HELLO
Dr. Jenny Vazquez-Newseum
She/Her
Meet the Leader
Dr. Jenny Vazquez-Newsum is the Founder and CEO of Untapped Leaders and author of Untapped Leadership: Harnessing the Power of Underrepresented Leaders. She partners with organizations across sectors to surface overlooked capacities, foster contextual agility, and cultivate leadership cultures rooted in equity and resilience. With two decades of experience in leadership education and organizational development, Jenny equips leaders to navigate complexity with courage, imagination, and purpose.
Restorative Leadership Interview Questions:
Question 1: What helps you stay creatively courageous when the world feels threatened/like it’s on fire?
Recently, as the news of the world continues to be unnerving and uncertain, I have found myself thinking about and intentionally "tethering" to others in my network and community. I have leaned in heavily into 1:1 catch ups, whether in person or virtual, just to take the time to connect in more depth. Conversations range, but it always seems to come back to a chance to share with each other how challenging the current reality is, and also a reminder of all that we manage to do and the intention we do it with to move towards a changed reality we'd like to experience. It's been a wonderful reminder that I am not alone in the experience or the work, and in that, there is a lot of courage and creativity that emerges in partnership.
Question 2: Describe a time when your imagination helped you move from fear into action.
For me, 2020 was a core-shaking year. It forced me to call into question how I use my time and talent for this brief moment on this planet. After the murder of George Floyd and watching marginalized communities be disproportionately affected by the pandemic, I reflected on the tough question of how I'd been complacent, and therefore complicit, in the world I was experiencing. In that space, Untapped Leadership, my book, emerged. I was moved by a vision of leadership that was very different than the leadership we've come to know and has gotten us to this place. That moment crystallized a lot of knowledge and awareness I knew I carried, and I'd witness others carry, that I was motivated to name and bring to reality to help shape a future that I'd be more interested in experiencing.
Question 3: What does growth and holding space look like for you after a loss or rupture?
Growth and holding space after rupture or loss first starts with awareness and acknowledgment of the impact of that loss. I think there is often a motivation to move past or push down challenging experiences, but the moments when I'm able to acknowledge and integrate the impact of those moments into my reality of who I am, I find that impact is cushioned a bit more. Essentially, when I accept it rather than resist it, it becomes easier to navigate.
Question 4: How do you protect space for imagination in your team or community?
Radical imagination and shared visioning is an important component of the Untapped Leadership model. We don't realize how much we are anchored to current realities that were envisioned by those who were not representative of all of us. Therefore, it is a reality that is not a collective vision, but a narrow one. In that narrowing, we begin to narrow our own vision of the future because we begin in this limited base. I fully admit it is really challenging work to imagine something different than what you are or have experienced. But as this prompt emphasizes, engaging with that challenge and creating conditions to imagine (and then move towards) something different requires protected space. I support teams and leaders in building practices and rituals to value and integrate that space, even as demands pull elsewhere.
Question 5: What rituals or practices help you (and/or your team/community) name what hurts while still holding on to what’s possible?
The Untapped Leadership Framework is driven by context. Context is informed on a spatial continuum (e.g. self - system) as well as a temporal continuum (past - future). For all of us, we are being informed by an interplay of these layers of context, whether we name them or not. In Untapped Leadership, we want to get good at understanding an intergrating that context. Connecting our lived insights with systemic awareness while tying in our personal agency and a collective vision. As I work with teams and organizations to cultivate the untapped capacity and potential of their teams through facilitated sessions and programs, uncovering and leveraging this context moves them through an honoring of past/current realities and their impact while moving towards a widening and inclusive vision that everyone has a role in creating.