At The Lincy Institute, a policy think tank headquartered at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a team of researchers interview leaders in business, government, and community organizations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Introduction of COVID into our society helped make more clear than ever before the importance of connectivity.
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We can systemize this whole thing. No one, no one is better.
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I guess maybe it was the intensity of fear and uncertainty that somehow simultaneously and magically magnified the intensity of compassion and innovation.
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Hey, Kellyanne, how you doing today? I am well Magda. How are you? I'm really good. You know, I've been thinking this week about leadership. You and I both teach leadership at UNLV. And you know what I love about the way that we teach now and the books that we're using is that we're reconceptualizing and we're rethinking what leadership looks like. It's no longer the great man theory, right? In fact, you and I were just talking before the podcast about our parents. My mother was a Mexican immigrant, had a education of two years, formal education of two years, yet she came to this country and did the unthinkable, right? She raised a family, she made a life for her and her children. And really, that's leadership. And you shared some things about your family, too, and your fat and your parents. And as I think about leadership, that's what I think
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about.
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I have been thinking about that exact thing a lot recently. Because in teaching leadership, I've had to reflect on, are you teaching someone how to be a leader, like the leader of the people in the room, the charismatic leader, as you put it? Or are you teaching folks how to develop collective leadership, how to display qualities of leadership, how to embody leadership, which anyone can choose to do. And I think, to your point, connecting it to my family's experience can be really meaningful, looking back at the qualities that I recognized in my father and in my mother. My mother is a a singer and a musician and her presence and ability to sort of create and focus on her art is a certain kind of leadership to me, right? So I learned to emulate the way that she carried herself and then my father's certain specific kind of integrity that he has and he's kind of a man of few words but always each word contains a lot of meaning. And I've taken that as well, not so much that I'm exactly like him, but there's different ways to lead and I think
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it's a really interesting thing to think about. And I'm so excited today because our guest today, we've invited her because she's an amazing person in my eyes, just such a wonderful community leader. Poonam, I've known you for quite a few years and we're just so excited to have you here. In particular, we wanted to talk to you about leadership under uncertain times, or times of ambiguity. And before we jump into that, though, tell us a little bit about yourself.
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Well, I want to...
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Hi.
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Hi, both of you. It's so exciting to be here. I want to meet your families. That's become really clear in just the introduction. And your question was, tell you a bit about me. So here's the things that have been the most formative in terms of the experiences I've had. I'm the oldest of three daughters, born into a family that had a mom and a dad. And my dad was a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. My mother was a stay-at-home mom until the last of the three of us went off to school full-time. Pretty idyllic. We immigrated from India when I was six, so I did have the experience of being, I guess, first generation. But it was a pretty easy road. Being middle class makes all roads less bumpy, I think. So that's been formative. I moved here 35 years ago as a young person. I'm not sure yet if I was running away or running to something, maybe a combination of both. But I landed here broke, miserable, and yet too impetuous and proud to call home and admit that maybe I'd been a bit prideful and impetuous. I just stuck it out. And this community has given me blessing after blessing, opportunity after opportunity. And so here we are 35 years later, I'm the proud mother of three, I guess four, I count four. I have adopted three, I have one who aged out of the foster system, but I still claim him. So I'm not sure technically what that means. I own three children and I have a long term lease on a fourth, I guess. And those are really the three most formative experiences. The bosom from which I came, the nuclear family that I was blessed to be a part of, all that living here has represented, and then the role as a mom, which is I think the one that's taught me more than all
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other roles combined. Now I think you're being quite modest in that you have really been a pillar in our Southern Nevada community here, in particular as it relates to philanthropic efforts and really being a bridge to many, many of our communities from private industry to public and really focusing on the social needs of our community. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
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Sure. Thank you for... That was a very generous way to describe it all. You know, I've been fortunate. I have had several important chapters in my career in the private sector, most notably as an officer of MGM Resorts with, at the time, 75,000 employees and 11 convenient locations to serve you. You still say stuff like that. And my portfolio there generally has included community relations, government relations, and most recently, corporate diversity. And so I've had the gift of getting paid to do the things that matter the most to me, to be involved in community, to advance and make things better. I feel particularly grateful that now, in this current chapter of my life, I am part-time the executive director of Elaine Wynn's Family Foundation. She was my first boss in the gaming industry some 25 years ago. And so I have that deep relationship with a woman who has said publicly that she wants to improve the world in an active way with the wealth that has been a tsunami in her life. And then she was also for 10 years the president of the State Board of Education. And education has mattered professionally, personally, and every other way to me, in Nevada we have a lot to do in improving education. And so it's been a real privilege to be a professional, both in the private sector and now a professional in the philanthropic landscape. And throughout all of those years to also be able to engage personally in advocacy and activism and engagement in the things that matter the most, principally kids and education.
