658 Karen Mangia:

We hear a lot these days about the “Great Resignation” …and simply put, a lot of people don’t want to go back to the old way of work. The covid pandemic was an epic “pattern interrupt” that made many people look deeper at what really matters in their lives, what we really want from our careers, and it looks like the days of hustle and grind simply to accumulate more stuff isn’t cutting it. My guest today – Karen Mangia  – is all about helping individuals, teams and companies define the future, so what is the future we’re building?

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock, and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and founder-CEO of the social podcast app Podopolo, and here on Wings we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … on every business topic across every industry across more than 650 episodes now … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. Wings is all about women lifting as we climb, so share the love by sharing Wings with an entrepreneurial friend so they can accelerate their dreams!

Today we dig deep with Karen Mangia [mann-jia], vice president of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, where she engages current and future customers around the world to discover new ways of creating success and growth together. An acknowledged thought leader in mental health and sought-after keynote speaker, Karen also leads Salesforce’s Work from Home Taskforce and is shaping the strategy for the workplace of the future globally. Passionate about diversity and inclusion, she also serves on the company’s Racial Equality and Justice Taskforce. Karen is the author of four books: Success from Anywhere, Listen Up, Working from Home, and Success With Less.

Karen will be here in just a moment, first:

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Throughout history, global pandemics have always led to massive changes, new ideas and advancements in society. It looks like Covid is no exception, changing the way we work, bringing us more into alignment with what we truly want out of our lives, and forcing companies large and small to re-evaluate and reform how they hire, inspire and organize their teams – and in many cases, how they deliver value to customers.

Karen Mangia [mann-jia], the vice president of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, reaches hundreds of thousands of business leaders each year as an internationally recognized thought leader whose TEDx appearance, keynotes, blogs and books explore the future of work and a fast-evolving perspective of what people now see as success. During the Pandemic she found time to write four books – that’s right, 4 books in one year –

Working from Home: Making the New Normal Work for You, Listen Up!, How to Tune in to Customers and Turn Down the Noise, and also Success With Less. Also a prolific blogger, she’s been featured in Forbes and regularly contributes to Thrive Global and ZDNet.

Passionate about customer success, Karen began her Fortune 100 career at AT&T – an experience she details in her new book,  Listen Up! Prior to Salesforce, she spearheaded Customer Satisfaction and Experience at Cisco Systems.

Karen’s strategies for customer listening, customer success and customer insights are central to the market impact of multiple companies, from Fortune 500 giants to privately-held businesses around the world. She is the Chair of the Customer Experience Council for the Conference Board and Executive Sponsor for YPO (Young Presidents Organization).

Listen on because Karen has so many valuable insights to share on customer success as well as team building, culture and how to attract and inspire top talent. She also advises teams and you can learn more about her at createsuccessanywhere.com

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Karen Mangia.

Melinda Wittstock:

Karen, welcome to Wings.

Karen Mangia:

Thank you so much. I feel uplifted already from just our pre-conversation.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, we had a great pre-conversation. I’m sorry that it wasn’t actually on tape, because it was really good. We’re going to have to repeat some of it. One of the things that we were talking about really is how everything as a result of the pandemic, or maybe it was happening before, but everything’s changed. Everything’s upside down. How we deal with customers, how we deal with work. There’s so many opportunities in that, there’s resistance in it, but it is, I guess as you say, we’re in the process of redefining success. And when you think of redefining success, what is that? How is success different now than it was even 18 months ago?

Karen Mangia:

What shows up for me is how often we equate success with more. We buy into this belief that we have to do more, to have more, to be more, and that will sum up to success. And that could be more products, more profits, more activities, more accomplishments, whatever that looks like to you, or to your team, or to the organization that you’re building.

And then something comes along like the great resignation. And within that, people everywhere are sending an urgent signal that says the more that’s being offered, even if that’s more pay, more paid time off, more perks, isn’t summing up to success for them. That really got me thinking, if success is about more, maybe it’s time for us to start asking a different question, which is, more of what?

Because what I’m hearing everywhere is people are really defining success around being able to live in alignment with the answer to one question. And that question is, what matters? I mean, I think people are really sending this signal that says the way we’re redefining success is we want to live our lives and spend our careers and our best energy on more of what matters, and have less of what no longer serves us.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, the pandemic was an interesting lesson in that, because you suddenly have things that you take for granted or the same old, same old, taken away from you. And you start to think, it’s like a big pattern interrupt, you start to think, well, what actually matters? And so the pandemic, I always saw it as an opportunity for, potentially, very positive reset to really think about that.

From the perspective of my own company, we see that what attracts people, say to Podopolo for example, is our mission, is our culture. It is the ability to say, innovate in an area that you want to. To not be micromanaged in some sort of cubicle. It’s all these kind of almost like lifestyle things. It’s kind of a mix of lifestyle and mission. And a flexibility. Being able to have more agency, I guess, in your own life. I mean, is that really what you see too? Say if you look at Salesforce, and the employees and team members at Salesforce, or the people that you mentor, is that really basically what it’s coming down to?

