Ep. 119 - Changing the Game to Create Success From Anywhere - with Karen Mangia

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Karen Mangia is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, VP of Customer & Market Insights at Salesforce, and strategist who focuses on the Future of Work, the Voice of the Customer, and nurturing a sense of Belonging within organizations.

Like so many of us during the pandemic, Karen recognized that we weren’t going back to the way things were. She sees an opportunity to change the rules and create the future — but we’re holding ourselves and our organizations back by defaulting back to the way we used to do things.

Telling the Customer’s Story

Karen is a storyteller at heart.

She started her career in project management and then held a series of sales and sales leadership roles, but what threaded them together was this love for understanding the customer, their business, and what really mattered to them.

That passion to dive deep into their needs, coupled with constantly changing roles led her to heading up a voice of the customer program at Cisco globally. It was about “getting deeply curious about the answers and putting together compelling stories that capture hearts and minds in a way that we would want to invest, to either solve those problems or co-create.”

During her time managing Cisco’s customer experience program, there was a lot of change occurring: new products, new customers, and the company itself was evolving, which meant they had to learn to listen differently.

She captured and conveyed these insights and trends via a blog about customer connection and a customer listening center of excellence. That fortuitous action led to Salesforce inviting her to build and scale their customer listening function.

But even in this role, the heart of Karen’s job is still telling stories, now about the future of work, customer success, racial justice, and belonging.

Growth isn’t Linear

Karen didn’t see her career trajectory as a linear path. She was always thinking, what do I want to learn next, who do I want to meet, what do I want to try? This curiosity, this experimenter’s mindset, drove her to expand her network and create new job opportunities but also new personal experiences. (She happens to be a trained chef too).

It’s this combination of “education, experience, and exposure is how I think about navigating career moves.”

You can think of it as the Power of Pilots. There’s a lot of power in thinking big and acting small. In “Success from Anywhere,” Karen writes about the Five Minute Fix.

Just ask yourself: What’s something you can do in five minutes that will bring you even 1% closer to a new skill, a new mindset, or a new system that brings you closer to where or who you want to be? You might be surprised by the progress you can make with just five minutes a day over a matter of weeks.

It’s about building the muscle and discipline of discovering and learning something new — because knowing can be the enemy of discovery.

“Success from Anywhere” means Changing the Game

Karen’s newest book, “Success From Anywhere,” is a playbook designed to help people and organizations find their right fit in the future of work, which Karen says is less about what our offices look like and more about how we redesign our relationship with work. And I could not agree more!

Like most of us, Karen was forced to take a step back, pause, and change some beliefs and approaches in her own life over the last few years. This caused her to think about why we were doing things the way we were — and realize that we have an opportunity to do them differently. We can change the rules and don’t have to conform to the way work and life are.

But she looked around and saw organizations going back into the same old holding patterns. So she wrote the book to start a conversation about what the future could be and how we can fundamentally change our relationships with work.

It’s time to change the rules to the game of life. And to make that shift, we need to understand our values.

Progressive Tolerance vs. Progressive Consciousness

Karen shares that what holds people and the organizations they work for back from understanding what their values are comes from their existing beliefs. We hold a certain set of beliefs and norms of what it means to be successful. that state.

That is what Karen calls a state of Progressive Tolerance, meaning we keep falling into the loop of tolerating what we inherently know doesn’t serve us and doesn’t represent how we are, what we care about, or what matters. It’s where many of us are right now.

“We settle for approval when what we're looking for is acceptance. We settle for mandates when what we're looking for is meaning... We settle for blending when our deepest desire is for belonging.”

But “belonging is bonding, not blending,” Karen says. “And you're never going to realize this belonging vision inside of your organization until people really can be themselves at work, in every possible sense.”

Our goal should be to achieve a state of Progressive Consciousness. This is when we recognize that every choice we make, on a moment by moment basis, is either in alignment with our values and what matters most... or isn’t.

A lot of organizations talk about belonging. But Karen says we can’t truly achieve belonging within an organization unless every single person within it is aware of their values and aligned in their values — a state of shared progressive consciousness.

Creating Sustainable Change

Karen Mangia talks a lot in this episode about how she changed the game of work and life for herself, which involved having that experimenter’s mindset and continuing to foster her curiosity and creativity. As a result, she created consistent and cumulative career progress through a series of pilots. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to make progress. You just need values that can serve as a north star.

Real and sustainable change requires consistent and doable progress — with a big emphasis on DOABLE.

And the whole idea of “Success From Anywhere” is to make career and life progress more doable. Because moving from a state of progressive tolerance into a state of progressive consciousness can enable us to make choices that are in alignment with our values and with what matters most.

And business leaders, I hope you read the book too, and I hope you take Karen’s words to heart. Every single one of us is looking for more of what matters, and that looks different for everyone.

Definition of Success

“Success is contentment. Success is freedom from needing to put myself into the future and postpone joy or punish myself for some past pattern.”

Career Advice

Live your life. Now. There are no do-overs

Key Takeaways

We currently have an opportunity to create and shape what the future of work looks like, but we’re getting stuck in old holding patterns, old beliefs, and misconceptions about how things need to be. So make the shift from progressive tolerance to progressive consciousness.
Creating success from anywhere starts with changing the game fundamentally because everyone can be successful by design.
Finding your true North Stars is what gets you excited and energized to keep going, as it’s a really helpful clue about what you'll enjoy throughout your career versus one specific goal.
You need to build the muscle and discipline of discovering and learning something new — because knowing can be the enemy of discovery.
Talent stacking is one of the most optimal ways to differentiate yourself. Learning how to apply what you know from one area to a different one will help you solve problems in ways that you are uniquely prepared to do.
Leverage the power of pilots to test out new ideas in your career and life. Employe the tactic of the five-minute fix to make the process more doable and approachable.
- Making big moves or grand gestures can lead to burnout or giving up. Remember: “Do the doable.”
Embrace a beginner’s mindset — because knowledge is the enemy of curiosity. When you approach something with a beginner’s mindset, whether that’s a familiar problem or a new journey, it will help you discover what’s truly there. And it can be exciting!
Remember that a sense of belonging, acceptance, and community begins with being clear about yourself.
Grant yourself permission to to do what you already know you need to do
For leaders, you're never going to realize this belonging vision inside of your organization until people really can be themselves at work in, in every possible sense.