CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Roslansky and CEO of Essence, Caroline Wanga [SPECIAL EPISODE]

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Negotiate Anything. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. And I am very excited for the episode today. So, as many of you know, we're proud to be part of the LinkedIn podcast network, and this partnership has opened doors to some truly unique opportunities. And today's episode is one such gem. Recently, ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, hosted Caroline Wanga, the dynamic CEO of Essence, on his podcast called the Path. The conversation was rich, insightful, and revealed the intricate dance of negotiation that Caroline navigated on her journey to the top. And now this is the cool part. Ryan, the CEO of LinkedIn, reached out to us seeking a negotiation expert to dissect and analyze the strategies that Caroline employed. And of course, we jumped at that opportunity. So for me, as a negotiator, I have to be on Brand, so I negotiated to be able to share this episode right here for all of you on our channel, so it'll be easy for you to find it. So in today's episode, we are delving deep into the art of authentic negotiation. Caroline's story is a testament to the power of self negotiation, understanding one's desires and motives and then translating that clarity into external negotiations to seize the right opportunities. Her journey is filled with challenges and showcases how genuine self awareness and strategic external negotiation can pave the path to success. So I want to end this with a huge shout out to Ryan and the whole LinkedIn team for inviting us into this conversation. It's an honor to add our voice and our insights to such a powerful dialogue. So, without further ado, let's dive in and explore the negotiation mastery of Caroline Wanga.

Welcome to the Path. I'm ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn. And on this show, I sit down with the world's top leaders to talk about the decisions that shaped their unique careers and how these valuable lessons can help you forge your own path. Today, my conversation is with Caroline Wanga, the CEO of essence. From dropping out of college to becoming a mother, to years of non profit work before climbing the corporate ladder at Target, Caroline's career path has been full of starts, stops and pivots. But it wasn't until she started bringing more of her authentic self to work that she got offered the CEO role at Essence. Here's how Caroline Wanga paved her path. You're an amazing CEO entrepreneur, but let's go way, way back, way back to a young Caroline. Maybe the first time in Your childhood, when you can ever remember at all, even thinking about maybe what you wanted to be when you grew up.

So I'm from Kenya, right? I was born in Kenya, and I was born in a country where what I look like was not a barrier. I also grew up with two parents who were in education. And so my childhood narrative from them was, you literally can do whatever you want to do. You just got to decide you want to do it. Transition to. My dad comes to the US to get his PhD. And so for the first time as I transitioned here, there were things that were barriers based on what I look like or who I was that I didn't understand. And so it actually started probably about an 18 year journey of making myself small. So I started to get rid of my accent. I wouldn't invite anybody over my house because my food smelled funny. I was smart, and I'd play dumb because all of those things that were different hurt. So that's junior high. Start making myself small. And the goal for success is make it through the day without being noticed. So I go to high school and I find sports. When I left high school and wanted to go to college on a track scholarship, I was going to be Jackie Jordan Kersey. I was going to be an Olympic heptathlete, right? And then I was going to major in criminal justice. I still don't remember why. I'm not sure what that thought. So I was supposed to do that. Got pregnant my first semester in college. I decided to be a mom, which meant I had to take care of her. And so I left college. And as all parents know, when you become a parent, like, my daughter's name is Cadence. Adam was not Caroline Wanga. I was Cadence's mom. We all have experienced that, right? Your identity becomes a mother. But you can imagine that it's even more exacerbated when you become a mom before you become a legal adult. Right? Like, my adulthood was motherhood. There was no separation.

What was your job title?