Karen Mangia:

What we’re all looking for right now, and you said it so brilliantly is agency. We want choice. And within those choices, we want to be able to choose from things that we view as favorable and have upside and are aligned with a bigger and greater sense of purpose. I mean, at Salesforce, you’ll hear us talk a lot about having business as the greatest platform for change.

And when I internalize that, and I think about the opportunity that’s presented to me each day in the role I play and in the way I connect with entrepreneurs and coach leaders, and imagine how we could define, design and deliver the future differently, I find people are most motivated to lead a change, to tap into their own adaptability, when they are aligned with a higher sense of purpose. That purpose isn’t just something that shows up in a specific project or on the weekends when you’re with your family, but not really where you’re spending your time during the week.

And so, in Success from Anywhere, my new book, the reason that I really thought about success differently was, this is a time where the pandemic has gifted us an invitation to freedom. The freedom to choose what matters, the freedom to decide where work fits in our lives and how it shows up best for us.

I take people through. And I do this when I’m working with leaders one-on-one, or people who have a dream of building a business. And we talk first and foremost about reconnecting with your values. I mean, what is your top value? And how is that value showing up in your everyday life? And if it isn’t, well, you’re probably one of the people that’s feeling really exhausted and burn out. I mean, when you think about what burnout really is, it’s about living outside of our core values for an extended period of time.

Melinda Wittstock:

And this is why we talk so much on this podcast about getting into alignment. Just alignment with yourself in terms of who you are, why you’re in an earth suit right now, what your unique mission is in the world. And then hopefully if you have a company or you’re thinking of launching a company and you’re going on that journey to build something from an idea on a back of an envelope, into a scalable business, you got to be in alignment, because it’s hard enough, without being.

From that entrepreneurial perspective, you’ve got to know your values and your true north. And hopefully be able to envision and create and attract the right people to kind of live that, in terms of who you’re being, not just what you’re doing.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. And I say this so many times, which is, how often are we human doings rather than human beings?

Melinda Wittstock:

I say that all the time. Oh my God! Yeah. Like, are we-

Karen Mangia:

It’s so true. And it’s so tempting to live in that always do and always go mode. What I’m finding right now and what I’m discovering right now about this inflection point about work and related to work is, I think more of us than ever before are attracted to entrepreneurship and placing our hope in entrepreneurs because we’re looking for new choices and new opportunities and new ways to live and to be. And I think in our minds, for perhaps the first time in a really pervasive way, we are collectively looking to entrepreneurs as the primary path to pave a future to choices and equity and the kind of lives that we all want to be leading.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, entrepreneurship to me is a chance to reimagine everything. It always has been. It’s kind of like, okay, well, if I can’t disrupt something or change something or improve something from within, say a corporation, I find this is so true of so many women who become entrepreneurs is they get to a certain place in corporate America, say with a company that is just unable necessarily to change fast enough.

And at the same time, it coincides with specific things for women, like to be having children, or just a different way that we operate most successfully. And think, wait a minute, it doesn’t have to be this way. I have an opportunity. I have freedom. There’s that word agency again, to be able to reimagine something, and solve a lot of problems for a lot of people and even society as a whole, by doing what I love to do with people that I love to do it with. It’s like as simple as that. It’s very attractive.

Karen Mangia:

Well, and what you said there is so important about agency. And I was thinking about, what happens when a professional athlete announces they’re going free agent? I mean, the teams that they’re on usually are concerned about that because really what that pro-athlete is saying is, I see a gap between how I value myself, and how the organization with which I am aligned is valuing me. And therefore, I’m going to take some agency. I’m going to exercise some agency and some freedom to go find an alignment with my values and with my worth.

What I find that’s so interesting, and I’ve been there myself, I mean, I never thought that I would write books or get a trademark or start a business, none of those things. And in my case, what happened was I gave a speech at a conference to close the conference. And when the conference concluded, a woman contacted me about a week later, and she said, “I was sitting in the audience and I listened to your speech, and I want to talk with you about it.” Now, in my head, I thought, well, she just wants me to come give this speech to someone else, some other audience.

And she said, “You need to do something with what you said.” I was like, “Okay.” And again, I’m still waiting for her to say Tuesday of next week at 4:00, could you speak to the, fill in the blank group, and just repeat what you said. I’ll never forget what she said. She said, “You really need to write a book about this and get a trademark. There’s more of this story to be told.” And I was like, “What?”

Now, play that forward. It’s not that I didn’t know how to start something or run something. I mean, I was working in a very large Fortune 50 company at the time, and had started a bunch of entrepreneurship, essentially endeavors there, but it took someone else to say, I see the potential in you, to take those skills and apply them in a different way. And then-

Melinda Wittstock:

This is something actually that this does happen to a lot of women. It’s almost like there’s something about us that needs permission.

Karen Mangia:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m hoping that that is disappearing, but I hear that a lot. And I’ve seen it at times in my own life, where how big do we dare to dream in terms of what’s possible and really like live in an abundant universe, anything’s possible, but we can be constrained by our own thinking of what’s possible.

Karen Mangia:

Absolutely. It’s almost as if are you asking for and aspiring toward what you truly want and dream of, or just what it is you think you can get? And there’s a big difference.

