Latha Poonamallee, Ph.D. discusses expansive leadership, and it's about to get connected

"As leaders, it is an opportunity for us to explore how we can approach this shift." In this week's You've Got This, Latha Poonamallee, Ph.D. shares her professional trajectory, the inputs that went into her new book on expansive leadership, and how inclusive mindfulness can help support resilience around the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Be sure to read her answers below, along with announcing our next guests, chief well-being officer at Deloitte Jen Fisher and Global CEO Program Research Director at Deloitte Anh?Phillips .

Victoria: "Can you tell us about your professional journey?"

Dr. Poonamallee: "I grew up in India and worked there for a few years after getting my MBA.?After a few years of that, I realized that I wanted an opportunity to examine the organizational life as a scholar. I came to the United States to get my Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. One consistent theme in my work is a focus on how to make a better world for everybody—an equitable, just, sustainable, healthy, and inclusive world, where we lead beyond the tribe and beyond our in-group members, and helping leaders transcend the divide and develop the capacity to lead beyond their tribe. The message has become timely given the polarization and divisive culture we have right now. Currently, I work at the New School in New York City as Associate Professor and the chair of management faculty and University Fellow. I have always tried to balance between action and theory through entrepreneurial action within institutional contexts with initiatives like the Center for Social Innovation in my previous university, the Management and Social Justice Conversation Series, Socio-Tech Innovation Network. Even as a graduate student and new mother, I co-founded a breastfeeding education and advocacy network. With my current healthtech startup In-Med Prognostics , I am now a full-fledged entrepreneur. We are the first in the world to focus on building neuro-assessment products with a specific focus on non-Caucasian patients. Because existing products and services are using algorithms that are biased by oversampling of the Caucasian population (this is quite common in the field), their tools, conclusions and insights end up not serving other populations, so we are filling a much needed gap in the market. I call it design justice. 80% of products are designed for 20% of the population. We reversed it. Emerging underserved markets are not an afterthought for us but our reason for existence."

Victoria: "What inspired you to write your new book?Expansive Leadership: Cultivating Mindfulness to Lead Self and Others in a Changing World: A 28 day Program ?"

Dr. Poonamallee: "I think books get written when there is a tipping point. All full-time writers would disagree with me! But what I find is that without the push from within or without, one can keep thinking about it, and that is what happens for most people, you do not end up writing it. For me, one of the tipping points was my own clarity around the practice and how to use it in my work. I used to have a very mixed and conflicting relationship with using and teaching mindfulness. I had to accept my own legacy, lineage and own it. That was my journey. Growing up in India in a community that was deeply embedded in the practice, I was exposed to mindfulness and meditation all my life and have practiced it most of my adult life.?But there were also things I disagreed with. The overall framework in terms of the caste system, misogyny, and patriarchal systems. Therefore, I had questions about how to use this in my own practice and in the context of consulting and teaching and figure out a way to reclaim the roots of the practice as a liberatory, collective practice.

I started to incorporate it into my teaching and consulting only about ten plus years ago. Interestingly or funnily, I was also not sure if I was 'qualified' to teach it. So deeply embedded in the colonial frameworks, I thought I needed a formal approval or diploma to teach it or use it in my professional practice. Once I accepted my legacy and began to decolonize my own relationship with my heritage, I started to feel freer to adopt and use it. The book is an offshoot of that journey too. I want to share with the world something I have tried and tested in various populations; people seem to like it and find it useful.

"My belief is that mindfulness cannot be a mountaintop activity for it to be meaningful and useful. Those who need it the most do not have the luxury to go away to Big Sur on a weeklong retreat. The book is meant to make mindfulness and contemplative practices accessible to everyone in the context of personal life, leadership development and identity explorations. My goal is de-mystifying mindfulness to a certain degree and make it accessible to people."

The other aspect is that the western secular discourse around mindfulness is dominated by white capitalist conversations and extractive/exploitative logics. For instance, TIME magazine released two cover stories on what they termed the mindfulness revolution. These two issues are separated by 10 years, but both covers feature white, blonde, and thin women sitting in a serene spot, meditating. It is like the thousands of years of Asian (especially South Asian/Indian subcontinent) heritage and contribution was disappeared and suddenly, some white people invented meditation and there is no other history to it. I started to begin to pay more close attention to the (mis)appropriation of these practices and morphing into capitalistic tools that serve to reify existing structures and systems. If you were to search online for mindful leadership books, they are almost always written by white people who treat the practice like another productivity improvement tool. I think that mindfulness purely sold at an individual level is a spiritual bypass that truncates an individual’s growth, robs them of full flowering and growth and pretends like meditation is such an individual practice and individual salvation. Which is another reason I decided to write the book. To decolonize, de-capitalize, and demystify mindfulness practice. That is why my book has a 28-day program in it so individuals can use it for and by themselves or in groups.

