Deanna Mackey’s Remarks
In our webinar on Tuesday, November 10th, our day of action and education for DEI in public media, Deanna Mackey from Public Television Major Market Group and Public Media Women In Leadership shared the story of her leadership journey. Thanks to volunteers for transcribing her remarks.
Hi, I'm Deanna Mackey, President of the Public Television Major Market Group and Founder of Public Media Women in Leadership. I'm really honored and pleased to have been asked to share my story with you as part of Public Media For All's webinar today on their day of education and action. I was asked to tell you a little bit about myself. I have worked in public media for 30 years. I spent 25 of those years at KPBS in San Diego mostly in positions of management and leadership; my last six years as the COO, and the last 5 years I have led the PTMMG, which is a consortium of the largest 40 public TV stations in the country.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about what my leadership journey was like. I moved into leadership very young at KPBS. It's a pretty progressive station and there were opportunities for women and people of color,, and I was in a management role in my mid-20s, and by my late 20s I was attending national meetings on behalf of my GM. The experience was very challenging - at the station not as much because there was a lot of support, but when I started attending national meetings I was small, young, brown, and female and that was not what you saw at these meetings. I was often one of maybe two women, sometimes three, and almost always the only person of color, so I really had to learn how to make my way, how to be heard, and how to fit in in what was often a very patronizing environment.
I decided early in my career that at some point I would try to create an opportunity on a national level to help women, and especially women of color, as they came up behind me. But in the meantime, I would do everything I could for both the women and the men who worked for me at KPBS. And I was fortunate to have a lot of freedom in how I led. And I had a philosophy about leadership and that is to lead via the individual first and the team second. And I don't think that's a norm in our industry. We tend to see our industry and the people in it as a family and everybody sort of works together to try to achieve the goal to best serve our audience through service media. That is an important and it's a lofty goal; however, you have to have the people behind that who are actually doing the work completely believing in that goal and feeling heard and feeling appreciated and feeling taken care of.
So, that's a lot of what's behind my philosophy about leading from the individual. I think it's really critical to understand who are the people working for you, what's their background, what are their goals and ambition, what are the things in their lives whether it's innately personal or family-oriented that might keep them from achieving their goal, and then what can I do as their manager/leader to help them achieve those goals. So, I think that leading from that philosophy helps you build a personal relationship that helps you enhance that person's professional experience. It also leads to a lot of loyalty and I was very fortunate in my many years at KPBS to work with a large group of people who I work together with over those many years because we had I think built an experience of mutual respect.
When I founded Public Media Women in Leadership I had a goal very specific to hopefully change the numbers. At that time in 2015 only 25% of the GMs and CEOs in the system were women. And over the past 5 years that number has actually gotten worse unfortunately, and it wavers between 20 and 25%. But what I learned in recent years is that what the women really needed was a place for community - a safe place to share, a place where they felt heard and where they could learn together. I'm thinking that within Public Media For All there will be similar goals. Of course, there are goals for action, and I think those are very important for people and organizations to be held accountable for making change, and that's one of the reasons Public Media Women in Leadership has joined as an organization with Public Media for All.
But I also think that it's important to take care of the people in your group. In PMWL we saw that creating space where people could share like in our peer groups or providing one-to-one mentoring where people could both learn and hear from people's experiences, but also share their own experiences, and through the many webinars and conferences we do providing training, but always time for sharing and learning together.
So, I think that those are a few things that I can offer to this community about my philosophy on leading from the individual first, being sure that you are listening to the needs of the people in your community even if you have lofty goals, making sure they're being heard and taken care of, and then putting that all together in service to the audience. And as we also know, that audience is changing every day, so we as an industry need to be open to change and open to all the new people who are coming into our community within public media and to the community we serve.
Thank you for listening to me today and thank you for letting me be part of this experience. I really appreciate it.