Melinda Wittstock:

There is a really big difference. I mean, that gets into all kinds of all the ways that women can fall into the trap of undervaluing themselves without even realizing it. It takes all these different forms that you see, the symptom is overwork, overdelivering, underpricing goods and services, negotiating against yourself, asking for only what you think you can get, rather than knowing and asking for what you want, and being able to actually step into receiving it.

The receiving thing is interesting, because, I don’t know, for years I was catching myself if someone gave me a compliment, I’d deflect it. I couldn’t even receive it. And it made me go on this whole train of, oh, that how interesting is that? We have to be open to receiving.

Karen Mangia:

What we’re talking about here, I mean, so much of this work of becoming a great leader, becoming a great entrepreneur, living the life of abundance that you and I deserve and that we all deserve is doing the inside outwork. I mean, defining or deciding that you are successful or valuable or valued comes from inside of you and how you see yourself and radiates out, not the reverse.

And I think it’s easy to spend time chasing all this approval or permission as we were just talking about from someone else. And it’s, really at the end of the day, how empowering is it to realize that you can grant yourself permission to be as successful and dream as big as you want to. You don’t need someone else to do that for you. Everything you need is inside of yourself to do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

Once this woman came up to you at the end of your talk, and she gave you this sort of, I don’t know, this permission, something that you knew that you could do, but I mean, you wrote three books during the pandemic. Not, one book, but like three. I mean, I don’t know how many people talk about, including myself, so yeah, like I’m going to get to that book someday, and don’t do it. But three books, what was that like? How did those just flow out of you so easily?

Karen Mangia:

I don’t think there’s really anything truly easy about writing a book or being an entrepreneur or-

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, no. Absolutely not. [crosstalk 00:14:25].

Karen Mangia:

But it’s actually a very funny story because I find that we all carry so many myths and misconceptions about success. And one of them is that the success is somehow the result of this perfectly linear plan that’s well executed. And then on Thursday of next week at four o’clock, you’ve got success scheduled to show up on your calendar, and then it gets moved up or moved out, or onto someone else’s calendar, and you’re thinking to yourself, what in the world?

This is kind of that kind of story. I had signed a contract in, it was about February of 2020 to write my book, Listen Up!: How to Tune In to Customers and Turn Down the Noise. Now, for some context, I had been flying several hundred thousand miles a year to do my job, and so when the lockdown happened, my thought was, I will probably be able to write a better manuscript because I’ll be sleeping in the same bed, in the same time zone, with really not a lot of options of things to distract me. There weren’t a lot of places to go, if you think back in March and April and May of 2020.

And so I write this manuscript. I submitted May 1st 2020. I feel that, like we all do, you celebrate a little bit. You feel the sense of accomplishment of reaching a major milestone. About a week and a half later, I’m having a conversation with my publisher. And I got curious, I mean, you and I were just talking about this. One of the most powerful tools for transformation is curiosity. And for entrepreneurs, certainly curiosity.

And so, I was asking her what it was like to be a work at home employee in the publishing industry. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never worked for a publisher. And so she started telling me about some of the challenges. And I said just in passing, “Oh, working from home? I started writing a blog about that. It’s going crazy.” And she stopped. She was like, “Working from home, do you think you could write a book about that?” And I laughed. Literally like you just did, I laughed.

And I said, this is one of the most ridiculous answers I’ve ever said to anyone. I said, “Oh, I can do that in my sleep.” And she responded, “Do you think you could do it in two weeks?” I asked her what was in her coffee cup. I was like, “No. No, I could not write a book in two weeks, but thank you.” And she said, “Do you think you could do it in 30 days?” And I said the two words that changed everything. I mean, I think there are two words that help all of us see and do the impossible. It was, why not? Why not?

I wrote Working From Home, completely unplanned, in less than 30 days, from the time she and I had that conversation until I held a physical a book in my hand was 87 days. I literally preempted my own book with my own book. I had to contact people who I had featured in Listen Up, and literally say to them, “You’re going to see me launch a book. It’s not the one you’re in. Yours will be coming 60 days later.” So it’s like, it didn’t happen because there was some perfect plan, these things certainly showed up out of order.

Well, when those two books then came out, in my head I thought, working from home, we’ll all be working from home maybe until the end of December 2020, then everybody will be back in the office. I don’t know, then I’ll talk a lot more about Listen Up then I guess. And then I found people were asking, well, now what? Now what do we do? We’re not just in the office or just at home, there’s all of these other factors. It’s the great resignation, the great reevaluation. It’s people coming up with entirely new products and needs, and it’s now what?

And I thought, well, now we need a blueprint for how to construct the future. I mean, how is this going to work? It’s so fascinating that this wasn’t an intentional plan. I find this so often, and we’ve been having a little bit of a conversation, you and I have just before the show about this, we get fixated on a particular outcome sometimes, and we want it to be that way in our timeline. And you were mentioning, I mean, you moved yourself to a place of opportunity for your business.

In this instance, sometimes it’s just letting success and opportunity show up moment by moment, and not having always this perfect plan with this only one outcome, only one way to win in mind and it must go that way. Otherwise, I’m not a success, or whatever that might be. So really, I think about those two words, the reason I ended up writing three books and publishing them in 14 months is really, literally, because of asking that question, why not?

