes to mind is “opportunistic.” I mean, if you don’t take any opportunities or stretch yourself into any environments that you might be uncomfortable in, well, you have 0% chance then of, you know, I say you’re, you’re much less likely to have anything happen. So I think it’s incumbent upon us to, to take opportunities or step into opportunities when they present themselves. At least, tat’s where I think, if you’re curious to instigate change, then you have to be curious about what, you know, well, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that. I’ll step. I’ll go here. I’ll do that. I’ll put myself in this situation where opportunities might present themselves.” And a lot of times that means stepping out of your comfort zone, putting yourself into a different current of people, and it’s like goin fishing. Sometimes you catch something, sometimes you don’t. But you definitely won’t catch anything if you don’t throw something into the water.

Abby: Yeah. I love, love what we’ve been talking about, but we have been talking a little bit more this way. So how do we, how do- what’s your practical advice? How do we tactically bring that down? If I’m listening to this episode and I’ve been like, “Yes, yes, I wanna be this person, I think this is fantastic, I wanna be,” you know, “an effective leader,” whether that be in an organization, we’ve talked about it within churches, we’ve talked about it within a community… This is really just in relationships in general. If you want to be effective in whatever thing you’re a part of, this can kind of funnel down. What are some tactical, strategic, like, practical ways I can go about doing that?

Rob: Sure. Yeah, in no particular order, and again, it’s not a formula, but I think there’s some, there’s some best practices. I would encourage someone to explore what it looks like and what it means to be curious, and yeah, that, that can still kind of seem like a conceptual thing, but it really has practical implications. So if you’re curious, you’re gonna start asking questions, and questions is just a very practical, tactical thing you can do, and it- I’m struck by really how uncomfortable that makes a lot of people, is to ask questions. But that’s a starting point, is to ask, “Why?” Ask the “What if…” questions. That’s really the only way you’re gonna start to know who’s around you. Who, like you said, may not share your exact perspective, but is moving in a similar direction. It’s gonna also help you understand why things are the way they are, or even to figure out if anyone knows why things are the way they are, right? So at least it establishes a baseline. So I think, cultivating curiosity and, you know, putting yourself around models of curiosity, I think, is a really practical step of just, start asking questions. Ask “Why?” Ask “What if…” Ask what if, ask how someone starts to do that. I think that they would be surprised by, I mean, you just start learning. So that’s really kind of that first step, that if you’re in a community and you’re like, “Oh, how do I become an agent for change here?” I think questions is a first step.

Now what do you do with the responses you get? I think you have to listen well, again, not only with your ears, but your, your heart. You had asked, in, you know, preparation for this, this podcast, “How do you identify needs?” Needs that- there’s surface, superficial needs, but then there’s, there’s also deeper needs, and I would argue that a lot of times the superficial surface needs are symptomatic, actually, of deeper needs, and, and you really, to get to that, you have to open up not just your mind but, but also your soul. This, this ideal of, of taking a posture of empathy, but again, practical, tactical, it’s, it’s really listening. Fight the urge, you know, the urge to move forward and proceed and kind of tromp ahead. It’s good, it’s good energy, but sometimes the best move is to sit and listen and to be with the people, um, who you believe will be part of the change process. And that really, to me, it gets to the heart of relationship. It’s, it’s change. We talk about change process, we talk about being a leader… again Abby, I mean, it comes down to how, how effective are you at building relationships, you know? And a lot of that happens when you ask questions. You draw out the story of those around you, you listen. Relationship is about the trust two people have between each other, and as that then expands, change becomes more possible. So again, practical, tactical: spend time learning how to develop relationships.

Abby: Yeah. I don’t know where I heard this quote, but it was something like, “Make sure you’re listening to understand and not to respond.” I actually think it might have been the book Love and Respect, if you’ve read that, it’s like a marriage book.

Rob: Yes.

Abby: But I think that was actually the book it was in. But talkin about kind of exactly what you’re saying, like, that a lot of people will listen to respond. That was such a convicting sentence, because I would say for a lot of my life and ashamedly so, particularly high-school-Abby, that was what I would do when I would take up a posture of listening. It was, I was listening to win the argument, or to win the conversation, or to provide a quippy response. And I was good at it. Like, I remember in high school being able to be in like any debate, and there was one, there was one big moment in high school where I debated on one team for one side, my teacher switched me to the other one, and I won both times.