Yeah, I never got to explore anything else. So I went to work and I went to the summer camp that I worked at in the summers. And I asked him for a job because I did take care of this little girl. And I started a career in nonprofit doing youth development programming. So I did a seven year career nonprofit, different nonprofits in the Twin Cities. I started to get to this place where advancement was being connected to a degree. I was angry. I was really angry, severely angry. And I remember saying to the people who said, you can get promoted if you go get Your degree, I remember saying to several people, but I'm not going to be any smarter. So I found out about a small historically black college in Texas that had created a single parent program. I did 21 credits a semester every semester, including J term, and finished a four year degree in two and a half years. Don't ever do that. Right? But I was so fueled by this anger on top of being small. So I get my degree and I'm like, all I know is I'm not going back to the frozen tundra. So I choose to go into. I'm looking for an internship. Find out about a small corporation called Target that had a distribution center in Tyler, Texas. And I take the internship because I needed to make sure I had a job when I graduated. And then I ended up there.

Did that internship require the degree?

So the internship was that summer internship before your last year of college. So I just had a semester, so it didn't require a degree. The last day of my internship, I was ready for my thank you so much for the opportunity speech. And they were like, here you go. You're going to start as a frontline leader of the supply chain team on Outbound, right? While you finish your last semester, we're going to do it. That's how I knew I liked Target. They did that. I didn't know why I wanted to be in corporate America. I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I needed to figure out why I was there. Some great mentors had me decide four experiences I wanted to have. So the first one was to lead a group of non exempt employees in case my career ever went to stores. The next was to lead exempt employees because it's a different kind of leadership. The next one was to not lead people at all because I hadn't decided if I wanted to do that. And then the fourth one was to do hr, which I only put on there because my mentors forced me.

These are four ideas you first talked to.

Experiences.

Experiences that you put them all down at once.

I put them all on paper.

Love it.

And like I'm a visual person. So literally was laid out like a flowchart. So each of those experiences was on there. I defined the three things I wanted to get out of that experience. And I would say one of my biggest career lessons has been it is not about finding a role. It is about experiences that help you say yes or no. Strategic, yes. Thoughtful, no. That's what that exercise was about. And by designing the three things I wanted to get out of it, I Knew what a strategic yes and thoughtful no would look like. That drove the first 10 years of my career at Target.

So wait, so you put these down and what did you decide?

So I show that document to my HR partner and my boss, and I say, these are the things I want to do, right? So I was in a role leading non exempts. I get approached about an opportunity to come to Target's headquarters to be in the distribution, planning and engineering team. That checks off individual contributor. One of the things on my experience list, Right. So I take it, also ended up back in Minnesota. Then I'm there, and people are like, look, if you want to try this HR thing, you got to do it here, because it's not out there in the field like that. Interviewed for 4hr jobs, got turned down for every single one, Was done with it, Got one more call from HR to come interview again. I defiantly said, no. My wonderful Italian boss said, if you do this one, I'll leave you alone. And I was like, fine, Defiance. There's a theme. So I interviewed and got it. And so I started as an HR generalist supporting multiple different businesses within Target's corporate environment. Did that work for a while. Realized I was much better at helping people than helping boxes, and ended up getting my leader of people role in hr. So now it's like Wanga. You said this experience would tell you what you want to do. What do you want to do?

I want to step back for a second. Like a lot of us when we were in college or in our first jobs, Caroline had no idea what she wanted to do. But she knew she was looking for purpose in her work. When she drew a map of experiences she wanted to have, which, by the way, I think is a genius way to get clarity on what your next step is, she was able to pursue fields she'd never considered, like hr. Along the way, Caroline still wasn't sure where her path was leading her. But she trusted the journey, and it opened up the door to the next big chapter in her life.

