Why Great Leaders Hire People Smarter Than Them

[0:00]  and I've actually had people comment to me about that like wow you you're Fearless about hiring people that are really good I'm like of of course what am I here for why wouldn't I like they're like you're not afraid that they might be better than you I'm like no I want them to be better than me oh let's let's break that down a little bit because this is a common fear with a lot of people who are not only starting businesses but are also in positions of leadership I feel like we come from a place of insecurity by surrounding ourselves with people who are better than we are but if you listen to to the top stories of successful entrepreneurs CEOs Founders they're often saying the one thing I realized is I had to surround myself with people who were better than me how did we come to that realization of why that's so important let's kind of hammer that home oh well I just know that I I'm good at certain things and not good at other things and

[0:48]  I uh my capacity for some things is not the same as what other people's capacity is and I need to surround myself with people who can do the work that I can't do and it's just that simple and I I remember saying early on with somebody that I hired one of my first hires um who was who's become a very good friend of mine as well and I said to him early on if you ever see me let my ego get in the way of this organization you have permission to tell me and there's only been one time that he's had to say that this is not about me this is about what this organization can can do for the community and I can't do everything it would be arrogant and foolish to think

[1:35]  that I could so and I want to have a team that is trusted out in the community I can't be the only one who's the Evangelist for the organization and for the work that we do so I kind of it's one of those say I I don't quite get it because it's just common sense but didn't Thomas Payne say Common Sense was not common at all all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast now today is going to be an incredibly important episode because I

[2:22]  have the CEO of the senica park zoo Society here with me today Miss Pamela Reid is joining the show today we're going to talk about the zoo society's approach to conservation education we're going to talk about why this work is so important to Miss Sanchez we're going to talk about leadership philosophy we're going to talk about combating environmental challenges through Community engagement and so much more Pamela welcome to the show thank you so much Keenan for this opportunity this is exciting this is going to be an amazing conversation because I've had one other guest on the podcast before and I believe I mentioned him in our previous conversation his name was Jeff venk he's a HR people culture leader from the Hogle Zoo in Utah and he was so passionate about Environmental Conservation and why this work is so

[3:09]  important and I'm hoping that we can dive into some of that today in our conversation but before we do I want to ask you a question sure work is out of bounds how would the person who's sitting across this digital table with me be described uh as somebody who uh really enjoys nature who finds peace and centeredness in nature who's going to be out on the water as much as possible in our kayak uh who who really believes that our role while we're here on this planet is to leave the world a better place and that our job too is to figure out what which problem it is that we want to solve and

[3:57]  um I'm constantly working at that I feel like you're doing an amazing job of that and I know that that did not just start in your current role as the CEO of this organization but you shared something that was really enlightening to me you said when you were a kid there was a sign on the light switch and it said turn it off if I believe I'm correct that is correct why was that and how did that Inspire any type of thought so early 70s I was a kid I'm aging myself but that's okay uh early 70s we were in the middle of an energy crisis and my dad would put Post-it notes like on the basement we had a little live in you know little living room set up in our basement uh and the kid was our kids playroom basically and he put a little Post-It note on the light switch saying

[4:43]  turn it off when you leave the room and it was a reminder to us that energy is precious and it is a in many cases a non-renewable source and we were also at that time uh in the midst of the energy crisis depending on how the whether you had an odd or even number to end your license plate you could go get gas or not you know if you had an even number you were Monday Wednesday Friday and an odd number Tuesday Thursday Saturday or something like that that's my memory um and at the same time we were watching these you know terrible we see them now and we're like oh that's terrible commercial but it was the commercial of the the man uh crying when he saw all the pollution we were we were really making a mess of the world and so policies began to change uh the

[5:34]  environmental movement really started at that time Earth Day started when I was a kid and I remember it vaguely um you know I didn't put words to it at that time but the Environmental Protection Agency was founded clean air uh act clean Waters act all of those things happened when I was a kid and we grew up I grew up thinking we had kind of solved those problems in I got a little older and really started spending more time in in this uh before we were all talking about climate change you know 30 years ago 40 years ago I was reading Rachel Carson Silent Spring and saying we really in a crisis and if we can't pretend we've solved it this is we all got to get involved all hands- on Deck with this how did we come from a place where you came from a generation where

[6:22]  you exposed to so many of these messages it seemed like everybody would be so informed just out of I'll use this word like intentionally indoctrinate of the Curr current crisis that we were in when it came to the environment energy clean water why do you think we drifted away from that and what was the realization when you got older that said wow we really need to do a lot more work that is such a good question I think that we as a society and I'm talking about American culture here in general broad general terms I'll probably get myself into trouble but I think that we have a tendency to think that we have done the legislation we have set up the bureaucratic structures to make it work we can clap our hands and move on to the next thing and even though there are people set up who are taking care of