Rob: (Laughing) That’s great.

Abby: And I remember being so proud of that. Now it’s kind of shameful, but I remember being so proud of the fact that I was that great of an arguer. But it wasn’t listening because I wanted to understand, it was listening because I wanted to respond, and I think that’s the kind of culture that we live in more often than not. It’s what social media can turn into. It’s what the news can turn into, it’s what our politics, I mean, literally, you can take it out of any form. People are constantly listening to be able to insert their own rebuttal of the thought that they already had preconceived to the conversation. Very rarely, or a lot less frequently now, do you see people who show up to the table and say, “I actually want to listen to be in relationship with you.”

Rob: Yeah, and I think that’s again what I extract from Edgar Schein, within organizational life, is listening to hear, you know, not necessarily to respond, and that again goes back to creating resonance. I also think of a couple of things, you know, in terms of practical steps that can be taken by people who want to instigate change. I think you first have to ask, “What can be done with what we already have.” You know, a lot of people talk about the lowest hanging fruit. I use that phrase a lot, right? If it’s what is reachable or attainable from where you’re currently standing. And again, it’s better, I would argue, better to already have a team or at least another person, a partner, a partner in crime, so to speak, to step into some of these things. But to evaluate, alright, what’s being done already that’s good, that we can celebrate, right? Going back to the Ryan McKinney thing. That’s already happening. That happened in our community. What is happening that needs to change? And then thirdly, “What needs to stop?” right? Those are kind of the three agenda items. What’s already happening that needs to continue, what’s happening that needs to change, and what’s happening that needs to stop. And you can evaluate that from where you’re currently standing. You know, you don’t need an influx of resources to kind of conduct that survey. But figuring out what you can do with what you have, is, is really, I mean, that’s a place to start. So I always talk, people ask me, you know, often contact me about wanting to restore a piece of furniture. They want to do it themselves and, you know, they’re very intimidated by the prospect of putting sandpaper to a piece of furniture. And, and I tell them, “Well, I mean, that’s where you start.” You have to start somewhere, and removing the original finish that’s built up, the old that you want to take off, you’ve got to take it off. So a lot of times the biggest hump we have to get over is ourselves, and that thing gets into fears and anxieties, things like that. And joining with another person can really help with that.

Abby: Yeah, yeah.

Rob: And that gets, again, back to relationships. But yeah, I thought, “What’s the lowest hanging fruit and what can be done with the resources that are currently available?”

Abby: Yeah, I like that three-list kind of format because I think that is really applicable in your life for you yourself. I can do that evaluation on myself, and then I can do that in a like, committed, personal relationship. I can do that in my friendships, I can do that as a team member in my workplace, I can do that in a high-level organization. So I kind of like three-step, what you said, what is something that’s going well, what's something that we could change, and what’s something we need to stop.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: And that right there is just like, okay, that’s a tangible little checklist for me to run through once a week or once a month or once a quarter, and evaluate from that kind of perspective of just, how do we evaluate change and how do we get there kind of one step at a time.

Rob: Yeah. Another, another exercise that, in terms of personal leadership development, that is kind of a common practice within the field of leadership, but, it’s the 360 Degree, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, it’s not anything real new I’m talking about, but if you’re wanting to become a better leader, you first have to know how others around you perceive you, and so conducting what’s called a 360 Degree Evaluation is, it’s choosing four, five, six, maybe seven people who are around you, who can speak to your tendencies, your practices as a person, your temperament, and it’s asking them to give and provide feedback about, you know, your patterns, your behaviors. It’s hard to hear, but you know, that’s the only way I believe as leaders, you know, you’re able to then know, “Okay, what do I need to modify? What am I doing well? What do I need to stop doing?” If I am wanting to have the, the most impact, I have to be receptive to, to that feedback.

Abby: Yeah, well I think to that point, I think all the change we’ve been talking about from high-level, it all starts with personal change, about you turning the mirror on yourself and saying, “Am I that person?” and asking critical questions and taking a little bit of a step back and doing, running those evaluations, and then if you’re not taking steps to be different there first… if you don’t, if you’re not holding yourself to those standards, you’re definitely not going to be as effective of a leader and you’re definitely not going to be able to institute change in a way that’s going to be super positive, if, you know, you’re the pot, kettle, whatever that’s saying, you’re the, the pot calling the kettle black. So like, taking a look at yourself first. To that point, we end every show at Redemption with two questions. The two questions I want to know. from all the people I sit down and ask. The first one kind of being along the lines of this: If you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be? And then two, what’s the one thing you want to be remembered for?