I ended up being an ERG leader of a black affinity group. And for the first time, I met the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. I was like, what is this over here? So inquired about it and decided that if I was going to serve my time in corporate, that was where I was going to work, because it was the closest thing corporate had to a soul. Remember, I'm a nonprofit girl. So I drew another map. This one had VP of DNI at the top. Oh, by the way, I've decided to promote myself Over a series of times. So I wrote this in June 2012 and said I'd be the VP of DNI by July 2018. Shared it with my boss, my HR person, and the person who had that job. And I said, are we all in agreement? I just needed them to not say no. They didn't have to say yes. They just didn't say no. Bet so thought that was going to be the plan. We would follow this. I'd been asked to go do some work in California on mergers and acquisitions, and I got a call from my boss that said, hey, you can do this, but remember that D and I thing you said you were interested in? We unanimously support you. Go do it. This is like December 2013. We way ahead of schedule right now, people. But I'd opened my big mouth. So in 2014, start that job. And the last part of the Caroline story that is really critical to understand. When my job became to create environments where authenticity was democratized, that being small thing, that had been my way of operating the entire career, including when I was in all of those areas in Target, because all I tried to do was what other people who were successful did. I didn't have a point of view. I got scared. I was like, how in the world is my job to tell people they can come as they are? And there's a whole bunch of stuff about me that I'm not living honestly. And I remember the first thing I did was cut my hair in this job. I was about three months in, and I started locs, because I remember having been told that that wasn't appropriate in corporate America. And I spent that whole week worried that I was gonna get fired because I changed my hair. Now, while there were some inappropriate interactions, they were bearable. So when I realized that didn't change, I was like, bam. Blue lipstick. Nobody cared. I towed into reintroducing Caroline.

This was the best thing Caroline could have done for her career. Once she reintroduced herself to her network, the right people started paying attention, and Caroline got an offer to collaborate with people who shared her values.

The family that owns Essence in our prior business, worked with Target for 15 years, the exact same amount of time that I've been there. We'd never met. We ended UP meeting in 2019, which was right when I was having this moment. So all of a sudden, I'm like, 10 times better at my job because now I'm not spending capacity worrying about what I look like, and I'm anchored in Caroline, and this comes along. So I'm thinking they're talking about target partnerships. I get a call in the spring that says, caroline, we want you to come run essence. And I'm like, you want who to come run essence? I'm not a media girl. Like, I'm not gonna break that thing. And when I had that conversation, what I was actually told about why it was time for me to do that was because of the way that I was living my life and how they wanted that to be a part of what I delivered at the role. Had I not made that decision, this opportunity doesn't come, and now I have the privilege and benefit of being the current custodian of a cultural artifact that I couldn't say no to because it's not the kind of job that comes again.

That last part, though, that jump to becoming a CEO, that's not an easy, like, mental jump to make. And I just heard you share a little bit about that process. But take me through. I mean, how you thought about it. Did you draw another map?

So there is another map involved. And that map was what I thought would be the third career map. And what it turned into is what I talk about a lot, which is the architecture of authenticity. So I'm gonna connect this for you. I had designed this thing that I thought was gonna be the third career map, and it was about how now that I had found the liberation of self, I wanted to have a job where I got to give that to other people. For me, this was a journey of recompense and servitude and authenticity, liberation. So when I rented the title of CEO, I almost quit. I remember calling the owner and going, I don't think I'm good at this job, and I will not break this cultural artifact. Fire me before I ruin essence. The amount of doubt that I existed in, that I could be what a CEO needs to be in terms of leadership, in terms of governance, in terms of fiscal responsibility, in terms of being this public figure, in terms of the pressure, in terms of the pain, the haters, the. Everything under the sun became really heavy, and I didn't feel worthy of being in the seat because my path there was not for the title. So that didn't help me. The title actually scared me. I probably spent the first six months waiting to be fired. When I made that call to the owner, I didn't resign, but I was crying, and I would have fired me. I was like, really in a different place about not sure if I could do the CEO part of this job. He said two things to me that to this day are what get me through the hardest days of CEO, which is whooping my behind on a daily basis. To be honest, he reminded me what he told me, which is, it is how you live your life that this brand needs, because it has always been an inspiration that pulled the culture forward. The second thing he said was, when I called around about you, you won. Everywhere you went, he said, I just want somebody who knows how to win. Those two statements did so much to resolve that inner saboteur. It's still there. It pops up on a daily basis. But what I know about that inner saboteur is that their language is stunted, their behavior is predictable, and it just stings. And so on the days where that inner saboteur is like, you can't be a CEO, or you're not a typical CEO, you're not good enough, or you should have known the answer to that question. Like, look, you screwed that up, right? Like, all of the board's mad at you. Like, whatever. I go back to those two things, and I say, am I still doing those two things? And if I'm still doing those two things, then what I'm gonna do is create threshold for failure in my day. Five fails a day. That's my philosophy. I give myself five fails a day, and unless I fail a sixth time, it's not a bad day.