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Yeah, yeah. And Kellyanne and I have been talking a lot about the last couple of years, right, surviving the pandemic, and what that means in terms of our community, locally and more globally, and just thinking about leadership and how our thinking around leadership has evolved. Do you have any thoughts around
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that? Yeah, I loved listening to the interaction between you about what leadership means and thank you for teaching it, right? It's interesting, the older I get, the less I know. But it seems to me the fewer things I seem to believe in deeply. And one of those has been an emerging clarity that, for me, I think leadership is simply inspiring followership. And so, therefore, it is not a position or a corner office or It is a choice. It is not relegated to some places where leadership is needed and that's where leaders should be. It's anyone who chooses to, as your mother did, set an example so compelling that inspired followership from you. Your mother was a leader. I think of, Kellyanne, what you described in your mom and dad. I'm an artist and expressive, and in the way that she showed up with her full, authentic and truest self, she inspired followership in you. She's a leader. Your father, a man of few words, what he said, integrity, I heard you say, that landed, and he inspired followership. And I think that's a takeaway that's hopefully useful for anybody, because it matters not who you are. For me it's the, you know you're a leader when you are inspiring followership and what I have seen and now have come to believe is the people who have inspired me the most throughout my life aren't the ones that had the biggest titles, aren't the ones who necessarily were officially the boss of me, as much as they were people who were living so authentically themselves, that it made me compelled by them, right? And so, especially coming out of COVID, COVID took us to our knees and it doesn't matter who I'm talking about, right? We as a society, we as a community, we as individual families, we as individuals, we're all impacted profoundly by COVID. And so I hope as we emerge, that we can, I think the greatest risk coming out of COVID is that we forget. I think that would be the single saddest thing to happen. And instead, what I hope is that we can take the ways in which we introspected and reflected ourselves and choose to strive to be slightly better tomorrow than we were yesterday as individuals. Because if we can do that as individuals, then guess what? If two of us are doing that, then two of us are doing that. And if a group of us are doing that, then a group of us is doing that. And if a community is doing that, then the community is doing that. If a nation chooses to do it, then the nation is doing that. And I can't think of any more hopeful way to be thinking about what is possible than that.
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Thank you for sharing that. I think what I appreciate about the way you described that is the simplicity in taking that step to embody what it is that you've learned and carry it forth in your own life is something that you simply make an inner choice to do. And then that can spread person by person, which can be incredibly powerful. And I think also, I appreciate how you said that the risk that we have now is that we could forget what unfolded. And it's interesting because I think as things have somewhat stabilized and returned to any sense of normalcy again, there is a certain level of, whoo, let's put that behind us, right? Let's move on. And, and what's fascinating is how you don't do that in life. You, you can't, every experience is still a part of the experience going onward. And what's been magnificent about the conversations we've been having with leaders throughout the community is learning how they specifically, what they've chosen to keep from the experience and how that has rippled out into their lives. I don't know if you want to speak at all about what you've chosen to keep from this period of time as you led the community in many ways that you shared with me, which I'm awed by, and what you've seen in our community and what you feel like you want to take with you?
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Yeah, it's a really important question. I hope that we all pose it on our drive home, right, today, to ourselves in the rear view mirror. The, I mean, on so many levels, COVID was a high impact moment, right, which is an understatement, I think. So for me, if I just look at it from the community perspective, the 18 months that I've, 12 months at least, that I was in a complete bubble in my home. I watched this community stand up something called Delivering with Dignity. And I watched restaurants, employees who were so grateful for the jobs that were being maintained by their participation that they poured extra love and gratitude into every meal. I watched volunteers who five days a week, regardless of what was happening in their individual lives, made a choice to go and deliver those meals safely to the doorsteps of vulnerable people. I watched the 50 nonprofit organizations who were identifying those most vulnerable shut-in people for delivery of those meals. I watched as they case managed and dealt with all manner of issues and challenges that those individuals had and then trusted us to deliver the food. I watched the generosity of a community that said, this must be done and here's my dollar, my thousand dollars, my ten thousand dollars to help make it so. I watched that. I watched us stand it up. I watched us do it in the middle of a global pandemic and I've watched now as the community has continued to keep it going because that's how it honors those who continue to be most vulnerable living amongst us. Let's never lose that. Let's not leave that behind. I watched this community, unlike any other in the country, said during this time when all of our babies are forced into virtual learning, it is unconscionable that any of our babies would not have connectivity in a device. And at the very least, that's a promise we've got to keep. This state, unlike any other state in the Union, mobilized from states to individual districts around the state to individual businesses to every kind of community group you can imagine where we did Connecting Kids Nevada. And we were the only state in the Union to be able to confirm down to belly button level, individual baby face, individual kids that every child who needed connectivity in a device had. Let's not lose that. I mean, those are the moments, in any crisis, I don't know what it is about crisis, but it is in the midst of a crisis, that somehow the most vibrant version of the human spirit emerges. And we need not to lose that, because man, the vibrancy of the human spirit was extraordinary during COVID. It made me hopeful. It made me grateful. It, you know, put a giddy up and a hop along during shutdown. It was a really, really big deal. And so on a macro, on a community level, those are things. Let's not forget what we are capable of. And let's not wait for another crisis to muster what we can do. Like, here's the cool part is we don't have to wait until there's a major knife's edge on our throat to say, I choose to collaborate and trust others that I've never collaborated with or trusted before. I choose to tell the truth, even if it makes me really vulnerable. I choose to ask for help when I'm not sure I can get it done by myself. We don't have to wait for deadly pandemic to muster those capabilities. We possess those capabilities. So note to self, right, whether that's personal self or community self, note to self, we can do anything. And let's not wait until it is required of us, let's just choose it.