Melinda Wittstock:

I think this is such an important thing that you’re talking about, because there’s a couple things I want to pick up on. And I often you use this metaphor about entrepreneurship. You know your ultimate outcomes. Hey, you have your vision or your north star of where you want to be. But if you’re in a sailboat, you cannot sail on a straight line. It’s like physically impossible. You have to tack and jib, and you got to go back and forth. You got to zigzag there because the winds are changing. The currents are changing, everything around you is changing. And I think a lot of people go into it with this really focusing on the how, rather than the why and the what. When you put your head down and you’re just focused on this really narrow plan, you don’t even hear or see the opportunities. So it’s a real trick to how to stay open to, oh, there could be a different way, while at the same time retaining focus on your goal. And the two seem kind of contradictory in a way. I mean, there’s a tension between them both.

Karen Mangia:

Certainly. What shows up for me and what you just said is with that big goal or big outcome we’re picturing, besides just the accomplishment itself, I mean, largely what we’re also picturing in that moment is how we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel successful, or we’re going to feel relieved, or we’re going to feel happy, or whatever you assign to that.

And I think some of the tension that I know I feel and experience, and I feel this as well from leaders around me is to keep yourself motivated on that journey, even if you have that big goal in mind, you’re aligned with your sense of purpose, you don’t want to postpone feeling great about it, or a sense of accomplishment, until however many months or years it’s going to take you to get to that outcome because right then something has shifted, and then you get there and you think, this doesn’t feel like I thought it was going to feel. And then I see people then who’ve accomplished amazing things. Have grown huge businesses and sold them. And they’re in this valley of despair, because they’re not feeling how they thought they would feel when they got there after waiting all that time.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Because it’s not really about the destination, it’s about the journey.

Karen Mangia:

Exactly. Well, and it’s kind of what you were saying about the sailboat. It’s like, it’s great to get to the destination on the sailboat, but wouldn’t you love to be able to feel and enjoy the wind in your face as you’re moving back and forth in the water during the whole journey, as opposed to just for one moment at the end, when you get to your destination?

Melinda Wittstock:

This is the thing that I have just learned along the way, because the journey has taught me that. The journey has taught me to enjoy the journey. I don’t know, it sounds kind of circular.

Karen Mangia:

Well, actually speaking of circular, I just was fortunate to speak for an event for the National Association of Women Business Owners, and for their visionary awards luncheon, which was wonderful. I mean, I got to hear about amazing female founders and their accomplishments and their progress. And you can imagine the joy and the emotion right behind lots of these stories. And unbeknownst to me, that woman who was sitting in the audience, who inspired me on my own journey of discovery and entrepreneurship and creation, received an award at that event.

I had this moment where I felt so grateful because I’m not sure I would’ve been standing on that stage with that audience, with that wonderful group of people, had it not been for her. So to get to literally sit in the audience and celebrate her, it was the most wonderful moment. And what’s even more beautiful was she was accepting an award for the work that she does with her own organization that she has now called the Startup Ladies, where she is committed full-time to a business of helping more women successfully launch and grow their businesses.

You talk about coming full circle, that was a really beautiful full circle moment, to literally get to sit and clap for her, and to see that she was getting awarded for finding more ways to help more women be more successful in their entrepreneurial journeys.

Melinda Wittstock:

One of the things about you, Karen, that I find extraordinary when I read your bio and I think of all the things that you do and have done. I just want to say this again, because people would’ve heard it in that host intro, but you’re vice president of customer and market insights at Salesforce. That’s a big job. Busy in and of itself. Then there were these three books. And then you also, with powerful pauses, you’re doing a lot of mentoring and coaching for individuals and teams that are handling all these kind of cross currents of change and you are a keynote speaker.

So for anybody listening to this podcast and think, oh my God, like I could never do all of that. That’s so much doing. What is your secret in terms of how you balance like so much in your life and stay healthy and sane? Because I think a lot of women are held back because they think I can’t play a bigger game because I’m already doing a lot. It means I have to do a lot more, but it’s not necessarily the case. How are you able to juggle all of those things?

Karen Mangia:

And it’s interesting, I continue to learn about how to find that balance and how to make caring for myself and being tuned into best energy to biggest impact and what matters most. I mean, I continue to learn about how to do that. As I came into 2021, as opposed to asking myself, what will this new year bring? I thought to myself, what will I bring to this year?

And I started thinking about how much I enjoy helping people access success, and have the tools to do that. And I thought, my highest value contribution to sharing some tools with others so that they can access and discover and realize and celebrate their own success means I have to stay well. I have to stay energized. I need to be present. I need to be able to stay curious.

And so I tried a couple of experiments and it’s been very interesting. As opposed to adding anything to my routine, I decided to actually change the order of how I executed my day. So for some perspective, really up until 2021 was the person who, you jump out of bed in the morning and it is like, let’s go. If you looked at my strengths finder strengths, you would see one of them is maximizer. Practically speaking, that means every day begins at zero.

So it’s like, what are we going to check off the list today? So I would jump out of bed, get rolling, start doing the email, clear all that out, was my thought process, so that I could focus. And then later in the day, get to these high value activities. And then I would try to use my self-care routine to transition from the end of my workday into life.

