Welcome to season two of Just Leading, where we’re thinking differently about leadership within and beyond the Jewish world. Co-hosts Elana Wien, Gali Cooks, and Ilana Kaufman are back and ready to dig into what it means to lead today; a time full of challenges -- and opportunities! They’ll be joined by inspiring leaders who are stepping up when it really counts, steering us through uncertainty and toward a better future. First, our three trailblazing hosts sit down to catch up and share their intentions for this season.
Welcome to season two of Just Leading, where we’re thinking differently about leadership within and beyond the Jewish world. Co-hosts Elana Wien, Gali Cooks, and Ilana Kaufman are back and ready to dig into what it means to lead today; a time full of challenges -- and opportunities! They’ll be joined by inspiring leaders who are stepping up when it really counts, steering us through uncertainty and toward a better future. First, our three trailblazing hosts sit down to catch up and share their intentions for this season.
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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] Ilana Kaufman: This is Just Leading, where we're thinking differently about leadership within and beyond the Jewish world.
[00:00:08] Elana Wien: This season, we're talking to people who are leading through the complex challenges of today to understand how we can build a better future.
[00:00:15] Gali Cooks: But first, we want to take a moment to check in and reintroduce ourselves, your three co-hosts.
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[00:00:28] Elana Wien: My name is Elana Wien, and I am the Executive Director for the SRE Network. We are a national Jewish network of over 150 organizations committed to addressing gender based discrimination and harassment in Jewish spaces and creating safe, respectful, and equitable workplaces for all.
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[00:00:50] Gali Cooks: I'm Gali Cooks, President, CEO of Leading Edge. We are an organization founded about seven years ago to support Jewish organizations in creating great places to work, serve, and lead. We envision an ecosystem of Jewish organizations that enable people to maximize their potential.
[00:01:11] Ilana Kaufman: My name is Ilana Kaufman, and I am the Executive Director of the Jews of Color Initiative. And we center the experiences and the perspectives of Jews of color, all with the intention of helping the U.S. Jewish community realize our potential as a community that is multi-racial and we help shift the framework and the paradigms of how we see and understand ourselves as U.S. Jews.
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Hi Elana, hi Gali. Welcome back to season two of Just Leading. It's good to see you two.
[00:01:42] Elana Wien: Thank you. It's so good to be here and so excited that we're back for season two.
[00:01:47] Gali Cooks: I'm pumped.
[00:01:52] Elana Wien: Well, I'd love to kind of hear your thoughts on reflections from last season and how you think the season's going to be different in terms of how we, we approached it..
[00:02:02] Gali Cooks: You know, it was a really formative experience, season one, working with all of you. And last season was really about who is a leader. Let's think of the mental models of what our society tells us a leader looks like, and really focusing on that "who" and that identity and I think this season is really more about "how." How do we lead? There's so many ways to lead. I think, especially during these two years, we've seen a lot of different ways of meeting the moment and really forging ahead. And that, that "how to lead" is, certainly as I was thinking of my own invitations and who I wanted to learn with in that, uh, really enabled me to stretch some of the boundaries of what I think leadership should be and how it should be personified.
[00:02:53] Elana Wien: You know, part of why I was excited to get to do another season with you both and invite some really just incredible leaders is really to just share inspiration from folks that are really adapting through these changes because it's hard and it's, it's pretty tiring. And they think that it's really important that we're creating those opportunities to lift up those bright spots and kind of learning from each other. So I'm looking forward to that.
[00:03:21] Ilana Kaufman: I think that's right on. I'm excited about the season. Part of the arc of kind of how we were thinking about the season is about leaders who have been just inspirational in a variety of expressions in ways over the last two years. And as we're having this conversation, I'm thinking, yeah, on any given day over the last two years, I've read something or seen something or heard something inspired by everyone in this season's lineup. The group is powerful. They're inspirational and they create a level of nourishment.