Rob: Yeah, I love those questions and I love that you close your sessions, I think that' draws out so much from a person. And it’s funny, as I was reading the outline you sent me with that question, what would you go back and tell your younger self? Well, at the beginning of the class that I’m in right now, my leadership program, that’s what we had to answer in our introduction in the course. So I have to admit I had a little bit of preparation.

Abby: I love that.

Rob: So what I would tell my younger self- really, two things. One is, laugh more, take every opportunity to laugh. There’s times that you need to be serious, but as I look back, how serious I took things and it’s hard when you’re in the moment, things feel so much heavier than maybe they really are.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: It’s like, just laugh. Like, laughter is, is such a neutralizer of so many things, but the other thing that I tell myself is, attend to your fears. You know, I think fear is just really paralyzing, and if I could go back and tell my younger self that I see so many decisions I made, um, that kind of curt- like, curtailed my, curtailed my fear. I didn’t do it maybe this way because I was scared to do it that way, but I did it this way. Or just didn’t even like, take a step because scared of the unknown, fearful of the unknown.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: So I’d say attend to your fears.

Abby: That is one of the best answers, I just have to say, to that questions.

Rob: Well, what was the other? What I want to be remembered as.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: That’s a, I love that question, I want to be remembered as a door-opener. And to me, a door opener is someone who removes obstacles and is a catalyst for people discovering new things. Whether that is the potential within themselves, whether it is a strategy that organization can take to get from point A to point B. Doors have to be opened, metaphorically speaking.

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: That’s what I wanna be remembered as. I wanna be remembered as a door opener. As I think of my kids, that is really what I want to be to them. I want to be someone who they viewed as, “Man, my dad really, he was someone who opened this door for me,” whether it’s, “He’s the one who taught me to hit a baseball,” to, “He’s the one who taught me how to critically” you know, “think about my environment.”

Abby: Yeah.

Rob: All of those are doors, so I think that would be great to be remembered as a door opener.

Abby: I love that answer too, this is why I ask these questions, because I just get so inspired by people’s introspective responses to them. So thank you. I so appreciate you from a, one conversation just bumping into each other in Spooner, then to coming and sitting down and having this conversation, it was fantastic. Like I feel so blessed by this and I’m excited, actually, to get to see what that means for Spooner and what that gets to mean in partnering to be about positive change, ‘cause this is definitely only the beginning for what that looks like, so.

Rob: No, thank you for having me, Abby, this was awesome.

Abby: Great, that’s so good. For people who are looking, you’re kind of, you’re transitioned now from kind of some of the stuff you’re doing. You’re still going to school right now, online, for the organizational leadership, but you have pivoted into the entrepreneurship journey, so people can actually check your stuff and like the charcuterie boards that you’re doing on Instagram?

Rob: Yeah, so my, my business name is Vintage ReNew, and I’m just so early in the process and actually I want to talk to you about this later, because I could learn a lot from you, I so, I haven’t launched any social media handles for Vintage ReNew yet, um, and don’t have a website yet, but I post all of my, my projects and pieces on my personal Instagram, which is @robjfoley. R-O-B, the letter J, last name F-O-L-E-Y. Rob J Foley.

Abby: We’ll have like a little thing on the video too, it’ll be there.

Rob: Yeah.

Abby: Perfect, awesome. So people can follow along there. I’m also going to make sure that we have all of the books and the TED Talk and everything that we’ve talked about today linked in the show notes for the show, so if you guys are curious on any of those things, there’ll be clickable links to all that. So thank you, again, so much for being here. It was a blast.

Rob: Yeah, likewise, and I wish you the best in this project.

Abby: Thank you.

Rob: Thanks for having me.

Abby: Yeah, thank you. Thanks guys, we are gonna see you next time, make sure you hit the subscribe button so that you can stay up to date on all of our episodes and when they drop on air, and like I mentioned, we’ll have all of the links in the show notes, so you can go click those, and have fun reading and on the journey to growth.

Abigail Melton

How Empathy, Efficiency, and Effectiveness Create Impact with Rob Foley

About Rob

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