[7:09]  those things the attention has moved on to the next Crisis and we got a lot of crisis in these country so you you think that you know and I've worked in different nonprofits I've worked in different cultural organizations and we get fatigued about a certain crisis we want to believe that there's people taking care of it so we can move on to the next thing we have very short attention spans and you know there're shorter now than they ever were um we want to know that something has has been taken care of we we spent time on that look it's no different than civil rights than women's rights we thought we took care of those things and we didn't know that we were going to have to keep a constant watch to make sure that our rights weren't being eroded and I believe that access to clean air and clean water are fundamental rights that we have as human beings not just American citizens when

[7:57]  you feel like you don't have rights to those things it completely warps and shapes your worldview in our previous conversation you talked about some of the impacts on like my current generation the Millennials people who are in that prime age of having children and starting to build the next Generations of our company or of our country often feel like we don't have a safe enough environment to even bring children into this world doesn't that alarm you um again at the risk of getting myself in trouble what alarms me most is that the people who are thinking that way or the people that we most need to have children who will be raised understanding the issues and knowing that they need to take part in solving them um my I have my own niece moved to Germany during covid with her husband

[8:44]  because they thought that Germany would be a Kinder place to raise children and indeed it is in many ways um who would have thought that 40 50 years ago but that is definitely the case um the lot of the young people that that we work with at the zoo um whether it's in zoo camp or zoo teens or Urban Ecology program um you know a lot of them come from really difficult situations we didn't talk about this last time but I we had a young man in our Urban Ecology program who we were his emergency contact for everything uh and he um he had a nurse call in from the hospital bed where he was in the hospital to let us know that he wasn't going to be at work that his job was really important to him but he had um sustained stab

[9:33]  wounds because he stepped in front of uh his mother's boyfriend who was coming at her and he had sustained these he was he was going to be okay but he had saved his mother's life but he would needed us he wanted us to know he couldn't get to work um and that he wouldn't be coming back to work because they had to they had to go find someplace safe and you know that just meant so much to us to know that we mattered enough to him that his time with us had taught him what peace and nature can feel like and it's something that wherever that young man is right now I he knows that he can go take a walk someplace and in nature and feel safe whether it's a city park or or someplace else um he knows it's for him um a lot of the young people that we

[10:22]  work with have not spend any time in nature uh where I live in Rochester New York um I'm on the Southern Southern edge of Lake Ontario right at where the jese river literally the jese river runs through Rochester New York the Great Lakes are one of the best sources of freshwater on the planet uh the Jenice river is a powerful wonderful River kids living half an hour or half a mile from it have never been down to the to the sides of the jese river they've never been up to the lake they don't even know um how what a quick walk or bike ride could to take them into where the blue harand and the deer and the fox are right in the heart of the city um and so our job is to connect them to that because if you don't know about it why

[11:10]  would you care about it why would you worry about throwing your garbage down a storm drain if you don't know that the storm drain connects to the jese river which connects to your drinking water oh why would it be relevant to you so the our first job with anyone any anyone is to get them to fall in love with the living world and you have to expose them to that first and whether that's through the animals that they see at the zoo or through one of our Outreach programs um that is our job every day first and foremost we want people to fall in love with the living world because when you fall in love with something you act differently you behave differently you act on its behalf you CH make changes in your own behavior to benefit that thing that you love doesn't have to be a person it can be nature and so that's

[11:59]  that's our job it's a pretty great one I was I hadn't a I was talking to another individual on the podcast recently and their episode's going to drop and he said something that was really powerful he said the the biggest form of evil in today's world is ignorance and if you think about the antithesis of ignorance it's knowledge if we think about all the conflicts and the things that we think about in life right what are you going to say I think the antithesis is curiosity I love that I love that the the point that he was making was anytime we feel disconnected or feel that we can do harm to a person to another gender to another Society or even nature in itself is because we truly don't understand how connected and alike we really are and if we are curious and we can understand

[12:48]  that everything is connected from Lake Ontario to the genese river to the cigarettes that we throw out the window and how that is all connected I feel like we would be in a much better place but the question for you is why is it so easy for us to feel so disconnected from this entire life experience that we're a part of right now you know Kenan I don't know if I can answer that and part of it is I don't know if I want to go there because that takes me to such a sad despondent place of how many issues that so many young people face today so many PE issues that families face today and regardless of what's happening in someone's life they deserve Joy they deserve to feel hopeful and if you don't know what

[13:38]  those things feel like um that is just that is such a sad place my my daughter is a third grade teacher and um she's in a suburb but it's a very diverse suburb and uh you know she sees families these kids these third graders already are going through so much trauma in their own lives and when you are constantly living in trauma the only thing that you can do is focus on getting through to the next day um without the tools of understanding hey if you go out and you just put your bare feet on grass for 10 minutes you will actually become rooted and feel better I mean there's scientific evidence now 10 minutes with your feet on the ground and your heart rate will go down and your feelings of

[14:28]  uh mental and physical Wellness will increase because they are in fact because we are all connected and I think one of the things that we struggle with um particularly in my culture Caucasian culture if you will um Robin wal Kim who's a brilliant brilliant environmental scientist who's an indigenous woman says Caucasian culture wants to learn about science or Le wants to learn about nature while indigenous learns from nature and I think that is so true that there is this um desire to name everything well I can't I go out nature all the time I love looking at Birds I cannot name most of them I don't know their calls I have to you know I look it up every time but I just want to learn from it and I think that's where