And I decided to do the exact opposite. I thought to myself, if my greatest contribution requires creating and coaching and leading, I need to spend my best energy on that. So I took my self-care routine, my meditation and yoga and movement and gratitude journaling. The first thing when I got up in the morning, in complete calm. I also turned my mornings into decision-free mornings.

So in the evening beforehand it’s like I’m going to school again. It’s like I’m in fourth grade. I pick out my outfit, I pick out my lunch, everything’s ready to go. I’ve picked out my coffee cup even, so that in the morning I get up, complete calm and care, and then set an intention for the day. And then it is, go into that first big create task of the day. That could be a blog. That could be a book chapter. That could be something I’m preparing to share with a customer or someone that I’m coaching.

So I do those high value activities first that I’ve decided the day before, in quiet, with my best energy, having made no decisions. And then I took everything I used to do in the morning. So all the email and those little responses, and I put that at the end of the day, it has been transformative.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’ve arrived at a very similar practice, and it’s game changing. Absolutely game changing.

Karen Mangia:

I think about start your day with calm instead of chaos. And unbeknownst to myself, I was starting my day with chaos. I was choosing chaos as the way to start every single day.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, most people roll out of bed, and the first thing they do is they look at their email or their social media. So they’re instantly on someone else’s agenda rather than their own.

Karen Mangia:

Very well said. Very well said. If you live someone else’s definition for success, you’ll end up with someone else’s life, and that might not suit you. And so in my case when I think about prioritizing and how am I finding space and energy to create and care for myself and others, it’s really for me has been a function of routines, rituals, and boundaries, and making some adjustments to those.

And some of them are career long habits, candidly, that I’ve revisited and changed this year. For me, that’s been one of the gifts of the pandemic. I mean, it is really like a day of reckoning to say, are you setting yourself up to be successful today? And then by extension, setting others who you serve up to be successful by how you show up. What I discovered along the way is it put me in a different place that I showed up differently at work. And when I did that, work showed up differently for me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, 100%. It’s actually even written in our company handbook. It’s who you’re being, not all of it, what you’re doing. And this is huge. I was just about to say, for a company the size of Salesforce or any major Fortune 100 or just a startup, like whatever phase of growth or size, whatever, imagine the impact if every single team member and every single executive leader operated exactly how you described. What would be the difference for that business in the world? How much value would they create? How much more creative would they be? How much more innovative would they be? I mean, it’s breathtaking to think about it. If you had like a hundred percent buy-in to that way of work, that way of living.

Karen Mangia:

Permission granted. That’s what I would say. To everyone listening, permission granted to do that. There’s a moment that really stands out in my mind. I’ll never forget the time I was at one of our company offsite, and our co-founder, Parker Harris was leading our executive offsite. He’s a phenomenal leader and a phenomenal human being. And this left an indelible impression on me.

So picture, he has helped grow Salesforce from himself and one other person, to being an organization now of 65,000 employees. And I remember at this offsite, it’s the first morning. We’ve had like a little evening session and a welcome dinner. It’s the first morning. And he stands up and he says, “Good morning, everyone. The first question I want to ask you today is who got up this morning and either exercised,” we had these different exercise options, “Exercised, did some meditation or spent a little bit of time either reading or writing in a journal, could you stand up?”

And so some number of people in the room stands up. And he says, “When I got up this morning, I went out and took a run. And one of the reasons that’s important to me is because I hit a point where I was burnt out and then I had some health issues, and it reminded me how important it is. Tomorrow morning, if you didn’t start your day today, taking great care of yourself, I’m really going to invite you to do that tomorrow. We have some ways to make that easy. You can join this group, yoga, you can do whatever, but whatever you’re going to do, remember that we can’t be of service to other people if we’re not taking care of ourselves.”

I thought to myself, here’s the co-founder of a really successful company, and the most important message he wanted to say to us first thing in the morning was, I want you to be healthy. I want you to be well. I mean, he didn’t say this and he never would, he’s a wonderful, humble human being. But essentially at his level, if he can find time to do that, we probably all could. And he said, we need to make ourselves a priority because that’s when we can best be in a place to serve our customers and our families and the people who count on us. That left an indelible impression. I thought, this is a caring culture. This is what a caring culture looks like. And if that’s the culture here, I’m going to do my part.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. So this actually comes right back around to the great resignation, because I think people aren’t just resigning from anywhere, they’re resigning from companies that are not like that.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. One example that shows up for me is General Mills. You might recognize them as the company that we were all killing ourselves to buy their products last year, like flour, for example, because we were apparently all simultaneously going to be [inaudible 00:33:09] on The Great British Baking Show, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely.

Karen Mangia:

We were all eating cereal, which someone reminded me the other day that General Mills is the only company that has a product that you use from age one to a hundred. And that would be Cheerios, interestingly enough, but do that as it may. I mean, of course they were hearing from their employees, “Hey, we’re burnt out.” I mean, they were essential workers. And so the well-intentioned leaders there decided to roll out paid time off. The little extra paid time off is a thank you. Please take some wellness time.