Another reason I wrote the book was for folks in the leadership and organizational development space to be able to adopt and adapt to use in their practice. So, one of the ways the book has been framed is to move from an exploration from individual identity and related mental models —understandings of how we deal with the world, how we set up boundaries and our relationship with time. For example, when we operate from a very ego or individual self-orientation, we tend to take a Me vs. the World perspective and become too defensive. ?We run the danger of becoming too transactional and setting boundaries that we struggle with being open and inviting the world to engage with us. There is a value for boundary-setting, especially for women and underrepresented groups because we have been exploited in the past. But to be an expansive leader, one must go beyond the tribe while protecting our tribe too. Whatever your tribe may be and where your boundaries may lay. It is a balance.

I first began to teach mindful leadership in my previous institution, Michigan Technological University to predominantly male undergraduate students in an engineering school. I think we were all equally shy and tentative especially about doing the group practice in the classroom given the context and mix of students. But very quickly, it became a popular class. My students were wonderful, supportive and engaged and their positive experience and support reaffirmed my belief that it was not only important to integrate mindfulness in education but also be bold to use it for whole person development and as a methodology creating space for active, critical, and structured reflection.

Almost always people come to mindfulness through a very personal lens, of wanting to be less stressed or calmer or do better in exams or be more focused etc. Basically, reduce their pain and suffering and increase their well-being. It is important to meet everyone where they are, and I welcome everyone if they are willing to be open and diligent. The problem is that most of the mindfulness programs especially the corporate ones do not go beyond that, and spur thought and reflections on what is our role in the world, what is our purpose beyond being a cog in the economic wheel and how we engage with the world at large. Take, for example, Google’s program Search Inside Yourself, one of the most popular corporate mindfulness programs. What have they truly achieved through the mindfulness program?Google is an excellent tech company with amazingly talented people who do interesting things in the world. But how did adoption of mindfulness programs change how people work with each other? Are they less competitive? More kind? More righteous? More moral? How did the collective practice change how they function in the world as a powerful organization? I am not just talking about checks they may write for community and nonprofit organizations. Did their practice lead to disrupting any of the hierarchical power structures within the organization and the organization’s power over the world? So that is one of the things I wanted to bring—a different perspective into the space, that would honor the original intent of most mindfulness practices, which is to understand and experience interconnectedness, and to understand that we are one and we all have a responsibility to care for each other and for Mother Earth and all life with whom we share the planet and the universe. I wanted to articulate my experience and the model that I have refined over the years and share it with the world to encourage moving from mindfulness as a solely personal pain reduction or productivity tool to a liberatory practice and advance a social mindfulness paradigm that expands the way we see ourselves in the world.

Finally, being stuck in the house in the pandemic and working remote gave me a nice window of opportunity to actually write the book. Instead of complaining or being anxious about it, I decided to change the quality of my perception. Three of my pandemic highlights are gardening, writing and completing the book, and hosting the Management and Social Justice Conversation Series."

Victoria: "As we look ahead around the pandemic, what are some ways you recommend we can bring these values of mindfulness to life and lead from a place of less stress and more compassion?"?

Dr. Poonamallee: "We are at a very interesting moment and a threshold, as a society, and as a world. We are at a moment of opportunity to build collective action and really challenge certain orthodoxies about how we do our everyday business and how we live. As a CEO and business entrepreneur myself, I understand that we must look at productivity, how people work in organizations, how to keep the lights on.

"But at the same time, here is an opportunity for us to change the world by becoming more inclusive leaders, and more progressive leaders, more trusting leaders, and more compassionate leaders. The timing is right. The door is open. The question is do we have the courage? Do we have the skills to step through and create a different better world?"

In the 70’s and 80’s there used to be a management style called Management by Walking Around. This involved managers literally wandering around and doing surprise spot checks on their employees. The idea was that you can control what you can see. You manage by line of sight. During the pandemic, so much of the world’s work was done remotely. For the first time in management discourse, we are forced to consider how to trust people who do the work without supervision in the traditional sense. It is an opportunity for employees to determine in what capacity they want to work, what kind of work they want to and how they want to do it. Millions of Americans are voting with their feet by resigning from jobs that they were forced to accept before the pandemic. We read reports that Gen Z is willing to take a pay cut for autonomy.?Do they want to do remote work or combination work, and claim some autonomy?

As leaders, it is an opportunity for us to explore how we can approach this shift. Can we create a shared power model with employees who have more autonomy than we are used to? To share power, we must trust that our employees can wield the power and autonomy well. It is not enough for leaders to be trustworthy then. We need to learn to respect and trust people that work with us. I see it as an opportunity for an overall shift to a more interdependent and collective leadership versus the 20th century hierarchical, top-down-driven older model of leadership.