[15:16]  you have to start you have to meet people where they are give them a moment of Joy give them a little bit something to be curious about and let them begin the dream themselves I go back to um maso's hierarchy of need and deep back in my history I love leadership Theory and motivation Theory and it's I just so I loved your recommendation by the way right book is right here oh you've got it yeah absolutely but um so if you if you go back to maso's hierarchy of needs you you know this where it's like you need to have shelter safety physical food and then you get to what he called uh the top was self-actualization right where you understand who you are as a person

[16:03]  and you become comfortable with with what you are well what he didn't say and he was a German uh scientist is that he took that theory from the indigenous of Northern our Northwest Pacific and Canada and that was not the top of the pyramid the next level of it was community and and what the IND indous believe and it makes so much sense is that once you are comfortable with who you are and have your own needs needs met then the most important thing becomes focusing on community and um the um the Messiah when they greet each other in Tanzania uh they say how are the children instead of how are you how

[16:54]  are the children because it's about if the children are okay then we're okay okay this this need to take care of other people that can get lost in the dominant culture in this country we uh took that way off course but no that was perfect this is this is great this is going to be an amazing conversation I'm super excited um so you know part of what you were talking about there and I mentioned this in our previous conversation was the uh Surgeon General came on to a national broadcast in 2022 and said the biggest threat to our society is not another viral pandemic but an epidemic of isolation and loneliness now to touch on that area that we didn't really want to go to I have a theory but that's very interesting and this kind of hits home for the individual who named you guys as his emergency contact we find ourselves in a place right now

[17:41]  where life has never been better but at the same time we've never been more disconnected from that highest level of community with all the distraction that comes from these little devices I've got my phone in my hand for everybody who's listening today we are constantly being bombarded by images that have been optimized to keep us in a place of fear a place of reactiveness because that's what gets engagement and that's how these algorithms have recognized to be able to tune into our little human brains our lizard brains if you will to show us things that keep us in that traumatic Loop of I have to focus on the right now so I can't even think larger than myself and that in itself is a tragedy so my biggest theory that I want to kind of expand on a little bit with you is I feel like we are so neglected in our personal lives to have that sense

[18:28]  of connection that great organizations and leaders like the person who's sitting across from me right now have the ability to inspire people and fill those gaps of connection validation and being seen by the work that we do and that's why I believe so much in the mission and the objectives that you're taking on by just being able to show people that there's something bigger than the little world that we often live in which is represented by an iPhone or an Android screen if that makes sense you it makes perfect sense we are an incredibly Mission focused organization and uh our mission is to inspire our community connect with care for and conserve wildlife and Wild Wild Spaces that's our entire mission statement uh and we review it constantly it's in you know different rooms

[19:17]  different offices and um we hire for Mission aligned people and that has changed over the course of the time that I've been there I've been there 10 years now and we have really made a name for ourselves as a conservation organization as an organization that's making a difference in our community uh and internationally uh the number of incredibly qualified applicants that we get for any open position is extraordinary even for our part-time positions people are lining up to work for us this we each summer recruit about 120 Zoo teen volunteers who are all there they have to apply go through an interview process they're there because they want to talk about conservation yes they like animals but they're there because they feel passionate about

[20:06]  helping save these animals by telling all of our guests about them and getting them to care um and it really becomes the focus of everything that we do all of our programs how does it serve the mission um and our mission is very carefully created to say it's it's about our community it's not about the people who come through our gat it's not about our members it's not about our donors it's about the entire community that we serve which is a you know nine County region in Upstate New York uh it's we have an obligation to get everybody to connect with nature and care about it to the point where they want to act on its behalf and so if you start every meeting every staff meeting as we do with a

[20:56]  revisit of what our mission is by saying hey let's tell me what tell me we call them not so cool moments um where people can share a mission moment and we can just remind ourselves constantly of what is good that we are doing and the impact that we're having and their stories you know maybe an accounting manager will talk about seeing a guest on site and hearing them talk about the Sturgeon or whatever it might be um you never know where their stories or come from but everybody has a story and that's really important that everybody no matter what your role in it role is at the organization understands how they connect to the mission how their job helps Drive getting the the objectives met for the organization you see me my

[21:45]  one of my Bibles back here John door is measuring what matters you know we have four companywide objectives that everybody understands their role in we have to maximize Revenue we have to deepen and broaden engagement we have to have be seen as a con conservation organization and we have to be seen as a welcoming place for all and so whether you are our volunteer manager or a finance director or an educator or you run the membership program everything you do relates to all four of those objectives um and when you when everybody's tied to Mission fulfillment then everybody shows up every day wanting to work together to figure out how we jointly meet that mission and it sounds all poana but it works we do surveys of the staff and