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You know what that reminds me of, this whole idea of leadership with creativity. And we've been talking about these ideas for a while. And what I also heard you say is, the sense of urgency really brought out perhaps the best and the worst in us, right? Talking about the restaurant industry and how every meal was prepared with care and love, right? Because they stepped into their power and they knew that connectivity was key to maintaining a level of sanity and, and a level of routine for our kids, right. So, it's just, it is really amazing how we're thinking about leadership now in time of crisis and what we choose to hold on to. And you also mentioned, although I don't know that you use this word, but I think a lot of people would use this word of vulnerable populations, right? And the word vulnerable is often associated with at risk or people that need help, right? But we've been talking about, Kellyanne and I, and Taylor and Carmen, who our listeners will hopefully meet in other podcasts, about how vulnerability really needs to be turned on its head, in particular as we think about leadership. What are your thoughts around leadership and vulnerability?
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That's great. First, let me just say I love the claim, they stepped into their power. I mean, what a cool, it's like a superwoman thing. I just love that visual. There's leotards and capes involved, which is great. If we could all just get into our leotards and our capes. Yeah, vulnerability, great. It's such a, and this is a bottle of wine and a dinner. One of the things that I've been sort of playing with in terms of the few things that I deeply believe is the relationship between vulnerability and courage. And you know I spent the majority of my life believing that courage, my definition of courage, involved stoicism and impenetrability and lack of letting them see me sweat and sucking it up and pushing through and never let them see you cry. That's what I have come to entirely differently appreciate is during those times in my life when a person has said to me, wow, you were really courageous, it makes no sense to me that they say that because my experience of that moment that they described as me being courageous was me being terrified in my vulnerability. And so there's this completely, it has caused me to rethink completely what vulnerability means. Vulnerability is the experience that is perceived as courage. And so when we talk about vulnerable populations, I think it makes sense there, right? Vulnerable, my prior definition would have been something sort of little and less capable. And nothing could be further from the truth if we're talking about vulnerable populations. I see courage when I consider the faces of the vulnerable populations that are dealing with the headwinds of social injustice, racial injustice, socioeconomic injustice, generations of injustice, wow, I mean, simply referring to a population as vulnerable, I think keeps them small. And I think that's not productive. I also think it's wrong. In fact, there's tremendous courage that comes from the resilience that's required, the perseverance that's required, the hope that seems inextinguishable, the indomitable spirit that is represented in a person has to overcome headwinds to be able to pace at a pace that in my life has been a pace that was set for me, as opposed to a pace I had to work really hard to achieve. Does that make sense? And so vulnerability, it's an interesting thing. I don't know what vulnerability means except for the willingness of a person to reveal my joys, my fears, my sadnesses, my traumas, my hopes, my aspirations, my ambitions, my foibles. It's been in those periods of time or those moments in my life when others have called me courageous. And that's exactly the opposite of what my definition of courage had been for all those years.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Kellyanne, do you have some thoughts around that? I think so. I'm going to go back to when you were speaking about the vibrancy that arose in everyone during this crisis and how vibrant we were living and connect that to what we're talking about now in terms of vulnerability and being willing to reveal what's happening within. Because maybe that's where the vibrancy comes from. And not just in those moments when you choose to be vulnerable, but that as you look at the crisis, our experience of it, everyone's was, I'm massively vulnerable, this could kill me, this could kill someone I love, this is dire. And so the, whether you wanted it to or not, the feeling that I am vulnerable, as is everyone else was at the forefront of your mind. And it makes you need to live vibrantly, right? I think of vibrance as that which like animates life. And so that awakens when you feel that part of yourself that could be hurt, or when you feel the idea that someone you care for could be harmed by your lack of vigilance or like attention to the moment. And this is something I know I mentioned to you before is that I have reflected a lot on how true that already was before the pandemic that we weren't in this heightened emergency state necessarily, but that we were in many ways, there are all kinds of dire circumstances unfolding throughout our community every day, and, and a great need to wake up in that way. That is, I opened my eyes, and I am vibrantly attentive to the need that is out there and the vulnerability that is within me and connecting those two things. And it's not easy to stay in that place when there's not like the headlines saying like, wake up, wake up, something bad could happen. But I think the more we recognize that that vulnerability and that emergency in terms of need in our community is continuing on in many ways, it's an opportunity, right, for greater engagement and better change and more connectivity connected
