Tammy McLeod

Q: What most notably stands out about your leadership style or what is an example of leadership success you can share with our readers?

My fundamental belief is that the individuals doing the work know best what they need and how to do it. I am here to support them. I don’t want to change who people are but, rather, I want to work with them and their individuality to create a stronger team.

To that end, we’ve implemented a program where individuals initiate their own performance reviews and plans to let leaders know what they need for their next stage of growth. It’s relatively new and not perfect yet but is designed to facilitate conversations about what we need in the workplace to do our work most effectively.

We also use StrengthsFinder as a diagnostic and resource, so that we know who we can turn to when we need a different perspective and one that will enhance our own — rather than producing automatic agreement. Again, we don’t change who people are; we work with their unique characteristics for the benefit of the whole.

Q: What impact has COVID-19 or the disruptions of the past 18 months had on you as a leader?

The pandemic created an opportunity for me to learn and grow in a many areas. For one, intentional communication became a lot more important in a virtual world. Not only were we transitioning in terms of the medium of communication, but we found it was more important than ever to stay in touch with each other personally as well as professionally.

I have worked to institutionalize more frequent touchpoints with our team as a whole and in one-on-ones. As we navigated the disruptions of the pandemic and the recalibration that followed, I think we actually got to know each other better and came to appreciate each other more than before. Along the way, we created shared operating practices and expectations so that we could more deliberately work in an atmosphere of trust. I think that has carried over as we have emerged from the pandemic.

Q: What do you feel we can be doing as a business community to empower economic growth here?

This response is not limited to the business community. Our entire community can demand that we resource our education system appropriately. Education has been and will continue to be the fundamental building block of our community. It determines the level of innovation in our community and produces our future workforce. We should be laser-focused on getting the educational inputs and outputs that will enable sustainable growth. That focus needs to be across our state, for all our students.

The business community can offer necessary leadership, but it will take all of us working collaboratively to produce world-class educational opportunity for all our students.

We have a terrific team in place, and we’re ready to tackle 2024. It’s going to be a big year for us, with several important initiatives. The Flinn Foundation’s highest priority is strengthening the biosciences in Arizona, and our state is at a moment of great promise, with redoubled commitment to medical education, a high-functioning research community, and rapid private-sector growth. This will be the backdrop as we work with state and local policymakers, economic-development groups and individual leaders in the sector to plan the next iteration of the Arizona Bioscience Roadmap.

We will also redesign our arts and culture grantmaking initiatives, work to elevate both the Flinn Scholars and our Flinn-Brown Fellows — individuals with extraordinary capacity for strengthening our state — and continue development of a civic-leadership program for youth.