Mamie Kanfer Stewart is determined to help people work better together. That’s why she founded her company, Meeteor, where she and her team support clients in improving collaboration -- namely, through more thoughtful, productive meetings. In this episode, Mamie and Gali dig into the elements of a strong, healthy work culture and why it’s so important to be accountable as a leader today.
Mamie Kanfer Stewart is determined to help people work better together. That’s why she founded her company, Meeteor, where she and her team support clients in improving collaboration -- namely, through more thoughtful, productive meetings. In this episode, Mamie and Gali dig into the elements of a strong, healthy work culture and why it’s so important to be accountable as a leader today.
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Special thanks to the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation for their support of this podcast! To visit them, go to https://hjweinbergfoundation.org/, and follow the foundation on Facebook, and Twitter.
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[00:00:00] Gali Cooks: Hi, I'm Gali Cooks and you're listening to Just Leading, where we're thinking differently about leadership within and beyond the Jewish world. In each episode, we're talking to people who are leading through the complex challenges of today to understand how we can build a better future.
[00:00:17] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: It's so easy to think about accountability as just being this person didn't do the thing that they were supposed to do. And therefore, I now have to go like have this really difficult conversation, but accountability is not only negative.
[00:00:29] Gali Cooks: That was Mamie Kanfer Stewart. Mamie is a coach, author, and entrepreneur. Through her company Meeteor, she and her team helped to foster healthy and productive meeting cultures.
Mamie's work extends to her coaching practice as well as her podcast, The Modern Manager, where she's rethinking what it means to be an effective, impactful leader today. I was excited to invite Mamie to the show because much of her work deals with the day-to-day; those moments where we can exercise our leadership muscles, improving consistently. This daily practice is absolutely critical. Let's dive in.
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[00:01:06] Gali Cooks: Mamie Kanfer Stewart. Thanks so much for joining us.
[00:01:08] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Thank you so much for having me today, Gali.
[00:01:11] Gali Cooks: So last season of this podcast, we really focused on who gets to be a leader. What does a leader look like? And this season we're interested in digging into how great leadership happens. How can we change leadership practices for the better?
And that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you because you and I go way back and you have been really for, has it been a decade Mamie, of you doing this work and really asking exactly that question of how to exercise leadership?
[00:01:42] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yeah. I've been interested in how people collaborate and work together for a very long time. My leadership journey, I got started as a child when I hated sleepaway camp. And I told my parents that I thought I could do it better and they, God bless them, let me start a camp when I was 12 years old and I ran it for four summers. Yes, this was my first entrepreneurial journey. And that sent me down a path I think just innately that I was like, I want to do something where I get to work with other people, but I get to make decisions and bring things to life the way that I have a vision for them. So fast forward and I get into what I call the real world after college and had an awakening that the way that people collaborate together is it so joyful all the time.
It isn't so effective. We waste a lot of time in bad meetings. We don't all have great communication skills. And so things just end up getting jumbled along the way. And there's a lot of unnecessary stress. And I think that really shifted for me, this difference between wanting to be a leader myself and really wanting to help other people learn how to collaborate with each other.
Part of being a leader is helping other people be their best. And that's what I love to do. That's why I like being a board chair is because I get to sit in a position where I can partner with so many different people, whether it's on the board or sometimes within the staff more deeply, or the CEO and figure out what can I do that's going to help them be really successful in their role?
[00:03:19] Gali Cooks: And that's beautiful that taking the time, sitting down, being able to listen, and then also think together about the ways in which the path can be shaped. Let's hone in on that sitting down together, because I know that you're maniacal about- in the best ways about making meetings better. And you've said that meetings are a microcosm of your company. Can you talk a little bit more about why that's the case?
[00:03:47] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Yes. So I love, love, love this topic. I love meetings because they really are a reflection of so many different aspects of your organization, right? We come together in meetings, we're all sitting in a room virtually or in person.
And how we show up is a microcosm of how we show up in so many other ways. Are we prepared to have this conversation? Have we all come in ready to get into the discussion? Did the person who's running the show there, is the person who's planning the meeting, did they do the right steps to prepare us to be able to execute on our meeting effectively?
Are we treating each other with respect? Are we making room for disparate opinions and dissenting viewpoints? All of those aspects of our culture, all those aspects of how we do our work that can show up in really big ways happen in a meeting in really tiny ways. So if we're not good at doing them in a meeting, we're probably not so good at doing them at an organizational scale.