[22:33]  discover you know what they love best going back to those connection moments they love our staff meetings who loves meetings our staff wants meetings they want to sit in a room together a lot of their work is varied and they don't get to work together but when they're in a meeting together they feel connected to each other and to the mission and they understand what their role is in it and they get excited about what other people are doing through sharing those simple not so cool moments right what we're doing is we're sharing impact which gives us insights to the bigger mission that we're a part of which boosts conviction it's much easier to stand behind something that you are selling and experience a connection with nature when you have conviction to the impact that you're making and I feel like that in itself is such a beautiful small element

[23:21]  because yes you're right who does love staff meetings but when you understand why you're coming together to be able to be a part of something larger than yourself this goes right back to the element I was just talking about that earning that deep yearning for that sense of connection to something larger and I feel like it's amazing organizations like you and yours and leaders like yourself that have the ability to inspire people to be a part of something larger than themselves which is so beautiful now one of the things that I recognize is we often discount the experiences that we've been through in life that bring us to this exact moment in our previous conversation you had mentioned something like our careers are something like a spiral right they lead us to different places all of the moments are a culmination if you will to these opportunities let's kind of talk about

[24:07]  your culmination of experiences that it brought you to this moment yeah I had a securious route to where I am uh and I was telling you in our last conversation that um a speaker at my College commencement talked about how the career lad wasn't a straight up and down ladder but a spiral staircase and so sometimes you make these lateral moves and but you're constantly moving forward and what I have discovered along the way is now I'm in a position where everything makes sense where all of the things that I have done along the way you know I started thinking I wanted to be a hospital administrator and then I did an internship in London in a hospital for a month and went no um went on for to do doctoral work at Syracuse University studying nonprofit management organization Theory and then got

[24:54]  sidetracked into environmental policy and and energy policy um which is what my a lot of my work went in I I moved to Arizona to be an assistant professor at um Arizona State University teaching intro to public administration organization Theory organization change managing diversity um environmental and uh energy policy and did not feel that I was really moving the needle I was teaching people who are maybe using what I was teaching but um but I wasn't making an impact myself the research that I was doing the Publications that I was you know uh that were out there were only being accessed by people who needed to read them and quote them for their own research and it just didn't feel meaningful so I went into nonprofit

[25:40]  management which had I would always been interested in what call somebody to nonprofit management versus public sector or private sector and there are definitely differences in why somebody works for a nonprofit uh we tend not to get rich in the nonprofit world and our uh our rewards are different than monetary so I worked in Social Services for a few years I worked with high-risk youth for the first three years uh and then I worked actually with uh even high higher risk youth at a special needs adoption agency and I learned a lot uh about the social issues facing families and facing kids and then I had an opportunity to go to work for an Arts organization uh in a velopment role and

[26:29]  which is fundraising basically um and I thought oh how nice it's going to be to not have to tell sad stories to get people to open up their wallets and it was true uh and the people that support cultural organizations uh you know we talked at the beginning about you get tired you get you're involved in this crisis for a little bit and then you move to the next it's the same thing with Social Services people you know they're involved with a Cancer Society for a while and then their need to do that sort of shifts to a different cause you arts and culture world doesn't work like that if you love art you love art and you're not going to stop loving art the same is true of the environmental world but um I worked for a number of cultural organizations then had an opportunity to move back to my hometown to take on a role um as director of strategic planning and resource development for an international Museum

[27:16]  of Photography and film you're like what do these things have to do with each other um but it's all about relationship building right and it's all about learning and figuring out what it all means together and uh the year that I turned 50 10 years ago ouch um I got a call from a Head Hunter and uh they said we've got a job I think you might be interested in looking at and it was this role of leading the zoo Society at really a critical juncture in the Zoo's history and I thought what a way to go back to my environmental Roots um to uh to be a leader of an organization that is doing really meaningful work but maybe not telling its story as well at the time that I took the job their catchphrase or tagline was the natural

[28:05]  place for families and the logo had a sun and in it with primary colors and it the reputation in town was it's a great place to go if you it's a sunny day and you've got small children because that's what they were putting out there and nobody really understood that we were really involved in in conservation not to the extent that we are now we do so much more with communities right now we we raise a lot more and send out a lot Grant more grant money now than we did um but really it was an organization at the precipice of needing to be more in the community needing to have a bigger presence and I thought this this is amazing and there's never been a day and there have been hard days but there has never been a day that I have not gotten out of bed and said yes I can't wait to get to work because and I think I told you this last

[28:52]  time I know every day what I'm doing is making a difference and that we're reaching people and all of that Collective action that we're inspiring can actually make a difference whether it's for the Amor tigers or the African land or the North American River ERS like that or just us you know our ability to have clean air and clean water um just by small actions inspiring people to say you know I get it now and I'm going to turn down my thermostat or I get it now and I'm going to stop putting the long clippings down the storm drain or oh all right I'll make sure I know where my fish is from when I buy it uh or I will stop using products that have palm oil that's not