[00:03:55] Gali Cooks: Yeah. And there's a concreteness, like there's a practical. I feel like, you know, March, 2020, it was like, what just happened? And here we are two years later, like what are the things that day in day out, like the different habits and the different ways in which we can exercise our minds, our behaviors, or our bodies as, as leaders, as people, as parents, as whatever else our identities are, to just, you know, move forward and really help us in, in that progression. I think everyone of the folks that we're going to be in conversation with this season really has their own mores and their own practical types of habits and ideologies and other things that I know I'm going to be learning a great deal from, and I hope that others will as well.
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[00:04:48] Ilana Kaufman: Let me ask you two, like, what's the last two years been like for you as leaders?
[00:04:54] Elana Wien: It's been, it's been challenging and I think we're at that point... I don't think we ever thought we were going back to some kind of a normal, but I think we're at that point of realizing there, isn't going to be some kind of a magical reset or enforced kind of rest or break that, you know, the world's continuing to turn, new challenges are continuing to greet us along with prior challenges still continuing. And so it's been a really important time to just kind of stop and reflect and think about, you know, what it means to be a leader and what we need to sustain ourselves.
[00:05:35] Gali Cooks: Yeah, building on that, it's just, it's been a very challenging two years. Very, very challenging two years. At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember I had a board member who said, you know, like we're kind of living in like biblical times from our perspective, as we've been working with leaders and organizations trying to support folks who've been trying to navigate during this time.
Like there's no playbook for this moment. If we look at all the different things that have been happening. And it's been a very, very interesting time to think of like, how do you connect with people when you're apart and how to manage a team that started out working in an office physically, and now we're remote. And how to do that and how we've onboarded people, like there are people in my team that I've never met before physically, but feel super connected to and crank out work with. So if I had to sort of name, like what, what have the last two years been? They've been surreal and yet super real.
[00:06:31] Elana Wien: How about you Ilana? I'd love to hear from you.
[00:06:33] Ilana Kaufman: On this side of the moment of the last two years, the word that comes to mind is I've had to adapt quite a bit, and I'm not naturally somebody who easily adapts. I'm a Taurus, so I'm very, very fixed in how I engage and understand and find comfort in the world. And the last two years have been about the pandemic. The last two years have been about supporting and helping my organization thrive and grow and wanting to you know, make sure the team thrives and grows and the work thrives and grows.
And in some ways it's just, in that particular regard, given that we're Jewish people of color who have experienced difficulties as people of color, and so we had some, some skills maybe built up or some level of resilience that we could draw upon from our experiences as being people of color. But we put our heads down and worked really hard and my ability to support that means that I have to be flexible and adaptive. And so that comes to mind.
And so I am accepting and adapting. Adapting has meant becoming more integrated because the wall, that fourth wall came down, right? Like everybody's seen my teenager in a meeting, you know what I'm saying? Like everybody heard somebody deliver something at the door and me being like, all, pardon me? I need to get up. Or like, oh, sorry, you can hear the laundry in the background. Let me like, turn that off so we can have our meeting. And so like, it's just invited real life into the other parts of my real life. And overall, I think that's a really good thing; to find ways to integrate even though the physics that sourced the integration are unwelcome.
[00:08:47] Gali Cooks: Yeah, it's so true. And it's like, it's control right? As a Taurus, you like that control and consistency. I'm a Sagittarius. I have no idea what that means, but it's yeah, control. Exactly. We have no control. And so like that adaptability has been, has been so necessary and it comes with a sense of loss and it comes with a sense of perishability too.
[00:09:10] Ilana Kaufman: Yes. I was like, what is that feeling I'm feeling? And I was like, oh, that's grief.
[00:09:15] Elana Wien: Grief.
[00:09:16] Gali Cooks: Totally.
[00:09:17] Elana Wien: Yeah, well, I have to throw in there, I'm a Gemini. We're known for loving to switch it up and trying out new things. And it has been a lot of change for this Gemini.
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[00:09:33] Gali Cooks: Can I ask? Because I, I'm super curious: what is sustaining you all right now? Very open to ideas.
