Kimberlyn Leary is a clinical psychologist whose scholarly work is centered on leadership, negotiation capacity, and large-scale systemic change. As an advisor and senior advisor to the Obama and Biden White Houses, she focused on whole-of-government policy initiatives centered on equity, including implementing executive orders across the 30 largest federal agencies. She has held numerous organizational leadership roles, including as executive vice president of the Urban Institute, chief psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and as a senior advisor at both New America and the National Math and Science initiative, as well as an advisor at the Gates Foundation. She recently published “The Consortia Century, Aligning for Impact” as part of the Stakeholder Alignment Collaborative. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, an MPA from HKS, and an AB from Amherst College.
Leary rejoins HKS (she was originally appointed in 2020) as an Emma Bloomberg Lecturer in Public Policy and Management. In addition, she is an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital and an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard’s School of Public Health.
HKS spoke to Leary about her equity work during the COVID-19 pandemic, her work in two presidential administrations, and her newest effort, the Good Services Lab.
Q: You first joined HKS in 2020 just as the COVID-19 pandemic started and entered a public service leave. What was your work during that time?
I was a visiting professor at HKS (from the Harvard Medical School) teaching one of the adaptive leadership courses when the pandemic turned our worlds upside down. An offer to join the Kennedy School faculty and one from the Urban Institute came in at the same time. Both roles deeply interested me. A colleague helped me to think through options which in my case, led me to request a public service leave from my just tendered HKS appointment. A public service leave at Harvard is a vehicle where one can take leave from the university to take a role in a public context. Sometimes it’s an appointed role in government. In this case, I took a role at the Urban Institute, a freestanding research institute that is renowned for its use of high-end data analytics in order to provide policymakers with as close to real-time updates as possible.
I was interested in the Urban Institute because of their cutting-edge work during the COVID-19 pandemic. What specifically caught my attention was that they were trying to provide as much data as they could during the pandemic to shape government policies about evictions—who was most vulnerable to an eviction, which communities were most at risk, etc.—so that eviction aid could be targeted in the most effective ways and make a difference to families.
Obviously, the pandemic lasted longer than any of us thought.
Q: You hold academic appointments in public policy, medicine, and public health. How do all these disciplines intersect?
My students often ask just this question. First, I must say, there was no 5-year or 10-year plan. Over my career, I’ve been privileged to work on different problems which have required me, in essence, to stay alert to learning.
The first part of my career was spent as a clinical psychologist doing the typical things clinical psychologists do. I was very interested in sponsoring what we might call “hyper-local” change in the context of individuals, their families, and small groups.
I was recruited to Harvard Medical School to become the chief psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), which at the time, before Massachusetts health reform, was a safety net hospital. CHA served all but especially immigrant and refugee communities and lower income communities here in Cambridge. The hospital has a reputation for being scrappy and entrepreneurial and thus also had specialized clinics for victims of violence, those who had previously experienced political torture, and was a leader in integrating behavioral health and primary care.
While teaching at Harvard Medical School, being chief psychologist, and directing three training programs, I became familiar with public policy—on the receiving end—as Massachusetts instituted health reform and prioritized new models of care delivery, including accountable care. Seeing how possibility expanded and contracted with political and policy cycles brought me to the Kennedy School, where I entered the mid-career master (though eventually switched to the two-year MPA program).
I had a longtime interest in equity, economic mobility, and expanding access, particularly for women and girls, and my first federal role, as advisor to the Obama White House Council on Women and Girls, enabled me to begin working at scale. When I came back from the Obama administration, I joined the public health faculty where I had the privilege of running the Enabling Change program for the Doctor of Public Health degree program there until I went to the Urban Institute and then the Biden White House Domestic Policy Council and Office of Management and Budget.
What I have come to realize is that public health and public policy include a similar ethic of care. It’s just done in a different way, with different tools and mindsets, and in a more politicized context, but still these jobs involve the care and stewardship of civic life and public resources. Part of that ethic of care includes creating opportunities for those who will come after me, after all of us.