I love the five fails. I think I'd have to give myself probably 10 a day to make it through, but it's a genius idea. And I guess the last question I want to end on. I get the question all the time. I know you do as well. Someone brand new, starting in their career, trying to figure out what to do, and asks caroline, what's your greatest piece of career advice?

If I promise to answer, will you tell me how you answer that question?

Yeah.

Okay. So there's two things I would say to you. Who you are is who you are. If you cannot be who you are where you are, you change where you are, not who you are. I give that first set of advice because there are so many opportunities that I missed over managing my who, making myself small, trying to mimic other people. Do not stop until you find the where, where your who is best. This generation has an opportunity to change the way of working that centers on the who. So that would be my first one. My second one is a little bit related to my ma. It is never about a role. It is always about an experience. The people who get tapped on the shoulder, and you're like, why didn't I never know about that job? Those are the people that spend their time looking for experiences, not jobs, because in those experiences, they meet the person who does the shoulder tap for the job. That was never going to be posted that just got approved by the board yesterday. Boom, here's our new VP or whatever. And so I would say it's about experiences, not roles. But if you tie that to not negotiating your who and demanding that the where accommodates your who, the purpose you were born to fulfill in the world will manifest, as Mark Twain said, two most important days in your life. The day that you're born and the day you find out why. How do you answer that question?

Want me to follow that? I would say a lot of what I really care about is why you and I are sitting here today. Most people fundamentally believe that they don't have control of their career path, that someone else. That the system is taking care of it for them. But in reality, that's not what works. And if you're not going to take control of your career on your own, someone else is going to take control of it for you. So what do you do? Similar to your map concept, I make everyone draw a two by two. I want you to pick the two things that matter most to you in your career. We plot those two things, and they're often something like learning or they're something like impact. The people I wanna work with, I wanna like them. They actually are rarely title or something like that. And then it becomes simple because you now have a map. You're either in the top right of that quadrant of the things that you care about or you're not. And if you're not, you know how to fix it. And then it becomes less about all the noise and what I should be doing or what my mom thinks I should be doing, or it's. You have control of it and follow it this way. So I think that just having that, you know, ability to take control of your own career and have a map to it is something that we both share in common.

Yeah.

Here's what stands out to me about our conversation. Throughout her journey, Caroline had maps that helped her navigate her career. And she was constantly negotiating the path to her goals. From moving to the US to her first corporate job, Caroline felt the only way to be successful at work was to make herself small and hide her authentic self. And I know there are others listening that may feel the same, but Caroline is proof that being yourself can open doors. Once she stopped negotiating who she was for the sake of a title, Caroline finally connected with her purpose at work and landed amazing opportunities. I know it's easy to say bring your authentic self to work, but it's not always simple. It might lead to some uncomfortable situations. So how can you check in with yourself and navigate difficult conversations with your co workers? We'll break it down for you after a short break. Welcome back to the Path. Before the break, we heard how Caroline Wanga went from trying to fit in to becoming the CEO of ESSENCE because she decided to stand out. But it took her years to negotiate what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it. If this is something you're also wrestling with, this next part's for you. I've invited Kwame Christian, a business attorney and negotiation expert, to give you advice on how to make these decisions in your own career. He's the author of two books, including how to have Difficult Conversations About Race. He's also the host of LinkedIn Podcast Network's Negotiate Anything podcast. Kwame talked to us about why Caroline's story struck him.