Surprisingly to them, of their 10,000 employees, fewer than 8% took advantage of that. And these burnout rates continued to be high. And they were having some attrition. So they stepped back, got a little more creative, came back, and they got a little outside help, but came back, and in January 2021, they rolled out the gift of choice program to their employee.

And they said, “We hear you. You’re burnt out. You want to focus on your wellbeing. That’s why we’re going to offer you the gift of choice program. And within this, you’ll have three choices. One, extra paid time off. Next, extra pay. So literally extra cash. Third, donation to the not-for-profit of your choosing.” So Melinda, what percentage of their employees do you believe opted into the gift of choice program? Realizing that the first go round, they had 8% opt in, what percentage in 24 hours opted in?

Melinda Wittstock:

It would be much higher.

Karen Mangia:

Yeah. 85%.

Melinda Wittstock:

85%. I’m curious how it broke down in terms of-

Karen Mangia:

Well, let’s talk about that. So what would you guess the number one choice was, again, that was more PTO, more pay, or donation to not-for-profit of your choosing?

Karen Mangia:

Actually, it was the PTO was the number one choice.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. PTO number one choice. More cash means nothing really if you don’t have time to do anything with it, or you can’t create a great experience or you can’t look after yourself or whatever. Was it something to do, do you think, Karen, with just giving them the choice of how they wanted-

Karen Mangia:

That was literally it. Yes. The way that General Mills got help is they engaged an organization that worked with brain psychology. And what they put to use in the gift of choice program is that when all of us as human beings are unexpectedly offered a set of choices that we view as positive, it lights up all kinds of great things in our brains that say, I love it. I feel great. This is amazing.

What I take away from that story is if you step back and think about it, how much time do we spend mandating and forcing and, whatever, coming up with ways and running all of these change management programs. And I thought about this. General Mills got to the exact outcome that they wanted the second time around by giving people a choice. What would happen in this world of work if employers could offer some choices they were willing to live with that employees would view as favorable? What might change for us to get to the outcomes we’re picturing?

Melinda Wittstock:

I think that’s such a great question. We keep coming back to this word agency. When people feel empowered and they feel part of something, it’s bigger than themselves, but they feel like a valued part of something. And they feel valued because they’ve been allowed to feel valuable. They’ve been empowered to make a choice.

Karen Mangia:

Well, and within choices, trust. Without needing to say, I trust you, what it says is, essentially I trust you to make the choice that’s best for you. Here’s a few as employers or leaders or your customers even, here’s a few choices we’re willing to live with, what might work for you. And it’s like, how does that feel when somebody sends a signal to you without needing to roll out a big initiative about trust or a big statement that just says, hey, here’s some choices. I trust you to make the best one for you. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of trust? And part in parcel with trust and choice is also ownership. I mean, we all feel greater ownership of what we help to create.

Melinda Wittstock:

100%. This is so, so important. And I think because you’re obviously an expert in customer insights, I want to connect this with a happy team member or employee is going to create a happier customer. I was always really interested in the late Tony Hsieh way back, the founder of Zappos. And I was one of his mentors for his Downtown Project for a while, for all these budding entrepreneurs that he invested in, in Las Vegas.

The culture of Zappos was so, so interesting to me, because when you think of the fact that Zappos wasn’t really doing anything that Amazon wasn’t doing. I mean, Amazon sold shoes too, but what Zappos was doing differently that got them a billion dollar exit valuation, or exit purchase price was this incredible culture that empowered people to be themselves. And the kind of counterintuitive, if you’re really happy and your job is to make the customer really happy, that’s transformational.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. And what you’re hitting on is a core concept, which is culture is not proximity or perks, culture is personality. And your customers and your colleagues want to connect with the personality of the company, and feel that spark. But you don’t have to be in the same room to do. But it’s, how do you create the kind of personality per se, that shows up in your culture? That’s the kind of person and culture you would want to be around.

Melinda Wittstock:

So, so important. So what are some of the trends? Let’s get into your Salesforce job for a moment, if you will, and the customer insights, how are consumers changing? How are business customers changing? What are you seeing in those insights? How has the pandemic changed what customers, clients want from businesses?

Karen Mangia:

Everyone wants to feel heard. And the message that customers are sending right now in big and small ways is they want to be heard differently. I work with a lot of organizations that have well intentioned programs to listen to customers and to employees candidly. Whether that’s the survey or we’re recording your calls and we’re listening. What’s so fascinating to me is we want to ask our customers questions, and we want to ask our colleagues and employees questions. And sometimes we don’t always know the questions to ask.

Our customers are messaging to all of us every single day, what they want us to know about their needs and preferences and problems that are going unsolved. And that’s usually in the unstructured feedback they’re giving us in conversations, and in some of those call center recordings. And what I find more often than not is that we need to be able to do a couple things. One is turn down the noise of what’s happening, all these other signals, so that we can get a crystal clear signal from customers about what they want to tell us, not what we want to hear.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, yes. One of the things that I came to understand in the company that I founded and was running before Podopolo is a company called Verifeed. You mentioned unstructured. So we did all kinds of unstructured data analysis really, of social media conversations with Sentiment and looking for patterns, all these sorts of things. It was amazing what you could discern from that. But one of the things that I realized is that the question that we ask is from our own experience. So it’s inherently biased.