[29:40]  sustainably sourced you know I will use reusable bags you there's so many small actions that we can all take that can collectively make a difference but it's got to be all of us it can't just be a subset of people for way too long conservation has belonged to a sub subset of people and they have been wealthy white people and the planet is not sustainable that way so whether it's a business decision a nature decision or simply the right thing to do we've got to spread out conservation to absolutely everybody I want to point out something to everybody who's watching and listening today the best leaders who are the most passionate about their cause who have come on the show often have a similarity with exactly what you just identified very succinctly you said when I got an opportunity to work with this

[30:28]  organization we are at a precipice a Crossroads on how we could be doing more great leaders often do not shy away from opportunities to have a greater impact but rather they lean into those moments to fill the Gap that's something that I recognize about you have you always been that type of leader who's willing to lean into the challenging situations to make a bigger impact than I guess you could even understand I I I don't know the answer to that question I'd like to say yes I've always wanted to do more I've always been very vocal about what I see as injustices what I see as things that could be done differently um I'm not sure it's always been as welcome as when you're the CEO there's a lot more leeway in what I can do um but Gathering the people around me who are on board with it and it's not

[31:16]  it's not always easy you know you come in as a new CEO and there's changes that have to be made and there's um that mission alignment around what we do that didn't necessarily exist exist when I got there um I had you know there were people who were there just doing a job and I'm not really interested in having people work for me who are just doing a job I want people first of all who are better at their role than I could ever be I couldn't do the role of anybody that works for me they are amazing they are passionate they are knowledgeable they are skilled I rely on them that's what you do you hire people who are better than you are um otherwise what are you what are you doing uh and I've always done that and I've actually had people comment to me about that like wow you you're Fearless about hiring people that are really good

[32:04]  I'm like of of course what am I here for why wouldn't I like they're like you're not afraid that they might be better than you I'm like no I want them to be better than me oh let's let's break that down a little bit because this is a common fear with a lot of people who are not only starting businesses but are also in positions of leadership I feel like we come from a place of insecurity by surrounding ourselves with people who are better than we are but if you listen to the top stories of successful entrepreneurs CEOs Founders they're often saying the one thing I realized is I had to surround myself with people who were better than me yeah how did we come to that realization of why that's so important let's kind of hammer that home oh well I just know that I I'm good at certain things and not good at other things and I uh my capacity for some things is not the same as what other

[32:52]  people's capacity is and I need to surround myself with people who can do the work that I can't do and it's just that simple and I I remember saying early on with somebody that I hired one of my first hires um who is who's become a very good friend of mine as well and I said to him early on if you ever see me let my ego get in the way of this organization you have permission to tell me and there's only been one time that he's had to say that this is not about me this is about what this organization can do for the community and I can't do everything it would be arrogant and foolish to think that I could so and I want to have a team that is trusted out in the community I can't be the only one

[33:41]  who's the Evangelist for the organization and for the work that we do so I kind of it's one say I I don't quite get it because it's just common sense but didn't Thomas Payne say Common Sense was not common at all exactly right and this is why a huge percentages of businesses fail long term in my personal opinion there's an element of ego that's involved in being the leader where we feel like we are the Brain Trust right I've been a big believer in my professional and my personal maturation process of masterminds being able to get in the room so I can learn from other people's experiences and very transparently this is one of the ways in which I personally benefit from this podcast is I have the ability to share in the same space as a

[34:29]  great leader like you who's been through experiences that I might not have context of today but in the future I'll have that subconscious memory of my conversation with Pamela and the reaffirmation and I would say the reinforcement of an idea that you have to surround yourself with good people yeah so I benefit from this but I often feel like so many people are scared to take that leap because how is that going to make me look compared to everybody else if everybody's better than me am I a great leader yes yes I think the other thing that I see uh with a lot of leaders uh whether it's small business or nonprofits is founder syndrome where they're just so invested in their own Vision their own dream that the thought of somebody else who might have a vision or dream that could take it to the next level is very threatening

[35:16]  to them and I'm not that I am not a Visionary leader I have some good Visions but I'm a strategist and I believe there's three types of people and I hire I hire for each of them there's Visionaries there's strategy and there's tacticians I am not a tactician um I'm a good strategist uh I hire people who are Visionaries as well um they feed me with ideas and I can pick out the ones that I know make sense for the organization and I can get us from I can outline get from a to G to M to V and then I need the tacticians that get us from ABC D and and that's to me that is so basic to management is you have to have those people who love the details who thrive in the details I'm not one of them uh I like big picture so there's a

[36:07]  an amazing opportunity for us to point to the book that's directly behind you in the first couple Pages Gary vaynerchuk talks about the 12 and a half ingredients that make a great leader great and one of those is self-awareness which I feel like you just hit on incredibly succinctly why do you feel like self-awareness is a skill set that is prominent in great leaders today by the definition of Gary ve in 12 and a half if you're not self-aware then then you don't understand or it is harder to understand how to communicate with other people and what your own biases and um fallbacks are when you're communicating um knowing your weaknesses helps you build on them and