I think for me, the word that comes to mind is validating. The interview was very validating for me. I'm a first generation Caribbean American and I grew up in a small town called Tiffin, Ohio. It can be really, really hard for you to be your authentic self when you felt that rejection for who you are. For me, I became like the most popular kid in school. So from the outside looking in, it looks like success. But that's what turned me into a people pleaser.

Kwame refers to himself as a recovering people pleaser. He's become an expert on how to have difficult conversations and how to negotiate, and he sees Caroline's story as a negotiation story.

So I like to think about a negotiation as anytime you're having a conversation with somebody and somebody in the conversation wants something. So through that definition, we realize we're negotiating all the time. And first it starts off with an internal negotiation. There has to be an introspective process where you're exploring yourself, learning about yourself, and figuring out who you really are. The world is really noisy, and sometimes it's hard to see where you begin and society ends and vice versa. There has to be this journey of self discovery before we can start to be authentic. And so once we get that clarity internally, that is what leads to the clarity externally. Now we can advocate for ourselves. Now we can walk authentically in our workplace. And the beautiful thing is that with her story, authenticity led to acceptance. And what's interesting is that when you're authentic, it'll lead to acceptance with the right audience. With the right people, with the right organization. If you show up authentically and then you're rejected for who you are, that is probably an indication that you're in the wrong place. And so that fear that we have of being rejected for our authenticity is actually something that we should embrace. Because if somebody's going to reject me for who I am, I want to know that as soon as possible so I can make the necessary adjustments.

Now, once you have clarity about what you want to bring to work and what you want from work, you can start having these external negotiations. This is where I also think about Caroline's advice. Don't change who you are. Change where you are. But sometimes you love where you are and you want to make it work. So how do you do that?

If you are different in any kind of way, there are going to be a lot of awkward situations. And sometimes people will say things that are offensive. They hurt your feelings, but they don't even recognize the impact it's having on you. And the problem is, with microaggressions like these, a lot of times the responsibility is on the person who was hurt to bring it up to the other side, because they don't even recognize that an issue has occurred. And so there's a simple approach. Situation impact, invitation equals engaged communication. So what you want to do is you want to describe the situation using what I call naked facts. So these are facts that are stripped of all interpretation, judgment, and opinion. Then we're going to talk about the impact that it had on us. We're going to personalize it, and then we're going to invite them to have a conversation, but use a collaborative invitation. So here's an example. So let's say with Caroline, she started wearing the blue lipstick and being more authentically herself. And then somebody makes something, comments, and then they keep happening, and she doesn't like it. Hypothetically, what could she say? She could say, hey, yesterday in the meeting, you said xyz, and that made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. We're going to be working together for the foreseeable future. And you're somebody that I respect, and I want to have a conversation with you about this so we can make sure that we can work together in a collaborative way going forward. And so that takes about 15 seconds. And there's really nothing that somebody can do at that point to resist that introduction, because nothing that was said was controversial. But if she said, hey, yesterday in the meeting, you said this really offensive thing, okay, now there's a record scratch that wasn't offensive. Now we're having a silly conversation that leads to nowhere productive. And so this is a really simple way to come into these conversations. And then when you're in the conversation, all you do is you flow using compassionate curiosity.

Let's talk about compassionate curiosity. It's Kwame's framework for how to negotiate anything. It's also how Caroline negotiated her way to the top.

