Ep. 111 - Mogul: Creating A Circular Model for Global Good & Bridging the Diversity Gap - with Tiffany Pham
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Tiffany Pham is the Founder & CEO of Mogul, the largest platform for diverse talent worldwide. Mogul has impacted over 430,000,000 people across 195 countries and 30,470 cities, and it all started with a desire to create a place where women and minority talent could come together to find opportunities, information, and resources to help their career journeys.
In addition to being a successful entrepreneur who is changing the game when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, she’s also a TV personality, an award-winning film producer, and the bestselling Author of “You Are a Mogul” and “Girl Mogul.”
This episode shares so much of what I want to spotlight on this show: what it looks like when you relentlessly pursue purpose, how that passion can help build a portfolio career and a company that focuses on bringing positive change in the world, and the winding path filled with constant growth that we have to walk down to flourish. Plus, a really lovely story about how her grandmother inspired it all.
Tiffany’s Grandmother: An Entrepreneurial Inspiration
Tiffany’ grandmother was a pioneer and Mogul in her own right, far ahead of her time. She ran newspapers and businesses in a time when women around the world often suffered from a lack of opportunities, and still always took the time to help those around her in need.
Tiffany kind of needed that role model, too, when she moved from Paris to Plano. There was intense culture shock and her family didn’t have a lot of resources, so she had to learn how to create opportunities for herself.
“That day that she passed away, I promised that I would ... dedicate the rest of my life towards helping others in need with opportunities, information, and resources that she had, no matter how hard or challenging.”
This breadth and depth of experiences, coupled with an inherent growth mindset, prepared her to be a leader that can be fluid, adaptive, and effective as her company grew and evolved into the powerhouse talent platform it is today.
Mogul: A Circular Model for Global Good
When I started reading “You Are a Mogul,” I was touched by the way Tiffany talked about her grandmother: a role model, an entrepreneur, a force of good, an advocate for community. And Tiffany carries so much of that forward, truly, into everything she does.
And it’s beautiful to learn how she created those paths and then dedicated her whole life to creating possibilities for others who are walking in her shoes — but who might not be lucky enough to have a role model or community to support them. But that’s exactly what Mogul offers people. An amazing circular model for global good.
Mogul, at its core, believes in and champions the necessity to have more diverse workforces and equality across the world to create greater belonging and inclusivity. Tiffany saw early on that creating possibilities for women and bridging the leadership gender gap would be crucial not just for creating equity but for helping organizations reach their business goals.
Mogul is composed of a talent ecosystem, talent solutions, and free educational resources for women and minorities, provided through their partnership with the United Nations. And their talent acquisition platform has been continually optimized and enhanced to service this community.
It’s all so focused on people — what they need, what they want, and how to bridge that gap by providing them opportunities to reach their goals and cultivate meaningful success. And Tiffany is succeeding because of, not despite of, that human-centered approach to her career and life.
What It Takes To Create A Truly Diverse Workforce
Creating that diverse workforce involves further education and vocalization across every layer of the organization. From leaders to recruiters to talent, Tiffany believes “there needs to be contribution towards that desire to create a culture of belonging.”
You also have to use the right tools and partners. You might go through personal training or create a system to reduce bias in recruiting, but there are popular tools in the DE&I space that have a lot of unconscious biases embedded in them, which will slowly erode an initiative even with the best intentions.
Even search firms can fall victim to this as they may be using tools and technology that have these same unconscious unbiases embedded in them. So a company putting more resources on a search still may not address the underlying limitations that are present if they aren’t intentional and careful.
Definition of Success
“[Success is] so different than when I first started in a way, in some ways the same, because success to me is still being the best that I can be for myself to feel fulfilled.”
“I ultimately needed to feel like I did the best that I could for whatever I was trying to do, not in competition with anybody else, but always for myself, to feel fulfilled.”
Best Career Advice
“There is no such thing as failure. As long as I was learning, I was succeeding”
Key Takeaways
There needs to be education and vocalization regarding the desire to establish a culture of belonging across every layer of the organization to ultimately create a diverse workforce.
Look at your end-to-end recruitment experience to ensure you have that strategic alignment from the beginning across the technology, tools, and people involved.
Understand that the tools you use may have unconscious biases embedded in them, which perpetuates the problems in identifying talent at its core.
To create traction in your career, you have to create a strategic plan for yourself.
Work out the vision of what you want to achieve. Once you are clear on that, you can work backwards to determine all the elements that are needed to help you realize it.
Building that plan will involve determining what skill sets you need to get there and the people required to help you to learn about these various skill sets.
Remember to treat business relationships like friendships because it’s about trust.
When reaching out to potential contacts, realize that these could lead to potential side hustles that could give you an onramp to gain the skills and experience you need.
The efforts you take to achieve your vision will inevitably be these little stepping stones you’ll make towards achieving your vision. Each small step leads to bigger ones until you eventually manifest your vision.