[36:56]  improve on I love when he talks about the 12 the half one the kind Candor and that um it's an opportunity to keep building it uh because I think that is so true we can only work on ourselves when we know what our weaknesses are um it's not enough to know our strengths we have to be thinking you know as I said I'm not a detail person so after every meeting I have I have to say okay who needs to know all of these things that I just learned um and I have to constantly work at that if I weren't self-aware about that there would be things falling through every single day um and I probably wouldn't be as aware like I'm not um I'm not great with the Atta girls and adab

[37:41]  boys I definitely give people props when they've gone above and beyond but because I'm not a person who needs a lot of Pat On The Backs um my my intrinsic motivation is different than that it's comes from inside me um I have to remind myself that other people really do need those they need that on a regular basis to be reminded how much they are appreciated and so to me self-awareness is just absolutely critical um but it's hard to look in the mirror it's really hard to look in the mirror and that's one of the things I found about entrepreneurship is this entire experience is really standing in front of a mirror and having to look yourself in the face and be self-aware to recognize some of the areas that I can improve you know I was talking to uh another CEO um from nonprofit in Connecticut the other day a guy named

[38:30]  Gino so Gino huge shout out to you he talked about I have to recognize the days when I have to shapeshift or show up as a different person based on the context of the person who I'm talking to and I thought that was really enlightening to recognize that your job as a leader is not always to be the same person but it's to shape shift and meet people where they are in the moments where they truly need that version of you if that makes sense absolutely I call it being a chameleon um nature girl um but I think it's so funny when you said meet people where they are because that I that to me is the key to everything that we do is meeting people where they are and going back to assuming people have no knowledge and no context and have never seen these animals before whether it's a hellbender which you probably don't know what that

[39:17]  is um or a giant millipede or a African elephant like to start where people are meet people where they are they may have great fear about some of the things that they see at the zoo or that they experience they may have fear of walking down a trail in a park because it is so unfamiliar or they've been told not to they may have fear of getting in the water because culturally water is something that they are not used to and they've been told stay away from it so meeting people where they are uh is key to everything and so I don't treat my Urban ecologist Workforce Development kids employees the same way that I treat my Board of Trustees I don't treat you know it's it's I don't know that it's

[40:07]  code shifting but it's definitely being able to recognize what people need uh and never making assumptions and yeah I love that meeting people where they are I was um interviewing a surgeon and a PhD in neuroscience and we were having a a conversation about the most important skill set of successful people and leaders today and he said emotional regulation with all the challenges that you face when it comes to combating narratives that we see in the media people not believing in the vision for what you guys are doing in the bigger opportunity to conserve everything that is in front of us in the form of Nature and Wildlife how do you kind of think about your ability to regulate your

[40:55]  emotions as a leader there isn't a choice and and I think it's really important to have um it's it's very hard to have work life balance when you are a CEO of a nonprofit or any CEO lots of us have trouble with work life balance um but you have to make time to get away and have downtime and I'm an introvert so it's really important that I have super quiet downtime on a regular basis um the I have learned over the years um you know maybe through failing at times that um keeping a straight countenance and never elevating is really important to being a leader and some of the most

[41:44]  powerful people I know and have worked with never raised their voice Above This level because they know how to use their words in ways that are incredibly powerful and when when I have to have very difficult conversations with people I never raise my voice Above This level and it doesn't matter what they say back to me or whether they elevate if they elevate I will say it's time to close this conversation and return to it when we can both behave as adults um because not regulating it makes things far worse um and I've definitely learned that and you know and I go back to that kind cander that um vanderchuck talks about and how difficult that is and you

[42:33]  know there we all have conversations that we avoid he talks a lot in other places about avoiding conflict um and how he's a master at it I think it was vuk that talked about that years ago and um I you know the the more you can um desensitize yourself to avoiding Conflict by having the difficult conversations the more you realize this isn't really that hard um and this is important part of business to me it's it's business and it's not you have to take the emotions out or but then you have to go and get them out elsewhere I agree there's a as you were talking there I was thinking about I read a book by a guy named Ray doio called principles not sure if you've

[43:20]  read it so Ray Delio is a big Financial guy and he talks about the concept of healthy conflict in his organization he said healthy conflict represents being willing to have that tough conversation being willing to have the ideas butt up against one another because when we have that onetime tough conversation it only lasts for a minute but if we let it go and we avoid that conflict it builds upon itself and impacts everything else that we do as a team and I really love that um it's just so powerful to kind of think about you know the highest form of compassion that we can really have for others is that definition of almost true love if your son or daughter or anybody else who has a relationship who's listening and watching to this podcast if you knew that they were doing wrong by themselves do you truly love them if

[44:08]  you were willing not willing to have that tough conversation with them that tough conversation is the highest form of compassion that you can have for another person because you're not coming from a place of malice you're not trying coming from a place of trying to hurt somebody you want to help and that's what love and compassion truly is in my definition no I think that's exactly right and you know when there when we have performance issues we have you a lot of places to use these performance Improvement plans and it's a scary thing for people and what I always say is look I have used these to manage people to success and I have used these to have people understand this is not the right role for them but the most important thing is for you to know this is what we expect from you this is what we need from you and we're going to give you a structure to make that happen and figure out how to have you succeed I want