This is what’s wrong with focus groups and all these sorts of things, because you don’t really know, like people tell you, this comes up in political polling as well is people want to be nice. So they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear rather than the actual truth. This is my chance to geek out with you here about the insights.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. And here’s one. And I have been a part of this as well. I mean, I’ve led these big teams that are listening to customers and you’re sending these surveys. One of the common pitfalls I see organizations fall into, and it’s well-intentioned, is this ease of doing business initiatives, where it’s like, we’re going to be easy to do business with. And we’re going to start this big portfolio of ways to be easy to do business with.

Karen Mangia:

And I started thinking about this. Easy might not be realistic in your industry or company. I mean, if you are in a highly regulated business like healthcare or finance, easy might not be realistic. I mean, I work in the world of technology. And some aspects of technology and information security are really complex. I’m not sure that keeping someone’s identity safe is ever going to actually truly be easy.

And so, when I was thinking, to your point about, how could we ask them better questions? How could we go on a journey of discovery together, give our customers the opportunity to tell us what we want to know, or what we need to know rather than what we want to hear. And I created this question, I call it the genius question. And the genius question is this, how could we make this easier? And it works with employees as well as customers, because easier says, we’re going to go on a journey of discovery together. We can co-create a little bit of time.

And by the way, one of my most fascinating discoveries from the genius question of how could we make this easier is more often than not when you ask a customer that question, or even a colleague, it could be a venture capital and investor, more often than not, you will discover something you can take away. It points you down this journey of simplification and creation. And within that, you are going to discover that the people around you, everyone can contribute, and everyone will give you a little something that you can try. And easier is a journey we can all acknowledge. Yeah, that’s a little bit easier. Easy? I don’t know. Maybe not. But easier is something we can co-create. And that is the stuff of loyalty building right there.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely. So that applies to everything from say, user experience on an app or a website, through like, how can we make it easier? It should only be like, just like this navigation, should be like one swipe or one click.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. Exactly. I mean, what inspired the genius question is one of my favorite female founders, it’s Christina Tosi, who built a $25 million business called Milk. And Christina Tosi’s original inspiration was essentially she asked, how could I make this easier when she was frosting one of this beautiful celebration cake. The big, tall wedding cakes and birthday cakes that we are all photographed in front of that are the nostalgia of-

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that almost makes it hard.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. It is hard. And that’s why she’s literally thought, how could I make this easier? And you know what she did, she unfrosted the sides of the cake. That’s what she did. Now you see this replicated everywhere. Now, she was the genius behind that idea of, what else could this be? How could we make this easier? And she thought to herself, I will stop frosting the sides of the cake.

And if you hear any kind of interviews with her, she will say, part of it as I look back on it now is I wanted to let other, especially young women know that you can challenge something even if it’s nostalgia. And you can challenge the status quo of, why do we have to frost the sides of a wedding cake? And then you can build from there. And I was like, choose to challenge. I mean, that’s a beautiful message. And I think about this in companies. If we unfrost the sides of a corporate cake, what we would see is all the layers inside of the organization. That’s kind of revealing. There are probably some we could take away.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. Oh my goodness. I feel like I could talk to you for much longer than this podcast can go on for. There’s so many important, important points here. And Karen, we haven’t even gotten to your backstory or your journey or anything, and how you came to be who you are. I want to get a little bit of that in before we have to wrap up. I mean, were you always kind of entrepreneurial as a kid? What was your journey really to where you are now? What were your big inspirations?

Karen Mangia:

My family will tell this story that I used to get up in the morning when I was kindergarten age, and I would go into the bathroom and I would sit on the floor and talk to my dad while he was shaving and getting ready for work. And I would ask him a couple of questions. By the way, I would periodically give him stickers for things I thought he was doing well. There was a motivational speaker inside of me, perhaps even then, and bring out-

Melinda Wittstock:

[inaudible 00:47:57] your dad?

Karen Mangia:

Exactly. Exactly. My parents will both tell the story that there would always come a certain point in those morning conversations where I would stand up, and look at either my mom or my dad, and announce that I needed to step away so that I could plan my day.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wow! Okay. You were a corporate executive like at age six.

Karen Mangia:

Yes. It’s funny you mentioned that. I was reminded the other day that while other kids were playing house, I was playing work. And I have a one brother who’s four years younger than me, I would have him be my employee at this like office or business I was creating. So as I look at it now, through the lens of retrospect, plus being raised in the Midwest, you get that great Midwestern work ethic that makes it possible to get up when you’re four and plan your day and play office. And then still do your schoolwork and all those sorts of things.

What I would say that I was really raised with that is more of an influence than I probably realized besides the Midwestern work ethic is my grandfather. And he is still living. First generation American. He is a World War II veteran. He’ll be 98 in December. And he still, as of this moment, day trades stocks on his two iPads and a smart watch, and is tracking 150 stocks a week and quizzing me about the PE ratio of each one of them.

You know what? He was an entrepreneur. He started a finance and insurance business. You could say he’s still running one today, and I’m one of his clients. And when I look at that, I mean, I grew up in the construct of talking about business from a very early age. Understanding money and finance. And if you have an ambition, you need to work for it. And how to survive setbacks. And I think that left an impression on me. I mean, I have this picture of sitting on, it’s a really very iconic kind of 1970s looking couch with the green flowers. You know what I’m talking about?