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[00:04:53] Gali Cooks: One of the many things that you've done is to get certified as a diversity practitioner. And I'm wondering what led you to pursue that certification and how that has affected your leadership and work?
[00:05:06] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well, like many of us after the murder of George Floyd, we took a step back and said, okay, have I been going about this work in the most inclusive way and with the best knowledge and understanding of the issues that people are experiencing?
And I realized that I had already a natural kind of inclination towards an inclusive manner. And it was just how I grew the business without even being conscious of it. And at the same time, there was so much that I didn't know. Still to this day, even when I'm doing my own show, I sometimes catch myself coming at it from a perspective of a white woman.
And that's not everybody's experience in the world. And as a coach, I need to be able to separate out myself and be able to remove the lenses. And as a, as an educator and a podcast, or I need to be able to pull back and say, how is what I'm saying relevant to people of all shapes and sizes and experiences? In a way that I can never truly authentically speak to everyone, but how can I at least remove any of the lenses of the biases that I can?
So that sent me down a path to wanting to really just understand so much more about various issues related to diversity equity inclusion. And now we say diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice or belonging, and there's, it's constantly evolving. So this was just one way that I could get a crash course and bring my own learning journey further along in a, in a faster way.
[00:06:42] Gali Cooks: Hmm. We've seen a lot of energy really spurred by the murder of George Floyd and some of the racial reckoning that at last has come about. And so there was this burst of energy and a leap forward, and then folks got discouraged because you know, it's like an asymptote, you never reach the axis and you're never done with the work.
And I'm wondering, it's two things. One is your own ideology and really philosophy about how change happens. Is it revolutionary, evolutionary, some other way in which we get folks to, to change their behaviors? And where you've seen folks get it right.
[00:07:25] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: I want to start by saying there's a real difference between changing someone's behavior, changing their understanding and changing their heart. And that has been very tricky for people. There are people for whom like their heart is totally in the right place and they want to do all these things, but they just lack understanding, and therefore their behaviors are not ideal.
And then there are people for whose behaviors, like they're fine. They can kind of, you know, play along and they know the things to say, and they know the things not to say, but they're not really doing it because they believe in creating a more equitable, inclusive workplace. They're doing it because it's what their boss told them they have to do.
And right? And then there's everything in between. You know, each person's change journey is different. And it depends on your own experiences and how you're entering into these conversations and how you're entering into the change world. So it's not a one size fits all. That, that's like the baseline of my experience has been it's, it's really not a one size fits all.
And every person has to go through their own processing and have someone, ideally, this is one of the ways I've seen it work well is have someone who is like a trusted friend or a partner or resource it doesn't even have to be a person, that can support your learning journey, who you can process things with, who you can learn from. And again, it could be a book that you're reading, that's helping you understand and see things differently. It could be, you know, online videos or things that you are reading or watching or listening to that are just getting your brain juices flowing. It could be a partner in life. It could be a colleague. It could be a friend, but someone or some thing that's helping you continue to grow and evolve and stretch your knowledge, your behaviors, how you feel about yourself in the world.
[00:09:27] Gali Cooks: That's beautiful. It's almost like a chavruta in a way that that can help you stride for stride.
[00:09:32] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Absolutely.
[00:09:33] Gali Cooks: And for listeners who don't know, a chavruta is a learning partner.
[00:09:37] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: We can't learn in a vacuum if we just think that we're going to change because the world around us is changing and we saw one thing one time, right? That doesn't happen for any kind of change. It's very rare that there's one major incident that suddenly transforms who we are. It does happen, but it's rare.
When it comes to really understanding identity and how we show up in the world, there's so much complexity in all of this. It has to be an ongoing learning journey. So it requires us to be constantly engaging with these ideas and the accountability side, that's like where it gets really hard, right? Like it's not so easy to have someone who's going to speak truth to you.
The goal in some ways is to have enough knowledge that you can start to hold yourself accountable. And I literally did this the other day in a meeting. I was facilitating a session for a client and I said, the words powwow in reference to meeting, which I've been saying for years. And I caught myself because I now know that saying powwow is not an appropriate term to be used when talking about how we gather in meetings.
And I paused and I was like, let me rephrase that. I it's one of those things, that's like I have a behavioral habit. I've been saying that word for so long in reference to meetings for almost a decade that I've been doing this work. And I also know intellectually that's not okay. So we can start to hold ourselves accountable when we have enough knowledge to be self-reflective and we have opportunities to say, oh, I recognize I didn't do that the way that I really wanted to. So I'm gonna do that again.