So it's three steps. Number one, acknowledge and validate emotions. Number two, get curious with compassion. And number three, joint problem solving. So let's walk through what that would look like internally. So number one, I'm going to acknowledge and validate my own emotions, beliefs and conclusions that I've come to. So what is it that I'm feeling? I might feel scared, I might feel afraid, insecure, whatever it happens to be right. So I'm going to list all of those out. Then I'm going to get curious with self directed compassion. So we have to be kind to ourselves through this process. So why am I feeling this? What led me to feel this way? And if it's a belief or a bias, we start to challenge that. How do I know this is true? And then with the last step, joint problem solving, we're reconciling the differences between our hearts and our minds. So what is it that would satisfy me emotionally? And now what is it that we should actually do in the real world to solve the problem at hand? Now when it comes to the external negotiation, again, same three steps. I'm going to acknowledge and validate the emotions of the other person. Saying it sounds like it seems like. Or I can tell that. So it seems like this is really frustrating to you. Or I can tell that this is something that you really care about. Something like that. And then you move to getting curious with compassion. So you're going to ask open ended questions with a compassionate tone. And then the last step is joint problem solving, where you're engaging in a win win negotiation with the other person because you've worked through the emotional challenges, you've taken the time to gather information, and now you have everything you need to problem solve with the other person.

Okay, so we have the steps needed to negotiate effectively. What's next? Let's look at Caroline's path. There are some other key things that are worth pointing out about how Caroline approached her career maps. She got really specific about her goals, giving her a sense of clarity that helped her communicate clearly with her bosses. She also understood that it's more important to negotiate for an experience rather than.

A position in Negotiation, we have to understand there's a difference between interest and position. A position is what somebody says that they want and interest is why they want it. And so that's why you want to use interest based negotiation. Because the more paths to victory you have, the more likely you are to achieve a victory. So if you go in and you say, I want a specific position now, there is only one thing that you can do in order to accomplish your goal. But if you are like Caroline and you say, I'm looking for these experiences, or maybe in your life, it might be, I'm looking to achieve a certain lifestyle, a certain level of balance, and you can broaden your perspective on what it is that you want now you can be a lot more flexible and creative in what it takes to get there.

And finally, Caroline figured out how to negotiate with the person whose job she wanted. That's not easy, but you have to remember that negotiating is all about building relationships and finding win wins.

One of the things that people often say is that there's a discrepancy in power. What do I have to offer this person? I know how they can help me, but how can I help them? There are a lot of different things that you can offer, and we have to be creative. But first it starts with curiosity. You need to figure out what it is that they're trying to accomplish. What do they care about? You need to take the time to learn about them, do your research, do your homework, and then in the conversation, lead with curiosity to figure out what it is that they hope to accomplish, what are their aspirations, what's their vision for the company? And now you can be creative together and find those solutions. And also at the end of the day, often people are willing to give back, they want to give back, and their mentees are part of their legacy and they want to see people succeed. And so if you can create a relationship, then your success becomes their success and they become more invested in helping you honestly, because it makes them look good too. And so once you figure out what that is for them now, you can communicate that and find that synergy, that interest, overlap. And that's part of the negotiation process too.

So here's my takeaway. If you can slow down and reflect on who you are in your personal life and who you want to be at work, you can be more effective at negotiating for the right things. At the end of the day, it's up to to you to advocate for yourself. And you can do it by following Kwame's steps. Find clarity. Start a conversation and negotiate with compassion. And remember Caroline's advice. A career Path is not a series of roles, it's a series of experiences. And when you can get clarity about the experiences you really want, you'll find your purpose and your path. Follow the Path for more episodes weekly and join the conversation about each episode on LinkedIn.com ThePath the Path is a LinkedIn editorial production. Our production team includes Ava Ahmad Begi, Steven Valdivia, and Rachel Wong. Asaf Gidron mixes our show, Enrique Montalvo is our Executive producer, Dave Pond is head of News production, our head of Original programming is Courtney Koop, and Dan Roth is our Editor in chief. Thanks to Tatiana Delmida, Caroline Gaffney, and Valerie Berrett. And a big thank you to Kwame Christian for lending us his insights. If you want to hear more from him, you can listen to his podcast Negotiate anything on the LinkedIn podcast network.