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh gosh, yes.

Karen Mangia:

Yeah. My mom has sewn and picture this, this is lovely, kind of the Charlie Brown style, yellow and brown horizontal stripe rugby shirts. And I’m sitting between my dad and my grandfather, and we’re all wearing those shirts. And I was like, I guess I joined like the Business Boys Club, young, because of that exposure so early on, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go into business.

It never occurred to me that finance or dealing with money could be some overwhelming, off putting thing. That wasn’t what I was raised with. I was raised with, have a strong moral compass. If you make a commitment, keep a commitment. Your character’s really important, and you should be a great manager of your money, and be a generous person. Those things are possible. Those things are within reach.

And I think about how much of those early inspirations I carry forward to now, and what a gift that was that I didn’t realize at the time, when you’re in second grade and your grandfather’s talking to you about what’s happening in the stock market, and you’re thinking, could we talk about Disney World or something? What I realized now is I was really from a very young age that I could try anything. And I needed to make smart choices along the way in order to do it. That that was possible. That that was within reach.

Melinda Wittstock:

What a beautiful story and how blessed you are for having that. I feel for people who don’t grow up in that kind of environment. I guess I feel equally blessed. My father was a stockbroker with his own firm. So the same sort of thing. I was having these conversations about all of this, and learned a lot of the same things. Like I guess the resilience, understanding the ups and downs, understanding about character, money, all these sorts of things.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s interesting, because I think as a parent as well, my kids have watched me as this entrepreneur. I remember one day when my daughter, she was in fifth grade at a Montessori school, and she said, “Hey mom, I want you to come and speak on entrepreneurship to my class.” And I was just so honored. I had like tears formed in my eyes. It just felt so good. And she said, “But here’s the thing, mom, you got to tell it like it is.” She did her hand movement was this like most entrepreneurs, and she drew the hockey stick, this kind of like, everything’s great. She said, “I want you to tell it like it is mom.” She did this up and down kind of like wave pattern with her hand.

Karen Mangia:

That was her version of telling you, you must embarrass her in front of her friends.

Melinda Wittstock:

She was just reflecting it back to me. It’s interesting how parents really create that. For an entrepreneur who’s coming into it now, so we’ve got all these new entrepreneurs and solo entrepreneurs. In the pandemic, entrepreneurship is very glamorous. It’s like being on a rock band in the 70s or something. And so everybody wants to be one, but don’t necessarily have the grounding in terms of what it actually takes.

And so when you mentor people, say who come from different backgrounds than your own, where you had this wonderful mentoring from your father and your family, for someone coming at it without that experience later in life and they have to learn those things as an adult they weren’t ingrained as a child. How do you mentor them through that?

Karen Mangia:

I like to ask questions and get curious. I mean, everyone has a story. I mean, every life has a story. And what tends to come out of the stories of our lives are a series of labels that we assign to ourselves. I mean, it’s the way we see ourselves. And that could be entrepreneur. That could be female. That could be successful. That could be failure. That could be unloved. That could be loved. There’s a whole range of labels.

And what I find happens more often than not is when we live our labels, those self-assigned labels, we tend to limit ourselves. And the move from limit to limitless is seeing some choices to move beyond the labels. I love this very powerful question from Byron Katie who wrote a book called Loving What Is, and one of her power questions is, who would I be without that story?

And I will often ask people that. And I mean, this can be for better or for worse. I mean, who would I be without the story that having your own business is admirable? Well, maybe someone different. But also, who would I be without the story that being a female in the tech industry is really challenging. Who would I be without that story? Well, I’d be more limitless. I’d probably be living in a mindset of abundance. I might be willing to take more risks.

So I apply that to myself as well. But I like to understand people’s stories because I think within those labels are the most powerful stories of all, because they’re the ones we tell ourselves. And I find that most of the work that we all do on this inside out transformation journey, and along this way of searching for success is letting go of some of those labels. And that becomes a tool by which we give ourselves permission to move from limited to limitless.

Melinda Wittstock:

Absolutely. And I especially love that. I had to recover from that as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

Of course, I have lots more questions for you. I want to make sure that everybody knows where to find your books and where to find you for coaching, mentoring. If that’s something that calls, and they’re the type of person you want to work with or whatever, what’s the best way to connect with you?

Karen Mangia:

You can learn more about the book on my website, createsuccessanywhere.com. And of course, Success from Anywhere is available at all of your favorite retailers. And if you want to connect with me and contact me, LinkedIn and Twitter are both of great places to do that. I regularly release new thought leadership, and I’ve also started featuring a series I’m really excited about, where I’m interviewing 21 people at a time on topics like, how are you redefining success?

So you can connect with me through direct messaging and following there. And I look forward to hearing what your listeners are discovering along the way of their own journeys, because there are as many definitions and ways to be successful as there are humans on planet earth.

Melinda Wittstock:

There are indeed. Thank you so much, Karen, for putting your wings on and flying with us today.

Karen Mangia:

As I like to say, together we rise.