[44:55]  everyone to succeed not not everybody does but we have to give them the resources and the structure to succeed we hired them for a reason um and it's yeah so I I am unafraid of those conversations um and my team once they've been through a couple of them they become unafraid of it I also uh I love the conversations with with new employees who come to me with what would you think about you know they think they're touching some sacred cow that I have with an event or something like that what would you think I'm like if you think that's what we should do go for it they're like really and I'm like yeah one of our workplace values is willingness to change and I always say if we can do it a better way let's try

[45:42]  it if it doesn't work what have we lost like we we've got to always be looking at how we can do things better than we are uh healthy relationship with experimentation is so important I know I think I heard Jeff Bezos at one point in time talked about how many experiments they've run as as Amazon he's like we've run so many experiments and they have crashed and burned but the ones that have worked out have turned into things like AWS Services which is a huge part of our Revenue now which is Amazon Prime those are all experiments that we've built into the culture here now there's some other elements of the Amazon culture that we won't talk about but I do love those Elements which I think is really important now there's something that is on the front of my mind and I want to use this as a transition the human mind is very bad at recognizing how small events today

[46:30]  impact a bigger picture in the future an example if you eat a bag of chips every single night doesn't seem like a big deal today but a year from now you're going to end up gaining like 40 pounds when it comes to the small moments of encouragement motivation giving people good access to information about conservation how are you thinking about the small actions today in the micro impacting the bigger picture of the macro of the mission that you guys yeah so we don't we it's about Hope right um and you and I talked about this a little bit hope is one of our values but it's also when you're asking people to make a change in their behavior we'll go back to the diet thing if you feel ashamed that you have gained weight and that you

[47:21]  were not as fit as you used to be and it feels hopeless um you might for a few days uh be good about your diet and get back to your 10,000 step walking but then you something happens and you have a chocolate bar and you feel bad about yourself and then you you you don't keep going because you just feel bad about yourself but if you have hope that over time your actions will lead to you feeling better if you see progress you feel even more hopeful we know conservation psychology tells tells us that the key to having people make Las lasting change is for them to believe in hope that there is hope and so you come to the zoo and you fall in love with the snow leopard because

[48:10]  they're hard not to fall in love with I mean they're absolutely majestic creatures they're beautiful and then you learn that there's only about 3,500 of them left in nature 3500 that is not a big number and that's a little scary that that is uh if you think about like the size of some towns you think about the number of people on a cruise ship there's more people on a big cruise ship than there are snow leopards left in nature that is stunning and that's that one of those aha moments I I'm totally believer in transformational moments like you can't see the world the same after you have one of those aha moments so you have this aha moment and you think well that's devastating and what's causing this climate change and habitat degradation

[48:58]  and it feels a little hopeless but we have signs that say but there is hope and we talk about how Human Action may have caused these things but Human Action can also make a difference and we talk about the different things that are happening either with our conservation Partners like the snow leopard trust that are working to make a difference we personally sponsor a beekeeper program to give people Economic Development opportunities in Nepal and Tibet that keep them from uh it's a it's an alternative funding source for them um as opposed to livestock which is threatened by um the snow leopards uh you can so we we teach them that there are all these efforts that are happening and that it's working that

[49:46]  we're seeing a difference we're seeing motional efforts we're learning more about them so we're beginning to bring it back from the from the edge and we can talk about that with a lot of different species and if you go oh there is hope there's there's things like Southern White Rhino I think that's the right one uh Northern white I think is completely almost completely gone southern white rhino at the end of the last the century before now 1900 is we were down to a frightening LLY no low number of white rhinos there's now you know 100,000 of them because Human Action American Eagles that's the greatest story you know when I was a kid they were almost gone um DDT was impacting the the thickness of the eggs of the uh Eagles

[50:35]  so um they couldn't hatch correctly and you know the eggs weren't strong enough and so we were at risk of losing Eagles and Human Action in the form of legislation but also in the form of educating people made a difference and now I see eagles flying overhead on a regular basis here so giving people hope is a whole lot better than making them feel bad sadly about their own actions um and I I told you the story of a friend who took a daughter to another Zoo that's a very good zoo but the language is a little heavy-handed on some of the signage and you about two hours in after reading all the signage a good portion of the signage you're like humans are terrible and we are um and my friend's daughter as they left said you know I'm rethinking having children and that is not what we want

[51:24]  people to feel we don't want people to feel despondent we don't want people to feel angry at what we have done to this world there's a place for those feelings but those aren't what are going to lead to somebody saying you know what I think I'm going to start composting because that seems like a something that's manageable for me to do that can make a difference and make me feel like I'm doing my part so our research shows us that more than 80% of the people that come to the zoo have learned something that day that they can Ed to live more sustainably and more than 80% have learned something that they can do to save animals from Extinction and that's part of what gives us hope to continue doing what we're doing because that is the part of our mission that matters most our mission is about people and