[00:11:16] Gali Cooks: Yeah. Yeah. And it really speaks to the culture of accountability in so many ways and our role as agents of our own being to hold ourselves accountable and model that. And I want to press on that because I have to tell you maybe one of the things that we have learned over the last five years in surveying over 300 organizations and nearly 35,000 employees working in the Jewish nonprofit sector. Overwhelmingly what we found is that folks like their manager, they really feel cared for and respected by their manager, but their manager doesn't hold them accountable and make them better. And I'm wondering if you had to pick the most important ways that leaders can create a culture of accountability and really feedback loop. What advice might you have for leaders as we try to navigate this?
[00:12:06] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: So first, a quick framing, which is accountability means that somebody gets the credit for the successes that they contribute to in addition to the feedback when they're missing the mark, right? It's so easy to think about accountability as just being this person didn't do the thing that they were supposed to do. And therefore, I now have to go have this really difficult conversation, but accountability is not only negative. So part of creating a culture of accountability, is for managers to really celebrate and acknowledge when people are doing things right. And it doesn't have to always be big, giant successes.
Just celebrate those little behaviors that you want to reinforce because somebody is doing a great job at being accountable for it. When it comes to what managers can do though to help elevate their accountability game. I think there is probably like one slash two big things. The first is people have to know what they're being held accountable for.
If they don't know what the expectations are, they can't live up to them. And it really sucks when you're being told after the fact that you didn't do a good job, but you didn't realize ahead of time that's what you were being asked to do. So you have to start with clear expectations so that the person can then go and do the work and know what they're trying to accomplish.
Then I'll say this is like the part two piece of it. You have to then have conversations with people along the way. We can't wait until the end and then have it be a big disaster, right? It's the same thing with any kind of performance conversations, right? You don't want to like store up all the feedback and then give it once six months later and be like, Hey, remember that project five months ago? Here's what you did wrong. We need to be in ongoing conversation. We need to defang this idea of having accountability conversations from being something that's so scary that I'm going to tell somebody that they did something wrong and that I'm seeing their weaknesses and they need to develop and grow and like take all that pressure off and say, no, no, we're just two people having conversation about how you can do your best work.
It's just a part of how we both do our jobs. Then we can build up that level of accountability, we can build up opportunities for everyone to grow in a way that feels so much more natural and less scary, which by the way, this idea that people actually want to grow is really important. Everybody -I shouldn't say everyone- almost everybody actually wants to do a good job. They want to get better. So even in the moment when they're hearing feedback and they're like, oh, I'm embarrassed that I did that way. I feel bad. Oh my gosh, don't see my bad side. Even though we feel that way in the moment, a few hours later, the vast majority of us are like, oh, I'm so excited I had that conversation because now I can be better. Now I have an opportunity to do something, to grow myself, to stretch, and I want to do better. And that's wonderful.
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[00:15:08] Gali Cooks: It strikes me that we just see that a lot of managers really struggle with some of these incredibly simple and elegant ways in which you see workflow happening that make so much sense. And yet we tend to belly flop into the work and twist ourselves into pretzels in ways that are just not optimal.
[00:15:31] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: So I have a couple of potential theories. One of them is around our ability to understand and control our own emotions. I have gone into conversations where I have gotten myself worked up because I'm nervous about telling somebody something that they're going to get mad about. And then they're going to have a big reaction to, and then I'm going to have to like deal with their reaction.
And so I get all like "ehhh" before I go in this conversation and delay it as long as possible. That's not good, right? Like it's not good in so many ways. It's not good for me to allow my emotions to be so intense that I'm not going to be able to go into that conversation and speak with clarity and calmness.
So that's the first piece is I think we're just generally, we tend to get super amped up about giving people feedback about confronting conflict, about anything, where we worry that we're going to hurt someone's feelings. And then I'll say the second hypothesis around, why do we not do all of these things is that we're moving a million miles a minute. And we don't always take our own advice that actually having a plan, actually taking a step back, giving yourself breathing room to reflect and think about the bigger picture. Like, we just, we don't give ourselves that space. And so we're constantly just in the churn and therefore just flying by the seat of our pants instead of saying, okay, what's actually most important here? So those are kind of two of the reasons I personally have experienced and I've seen other managers really struggle with.
[00:17:07] Gali Cooks: Oh, my God. I feel so seen. Yes, the emotional piece and just like the inertia. Ultimately, it's letting the important take precedent over the urgent and it's super important to have that frame and kind of break that cycle.
