Lessons in Leadership: A Q&A with Luke Bronin

Luke Bronin ’06 joined Yale Law School as a Visiting Lecturer in Law and Tsai Leadership Senior Distinguished Fellow in Residence at Yale Law School in January 2024.

Prior to joining The Tsai Leadership Program, Bronin served as mayor of Hartford, Connecticut from 2016 to 2023. During his two terms in office, Bronin helped the city recover from its most severe fiscal crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, brought new investment to the city, and established community-focused programs, including the Hartford Youth Service Corps aimed at engaging disconnected young people, the Hartford Reentry Welcome Center, and HEARTeam, a civilian crisis intervention project. 

Bronin previously served as General Counsel to former Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the U.S. Department of Treasury during the Obama administration. He has also served as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and was a member of an anti-corruption task force during his deployment to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. He was also a partner at the law firm Hinckley Allen and worked earlier in his career at the Hartford Financial Services Group. He holds a B.A. from Yale College, an M.Sc. from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

You’ve served as a leader in many arenas, most recently in municipal politics, but also in the contexts of federal policy and the military. What do you see as necessary traits common to leaders across these different environments?

A leader’s most important job is to get the best out of people. That means making sure people feel like they’re part of a team where everyone’s work matters. It also means taking the time to really understand, as best you can, what moves and motivates the people you’re leading — as individuals. Great coaches know that leading a team means being not just a tactician, but a psychologist, a counselor, a pastor. It’s easy to forget that.  

Leaders also have to strike a challenging balance: develop thick skin, but don’t let it get too thick. There’s never a shortage of naysayers, and you can’t let yourself get distracted by attacks. But you have to stay open to critical feedback, or you won’t recognize and fix real problems. One way to do that is to make sure that your own team knows that you genuinely want to hear bad news. Good leaders will always welcome dissent, at least behind closed doors — and be willing to be persuaded by new information or a compelling case. 

Finally, leaders have to be willing to make decisions with imperfect information. Ask questions, probe, take the measure of the problem, recognize what they know and don’t know, and then move forward. One of the mistakes people often make — and I’m sure that I’ve made, too — is to get paralyzed by the knowledge of all that you don’t and cannot know. Inquisitiveness is good, indecisiveness is deadly.

What were some of the biggest problems you tackled at the state and local level, and what did you learn from those experiences?

We faced a lot of tough challenges during my eight years as mayor, beginning with a full-blown fiscal crisis. When I took office in 2016, the city of Hartford was bankrupt — literally, though not legally. The first battle was to get solvent and stable, and I learned a lot from that experience. Maybe the most important lesson was that people are willing to accept and do very hard things, if you’re honest and transparent — and if they see that there’s a plan.

The first part of tackling our fiscal crisis was sharing a lot of very bad news, because nobody realized just how dire or immediate the crisis was. We made some very deep cuts, which the community felt. We asked our unions for some very big concessions. We asked our biggest companies to make some big financial commitments. And we asked the state to partner with us. Though we didn’t ultimately have to file for bankruptcy, we actively prepared the community to go down that path. We came out the other side not just solvent, but stronger as a community. 

A lot of times leaders — especially politicians — are afraid of having hard conversations. And there’s no question that a lot of the conversations we had back then were really hard, and sometimes quite contentious. What I found is that communities and voters deserve a lot more credit than they often get. People appreciate and respect being told the truth. And that appreciation and respect creates the trust that lets leaders do the hard things that have to be done.

That lesson applied to every other challenge we faced during my eight years in office, from COVID-19 to community gun violence, to a whole lot else. 

What drew you to return to the Yale Law School community as Senior Distinguished Fellow in Residence at The Tsai Leadership Program? Tell us about your first semester teaching at the Law School.

While I was mayor, I came back a couple of times to do visiting talks as part of The Tsai Leadership Program. And every time I came back to Yale Law School — and every time I left — I felt so energized. The conversations were challenging, but also earnest and serious. And it made me remember the way that I felt when I was here as a student: a deep sense of responsibility to figure out how I could best contribute, and a commitment to wrestling with really interesting, difficult questions. 

So when I was thinking about what to do after eight years as mayor, I couldn’t think of anything better than being back at Yale Law School for a while. That instinct was right, and I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity. 

Last semester, I taught a course on hard issues at the state and local level — focusing on issues like homelessness, community violence, and the mental health crisis that present complex tangles of law, policy, and politics. It gave me a chance to reflect on the work that I’d been doing for so many years and think about it in a different way. And hopefully it helped students wrestle with problems that don’t have easy answers and examine them not just from a theoretical perspective, but from the perspective of someone who has to make a decision and act. Not surprisingly, the students were terrific and every class felt like it could have gone twice as long. 

This fall, I’m teaching two very different courses. One on the law and policy of gun violence prevention. Not a Second Amendment course, but a course focused on the work that’s being done at the community level in cities across the country. The second is a course on economic statecraft, drawing on my work leading the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the U.S. Treasury Department. 

As a Yale Law School alumnus, do you have advice for students considering how best to apply their leadership skills both within the Law School and as they look to the future?

I wouldn’t presume to give a lot of advice, but I would say that students should not feel the need to lead in traditional ways. It’s okay to go through Yale Law School and not be a research assistant, not work on the Yale Law Journal, not pursue a clerkship. Those are all great opportunities and important ones. But they’re not the only ways to learn and they’re not the only paths to leadership. 

Not surprisingly, I’d also encourage Yale Law School students to think about ways to lead closer to home — or closer to here. Washington, D.C. is not the only place to pursue public service. New York City’s not the only place to practice law. Some of the most exciting opportunities to make change in the public sector are at the state and local level. And sometimes, those who make the most profound impact on our society do it through leadership in the private sector.

How does The Tsai Leadership Program build on the School’s strong tradition of empowering leaders?  

Yale Law School has always been both an extraordinary law school and, even if just by virtue of the people that come here, a school of leadership. Or at least a school for leaders. Whether or not Yale Law School grads end up pursuing a traditional legal or academic career or do something else, there’s real value in getting exposed to people with a wide range of leadership experiences. So I think the events that the Leadership Program sponsors are really valuable. I particularly love the Crossing Divides Program, because the ability to think, work, and communicate across divides is a vital skill for every lawyer and every leader. 

There are also concrete skills that leaders in almost any field have to develop, and there are ways to develop them deliberately and rigorously. I think it makes all the sense in the world that YLS has a program to help do that in a more intentional and comprehensive way — making sure we’re offering the courses that someone who wants to pursue a career in policymaking or in business needs.