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to one another. Rich insights. You know, nothing like telling me that I must... tell me I can't do something and my instant visceral response as a mammal is, oh yeah, watch. So when you tell me that I must mandate, that I am mandated to isolate, the craving for connection went so much deeper in me, right? So that was one thing that I was sort of struck by during COVID. The other thing is that it's a really interesting point. For the first time, I think, certainly in my lifetime, there was a we that have defined it. When we sort of isolate and become our own little tribes and our own little clusters and our own little classes and our own little countries and our own little communities and our own little suburbs and on and on it goes, we, that means something to us based on the tribe that we associate with. For the first time, we was literally a global, I was in a tribe with every other human on the planet, against a virus that could take any and all of us out. And so that was a big deal. And I saw a lot of that larger we in our actions locally. Where all of a sudden we could trust. Previously I would only trust those that were in our pack, which was limited as a group of we. But when we defined we as larger, then I could trust you, who up until this moment had been a stranger, but now we have something in common, it's a deadly virus. And so it was interesting that it did, in the time that we were living in it, cause us to reclassify, like reorder our classification system of who we were a part of and who was not a part of us. And that was a good thing. And I think the George, the murder of George Floyd added even more sharpness to some of those lines for me. Right? I mean, I was struck, really struck by, well, a couple of things. The fact that in the wake of the George Floyd murder, the Black Lives Matter march, what I was struck by was just how magnificently diverse the marches were. That was not the case across the, in the 60s and 70s. And so that was really encouraging to me. I also was humbled. I mentioned I've got adopted kids. I have two black ones and two white ones. So this was a pretty interesting moment that allowed for some pretty interesting conversation around our kitchen table. And I thought I was, I had been a senior officer in a gaming company in charge of diversity. We called me the diversity diva of MGM Mirage. I had a family that was diverse. I got this. And yet, I didn't got this, right? Because I'd never done my own research. I mean, I grew up in a country, I grew up in Canada where I wasn't exposed to black history or American history for that matter. I can tell you about the indigenous people and the relationship to Hudson's Bay, because of how little time I had chosen to spend to become smarter on, to do my own research on all things Black history. And so part of what I did through COVID was read the books and watch documentaries and Black Lives Matter on Netflix. I mean, it was lovely to have such access. And so it made me different, right? These are the kinds of things that caused me to think differently, both as a person and as part of a larger we.
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I really do feel like we can have this conversation on for days. And I hope that you will return and visit with us. I can't thank you enough, Poonam, for the work that you're doing in our community, for the work that you're doing with your family. And I know that you shared you just got back from a meeting that is focused on youth mental health. And I think that that's going to be a podcast in the future. Because although many of us, many, many people feel that the pandemic is behind us, now we're dealing with the cumulative effects of the last couple of years, and we know that this is an urgent crisis that absolutely requires our attention, is youth mental health. But I feel really confident if people like you are on the front lines of thinking, connecting, and actually stepping into your greatness to really address this issue and to really think creatively, compassionately, and from an equitable perspective on how passionately and From an equitable perspective on how we address that that very critical issue right now
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Our youth need us our community needs us and we certainly need you and so so much appreciate you Thank you so much for being I just need to love on you for a minute You have been an icon in this community for as long as I can remember and so for the incredible work that you do so steadfastly Thank you because you bring big thinking to solving problems. And I don't know what we'd be without you. And so Kellyanne, you're riding sidecar in this adventure, I know. So put on your leotards and pick your capes.
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On that note, thanks so much, Foonam. Thanks, Kellyanne. We'll talk soon again.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for tuning into this episode of Conversation to Transformation, opportunities born from the Pandemic. This podcast is made possible through the Lindsay Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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