[52:11]  people's change it's not about animals the end result is it's saving animals from Extinction but our mission is about changing human behavior so that we all can enjoy these species and our own health for for generations to come what we're talking about is the concept of lagging indicators here just like when you change habits or you change behavior in the micro a lagging indicator is the result that comes later so we can't often save all these animals today but if we change our human behavior the result down the stream is that lagging indicator of a more harmonious ecological environment which is just amazing to kind of think about you know there's a I want to I want to give you an

[52:58]  opportunity because one of the things I always talk about when it comes to great leaders like yourself is one of your biggest opportunities to fulfill on your mission is to cast a vision so big that highly talented people like you said are literally banging down the doors to work at your organization can find themselves in Your Vision let's paint a vision for the zoo Society over the next let's say two years so it's kind of in the micro what are we trying to accomplish what opportunities are in front of us what are you excited about um I'm really excited about all of our efforts to be more inclusive in what we do um and I think that that message is really starting to to resonate and when I when I talk about that you know our

[53:47]  our audience reflects our community pretty well in terms of demographics and you look at any socioeconomic indicator any ethnicity um but we we have a particular charge in our region to do a better job serving um the deaf and heart of hearing Community because we have the third largest per capita community of DEA and heart of healing in the country um we have a very large number of native Spanish speakers that we are not doing a great job of of reaching and and speaking with we have the I think the second largest outside of New York City uh population of Puerto Rican uh we have a huge Refugee Community here we have um statistics are showing that one in about 12 uh people are on the autism spectrum and we have uh relationships with autism up here and a number of organizations

[54:35]  serving that community and we're doing really incredible things to ensure a welcoming experience but as we begin to plan a new tropic center uh and new Welcome Center we are doing them with Universal Design in mind and making sure that they will really feel that the place was built for them uh you know right now we have we have ASL signs animal ID signs around that are really wonderful done by the kids that uh go to school at Rochester school for the deaf and we're we're proud of that but we know that there is so much more that we can do because it is so important to level the playing field for who nature belongs to we are part of the museums for all program which is a program uh coordinated by The Institute of Museum

[55:22]  and Library services and the association of Children's Museums and it essentially says uh if you're part of museums for all that um if you receive snap card benefits that you for us in for the case of the zoo you're admitted for a dollar for up to four people in your family and we know how many more people are using us than used to use us we've been on the program for two years I'm on the national advisory committee for museums for all and I'm very proud to be because we're really changing the discussion about who museums belong to who are they for um and in our case it's nature for all if you're a science museum some people say science for all but the idea that we are creating opportunities for a family without means to have the same family

[56:11]  memories at the zoo that a family of means has is incredible that they know it's a safe place that they feel welcome that they have joy that they come together as a family just like my family did when I was a kid um that's powerful to me and I don't know if that really answers your question but I I know when I talk about this kind of thing it's people like yeah I want I want to be part of that I want to be a part of doing that for this community I think about this as culture for all right it's not science it's not museums it's not zoos this is culture of our planet that unifies us to be one and to be all and I feel like that is you know a beautiful opportunity um there is one question that I have for you as we kind of land

[56:59]  the plane here so this has been first of all an amazing conversation we've learned so much about your passion Environmental Conservation the challenges that we Face the opportunities more more importantly that are in front of us one of the uh things we do here on the podcast is we have our previous guest ask you a question now this is an interesting one and I need to put a little context around this nonprofit CEO burnout is a real challenge now you had mentioned that often you are kind of you know introverted and introspective so you don't need a lot of Kudos and validation from others but when it comes to encouragement and support and reinforcement to the work that you do instead of giving it to other people all day how do you get support for your role as the leader of your organization who do you lean on I have a remarkable

[57:48]  network of people that have nothing to do with work I have a writing Circle I write poetry and Memoir stuff I have a writing Circle uh that we get together every month uh one of my dearest friends uh lives in Connecticut and was a former editor-in-chief of women's day magazine and how Jane and I found each other is a long story but we to get together every month through Zoom um it's a network of people that uh don't ask me about work and know that if I have a problem at work they're they're there to sound it out but they really allow me escape um that is my answer to that question I love that because it's really important I mean like the role of being a CEO is

[58:37]  all consuming right it's not exactly easy to turn it off because I'm sure you like myself we spend so much time um thinking about what we're trying to do the mission we're trying to fulfill on how can we encourage our teammates how can we kind of get Talent into the organization who's better than us to be able to help us fulfill on this mission and being able to disconnect is something that I'm truly working on those boundaries are incredibly important it's something I'm still trying to figure out um but when I hear the important perspective of leaders like yourself it makes everything a lot easier to understand the importance of and I just want to say Pamela thank you so much for everything that you're doing like this has been an amazing conversation to sit across so much I could talk nonprofit leadership for a very long time so an hour wasn't enough Kanan yeah maybe we should have you come

[59:25]  back for around two then I think that's what the people are going to ask for so you know I just want to say for everybody who's tuning in and watching let's give you know Pamela Reed Sanchez a big round of applause because you are the definition of heart and hustle hands down so thank you so much for coming on the show thanks Kenan