[00:10:23] Ilana Kaufman: Part of what sustains me is having a mindset about what's expected of me as a leader. And I mean, my garden sustains me, and my teenager sustains me, and my friends and family sustain me. Cooking. I mean, I binge watched a couple of seasons of various things when I took a break that, that felt very nourishing, but having a mindset that I am a leader and there are things expected of me. And that I have chosen leadership as my work. Embracing that mindset and creating structures of accountability for myself to be able to meet that set of standards. I am accountable to somebody as a leader, even if I'm tired, even if someone in my family is not well, even if there's COVID everywhere we go or there's grief everywhere we go. In that is opportunity for us as leaders and there are expectations of us as leaders and reintegrating that mindset and perspective has, has really sustained me over the last year in particular.
[00:11:25] Elana Wien: Yeah. I mean, so much of what you said, I really resonate with. I mean, you know, in my case, I think it was about six months in, I had a fairly serious accident and so I was recovering from a concussion and we were renting a space that had these beautiful gardens and I just got really into it. And so when we moved, I, I took it upon myself to try to recreate a form of that. Granted, where we moved, you know, it, it's not grass. It's turf. There was very little living there and I was determined to bring the birds.
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And this has been a daily, weekly adventure where my wife with full support thought I was crazy in the beginning, but now she's with me and my two kiddos, we look out the window to just wait and see, have the birds come to the bird feeder and I will share with you, the birds have finally started to come. Butterflies are starting to come. And so I'll say the other thing that's related to that that's sustaining me is that aspect of observing around me changes and changes that are good. And then I think the third thing is really looking for the people behind the scenes that are making things good and are moving important work forward. And I think it's given me a different way to think about my leadership. And I realized that that I think is part of the arc of the folks I interviewed for this season; all really people that are championing important change work behind the scenes and in ways that really inspire me.
[00:13:02] Ilana Kaufman: I love that, that's, isn't that a famous Mr. Rogers quote? "Look for the helpers."
[00:13:06] Elana Wien: Look for the helpers.
[00:13:07] Gali Cooks: Yeah. Super powerful. Yeah. I'm drawing a lot of ideas and inspiration from you both. Thank you. I wish I had more discipline for some of the things, I wish I had more Taurus in me, Ilana, uh, truly, or a green thumb. I, I would say for, for me, it's been more mindset in every stage, especially over the last two years, what has been clear as that fourth wall has come down and we see other people's lives and ways in which, you know, we're living at work, in a way, that the thing that I have been trying to hold on to is giving people the benefit of the doubt. We are all dealing with so much. The other thing, I mean kind of Elana to your point, is one of the things that my wife and I have started doing as a practice is, she's pregnant right now. And like super pregnant, like everything hurts kind of pregnant. And, and so I started asking her, well, what doesn't hurt?
[00:14:14] Ilana Kaufman: Mmm.
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[00:14:15] Gali Cooks: So she'll be like, well, my forearm. And my elbow. So to your point Elana, like thinking about some of the ways in which like, well, actually, like there has been positive process, you know, like we are in a positive slope, it might be ups and downs, but genuinely, you know, we are on that positive slope.
[00:14:45] Ilana Kaufman: Elana, Gali, it's great to work with you both again. I'm really excited about this season. It's really good to be in connection and conversation with you two. Thank you.
[00:14:57] Gali Cooks: Same.
[00:14:58] Elana Wien: Same here. So excited. Thank you.
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[00:15:07] Ilana Kaufman: Thank you all for joining us this season. Next week, tune in for a one-on-one discussion with Keshira haLev Fife.
[00:15:14] Keshira haLev Fife: Even before I had language or understanding for how to integrate identity, the conclusion that I drew was that it's really better to be fully and wholly one thing rather than half this, half that.
[00:15:26] Ilana Kaufman: Just leading a 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 at srenetwork.org and Leading Edge at leadingedge.org.
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