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[00:17:20] Gali Cooks: As I think about you and the role that you play in our community and the business community and the Jewish community as well. You're a founding director and the president chair of the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah and among the many things you've done with the foundation over the years, I'm struck that your work has really been able to manifest certain actions in Jewish wisdom.
And you also bring more appreciation and practice of democracy into the Jewish community. And if we're really panning out, I'm very curious about the Jewish wisdom and democracy dual strategies that I believe really infuse the foundation's work and where you see the Jewish community going over the next decade as we really work to infuse those two aspects into our community and our work.
[00:18:18] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: So our name Foundation for Living Torah is, has a dual meaning for us. And it's the central organizing principle for the foundation's work that Torah or Judaism is meant to be lived. It is something that we should be bringing into our everyday lives, bringing into our outlook on the world and activating, and that, second, the Torah and Judaism, it's alive in the sense that it is continuing to grow and evolve. It is not something that was set in stone hundreds of years ago, but it's something that we are all actively contributing to whether as doers or thinkers or scholars or educators, or just practicing Jews and all of our work in the foundation hold those two concepts of Living Torah at its center and has really guided how we believe the Jewish community can look in the future where more and more Jews and fellow travelers take a perspective that Judaism has wonderful wisdom that we can apply to help ourselves live more meaningful lives that we can help activate to make the world a better place. And that we should be turning to our wisdom. Not because it's necessarily any better than anyone else's wisdom, but because it's ours and that means something.
On the democracy side. I say that's one of those places where we looked at our wisdom tradition and we said, Hey, not only is this a problem in America that our democratic institutions and norms are being undermined and that's not good for anybody, but also the elements of democracy are very much part of Jewish wisdom and Jewish tradition. And we have something to say about this and we can organize ourselves to bring Jewish wisdom to this work. And we, as Jews can organize ourselves to be advocates out in the world for American democracy, which is not a progressive or a political thing it's actually just a people thing that we all need to live in a place where democracy is strong.
[00:20:38] Gali Cooks: Yeah, amen. Just incredible work.
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[00:20:42] Gali Cooks: You do a tremendous amount. You're an entrepreneur, you're a philanthropist. You serve on a number of boards. You're a parent and a partner, and there are many different hats. And one of the things that we know is, especially over the last two years, it's been a, it's been a rough time in a variety of ways for us as a people and as a planet. And I'm wondering, how do you maintain your energy and where do you recharge?
[00:21:09] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well first, I would say that I am very good at not running myself ragged, which I know I'm very blessed to be in a life that I'm not forced to work crazy hours nor to make ends meet. I'm lucky to have a really healthy relationship with my partner and with my family and be part of a wonderful community, there are so many things that I feel really blessed and even when I was growing my business Meeteor, I told my team like, don't work at night. If we have to slow down our deadlines, that's fine. If we have to do fewer projects, that's fine. I would rather do less and do the things really well than have everybody working crazy hours, working over the weekends like that startup culture did not resonate for me because I, I just don't believe that you can do your best work when you're working that way.
And then the second thing is that I am a huge crafter. I love, love, love making things with my hands, whether it's baking cakes or cookies or knitting or making music, I play three instruments. I'm always in the midst of some sort of creative crafty project and almost everything I make I give away. So that also brings me a ton of joy to be able to give someone a hat or cookies or whatever it is that really just fills me up all the time.
[00:22:32] Gali Cooks: Well, may you continue on that path, Mamie, of balance and perspective as well as crafting and the joy of giving. It's just beautiful. Thank you for this. I learned a great deal. I really appreciate it.
[00:22:44] Mamie Kanfer Stewart: Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to our ongoing relationship just out in the world.
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[00:22:54] Gali Cooks: Check out Mamie's work at mimiks.com, including her podcast, The Modern Manager and her book, Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings. Our goal and Just Leading is to think differently about leadership. Next week, I'll be passing the mic to Ilana Kaufman. She'll be speaking with Hen Mazzig.
[00:23:13] Hen Mazzig: For me, it was all about doing these small things. Yeah, it's a drop in the ocean but the ocean is made of drops. So whatever you can do is meaningful.
[00:23:22] Gali Cooks: Just Leading is supported by the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. It's produced by Wonder Media Network and Anna McClain.
For more information about the organizations we work for, check out the Jews of Color Initiative at jewsofcolorinitiative.org, the SRE Network srenetwork.org and Leading Edge at leadingedge.org.