To build an inclusive and equitable world, we must change power structures. I have a deep understanding and empathy for people who are being asked to change. Change is difficult for most people. Even changing our daily run route is challenging. So, changing the traditional structures and access to resources, opportunities and power and sharing power is even more challenging. We cannot change the outside world if we do not change our inner worlds. If we cannot transform ourselves, how can we transform the world? Of course, we need to hold everyone accountable. But we must also equip ourselves to step through this threshold to a new leadership model that is inclusive and honors the interdependent nature of life and human existence. But everyone needs tools and methodologies to use as scaffolding for this transition. I believe mindfulness practice can give us a way to manage transitions more robustly and with more compassion to ourselves and others. Mindfulness and contemplative approaches are a way to help us into this transition by creating spaces for reflection and building up of inner resources and making us more robust and compassionate and develop more expansive mental models about our relationship with the world.

?"We also need to be more resilient and agile. A lot of times, the world does not seem to change that much, but suddenly, some event triggers a big change. The pandemic changed the entire world so much. We have realized we do not have a lot of control over everything."

For example, my mother is in India, I have not seen her in 17 months. This is the longest I have not seen her. India has been burning with COVID issues, as we all know, and there is not a damn thing I can do to be 100% confident that she will not contract the virus. I get her groceries delivered via Amazon, so she does not have to go out, I talk to her every day, but beyond that, we have to deal with the situation or the moment as it unfolds. I have seen this phenomenon in my previous research on disasters. These are breaching moments when we are suddenly confronted with the lack of control combined with a pressing demand to handle the present moment. To handle it, we need inner resilience, resources, and strength to be agile and present.

Finally, there is the collective trauma that we have had to deal with, and we have not dealt with it yet. Mental health issues are shooting through the roof. In 2020, young peoples’ ER visits due to mental health issues has tripled or quadrupled. Whoever thought the US would have lost 600,000+ lives due to an illness??Globally, we have lost over 4 million lives to the pandemic. Some researchers report that if we include Excess Covid Deaths, this number may rise to over 7 million people. It is not just the loss of lives but also lost years and formative life experiences for cohorts. My son turned 18 and 19 during the pandemic, finishing his freshman year of college, and at this age, he and his friends have been robbed of this time in their youth. We need leaders who are empathetic, compassionate and value health and wellness of their employees beyond the bottom line.

We all know the world has changed or it must change. But every human organization including societies must contend with its inertia. We may forget what happened most recently and go back to what it was! It is leaders’ responsibility to remember how much we have learned during the pandemic. How we have learned that the most vulnerable among us bore the brunt during the pandemic. We have also learned that we live in a very interdependent world. If a community somewhere else is suffering from COVID-19, it is a danger to all of us. Japan’s tsunami showed how disruptive a single disaster can be to the world of business and supply chain management. But the COVID-19 pandemic has been the longest disaster experience we have experienced probably in recent memory.

Earlier I complained that 'mindfulness is used to alleviate personal suffering.' But it is essentially very human, nobody wants to suffer. At the same time, using mindfulness only for alleviating one’s own pain truncates human experience and development. We tend to avert our gaze from other people’s suffering because we do not know what to do or how to help. We feel helpless. We do not know how to handle that sense of loss of control. I live in New York City; I see homeless people all the time. ?I can help my local homeless person by buying food or connecting with them as a fellow human, but as an individual, I am unable to help all the homeless people in New York City. Other people’s suffering arouses feelings of pain and guilt in most of us. In Los Angeles, you have veterans in tents, with flags on their tents. That makes me angry and helpless. But if we use mindfulness to look away from other people’s suffering, then we lose the purpose of these spiritual practices. And we do not develop or grow as a society or as people.

So, while we continue to go through this tough time that has destabilized a lot of things, I hope we do not forget all the inequities and injustices that surfaced in the pandemic due to challenges, the grief and loss. And the humanity that we witnessed in our co-workers. I hope that they inform us moving forward, so we can build a different world. It is about how we can manage that, and acknowledge the collective trauma, grief, and loss of control we have all had to deal with not just the pandemic but also in our history as a country, as a human race. These are things we must contend with so we can move forward. We must remember what we learned and not forget. So we can re-organize how we define who we are in relationship to others and co-exist with these complexities and move forward as leaders. It is a great opportunity for leaders to change the world."

Follow Dr. Poonamallee on LinkedIn. ?

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Next week's guests: Jen Fisher and Anh Phillips

I'm looking forward to our next guests, collaborators and co-authors Anh?Phillips and Jen Fisher of Deloitte. Bringing together extensive experience in research, management consulting, and innovation with a focus on strengthening workplace relationships, here's what I'll be asking Jen and Anh in our conversation:

• Can you tell us about your career journeys?
• In your recently-published book WORK BETTER TOGETHER:? How to Cultivate Strong Relationships to Maximize Well-Being?and?Boost Bottom Lines, you outline the importance of 'humanity in the workplace.' As we look ahead to adjusting around the pandemic, what are some key trends you’re seeing?

• What advice would you have for those who want to improve and strengthen their relationship-building skills at work and beyond?

If you have questions for Anh or Jen, I encourage you to ask them in the comments below, and thank you for being a part of You've Got This!