“If you truly see vaccine mandates as government interference, there is no amount of empirical research that’s going to change your mind because the problem simply looks different to people on either side of it.”
Q: What stands out for you from your two White House appointments?
When I had the opportunity to work in the Obama White House, it was my first opportunity to work at scale. A White House platform enables you to look across the country to identify innovation and bring people together to create synergies and new solutions. At the Council on Women and Girls, we looked for innovative programs, research, and engagement models that focused on enhancing life outcomes for women and girls. Ultimately, we were able to steward 20+ women’s foundations to collectively focus their efforts on economic prosperity. We also worked on STEM engagement and on issues pertaining to girls in foster care and juvenile justice. We invited girls and young women to the White House, as experts in their own lived experience, to engage in “what if, what next” conversations. Seeing kids make the White House their own is one of the most impactful memories I carried with me.
At the Biden White House, I had a different role. I served as a senior policy advisor on the Domestic Policy Council as well as in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Both White House components were tasked with implementing President Biden’s first executive order on equity. While there were about 30+ agencies that were obliged to determine where barriers to equity existed in service provision and identify plans to remediate them, ultimately 90 agencies participated in this year-long endeavor.
Much of that work was organizational change management, of getting different agencies, with distinct missions, and mandates to row in the same direction—which was to better deliver benefits and programs to the communities they served. An executive order is really like a blueprint. You must figure out how you are actually going to build the thing. So, we created and delivered an architecture enabling agencies to link their work to this vision for a more inclusive country. We were super proud of that. Interestingly, given our times, I would note that this executive order focused on delivering equitable outcomes to communities and not diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) in the workplace, a distinct matter, which was the subject of another executive order. Last summer, I had the opportunity as a Rockefeller Bellagio resident fellow to spend a few weeks thinking about this portfolio work, and before too long, I expect to write about it.
Q: What will you be teaching?
Right now, I teach in Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and have since 2020, through the time I was on public service leave.
We work with mayors and senior city leaders to build the capacity of city hall. I teach in the flagship Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, working with mayors and senior leaders. I also teach newly elected mayors in our New Mayors program with Mitch Weiss of the Harvard Business School.
With professor Jeff Liebman, who led the Office of Management and Budget for President Obama, we co-lead a program for one of our alumni cities on enhancing procurement efforts in city government, which is of course critical to getting things done in cities, and I also lead our Cross-Boundary Collaboration track for cohort cities.
In addition, I’m launching a new initiative called the Good Services Lab. We will translate federal customer initiatives to municipalities. The lab will have a research component and focus more specifically on innovations in service to serve residents most effectively.
As part of the Good Services Lab, we also expect to run a study group that students will be able to participate in during the spring semester and bring in former government officials to speak with them.
Q: What is something surprising that you have learned from your work across such different sectors?
I’ve learned from being a clinical psychologist that listening is an active behavior, and listening to people and understanding them is pretty important if you want to sponsor or steward change. The same skills are needed in public leadership.
As a government innovation practitioner, it’s also important to look for places and issues where people can join even if they don’t, or can’t, agree on everything. If there are four things or even one, on which they see eye-to-eye, that’s a beginning, at least.
Public health is also an effective metaphor for what communities seek. The tools of public health are grounded in community engagement as well as data science and innovation. People are the vectors of change. Take preventative care. You must convince people to take care of things, especially before problems occur, and that can be a hard sell. Sometimes people have cultural blocks about what they can do, or what they feel they cannot do. For example, if you truly see vaccine mandates as government interference, there is no amount of empirical research that’s going to change your mind because the problem simply looks different to people on either side of it.
These are the hardest problems before us. But I can’t think of a better place than the Kennedy School to work the next generation of problem-solving needed and I look forward to continuing to prepare public leaders and managers to use data, an innovation mindset, and smart skills like cross-boundary collaboration to keep moving forward.
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Photographs by Lydia Rosenberg