Kristiana Corona
Hi, and welcome to the Worthy to Lead podcast. I'm your host, Kristiana Corona, and I'm so glad you are joining me for this new episode. So it's been nearly four months since I left my corporate career and headed into the wild unknown of entrepreneurship. While there are many stories to share about my entrepreneurial journey so far, and I will be sure to do that in an upcoming episode.
I don't want to miss the opportunity to take a moment and pause and look back at what I learned over the past three action packed years at Amazon. Working at Amazon is an experience that has no comparison, at least not in the 23 years that I've supported a range of Fortune 500 companies. There are things that are so unique to the culture and the way of working that you have to forget everything you think you know and be prepared to be a beginner all over again.
So I'm going to do something new and share a series of mini leadership lessons that I took away from my experience at Amazon that hopefully you might find helpful. These lessons are universal and they speak to how you can become effective at scale, overcoming adversity, and learning to invest in yourself. Since I'm trying something new, I would love your feedback on how this shorter episode resonates with you. So with that, let's dive in.
I want to start by setting the context so you get an idea of what I'm talking about when I address the topics of scale and complexity. At Amazon, I led design and user experience teams across the Last Mile Delivery organization.
If you've ever seen the big blue vans that drop off packages at your door, this is considered the last mile of delivery where a driver takes the package from the station and brings it to your home or another delivery location. This may sound pretty simple on the surface. The driver just picks up a box and delivers it to your doorstep. How hard could that be? Right? Wrong. Keep in mind, Amazon delivered over 9 billion packages in 2024 in 20 countries around the world. There was nothing simple about it.
Our teams had to account for a wide variety of scenarios for cultural differences and for service types. For example, drivers don't just use traditional blue vans for delivery. They also use electric vans, cars, rental trucks, e-bikes, motorbikes, three-wheeled trucks.
And they walk around with backpacks and carts in dense urban areas. They don't just deliver to homes. They also bring packages to lockers, counters at retail stores, businesses, college campuses, apartment complexes, and hubs. And many drivers are managed by small business owners that work with Amazon called delivery service partners or DSPs. These small business owners also need tools to run their business, like managing driver schedules.
doing vehicle maintenance, performance management, and pay. As if that is not enough complexity, there are also a number of safety hazards that drivers face when delivering that need to be considered. Things like how do we keep them safe from aggressive animals or angry customers? How do they deal with extreme weather conditions? What do they do when the address is out of date or wrong? How do they deliver safely in the dark?
How do they deliver to different neighborhoods or places that have poor cell service to name a few? So last mile deliveries can be a quite intense place and require a great deal of grit and resilience. And so the job of the last mile delivery organization was to keep everyone safe and to streamline the technology so that drivers can focus on delivering smiles to customers. Did I also mention
that some of these tools need to be translated into 75 different languages and also delivered across any kind of mobile device that's out there. From a technology perspective, the complexity is almost unfathomable.
So knowing all of that, imagine walking into your first day on the job and knowing that you need to absorb that scope of information. How would you feel?
I can tell you how I felt. I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose. Only instead of a fire hose, it was a wall of a hundred fire hoses. And new ones kept being added every day. Each fire hose had a new partner and a team that went with it. So there was no end to the people that I was meeting and the projects that I was exposed to.
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It was both daunting and exhilarating. If this was a choose your own adventure story, this would be the moment where you make a choice. Do I A, climb the steep mountain ahead of me, diving into the complexity and meeting hundreds of people? Or B, do I look for an easier path instead? The answer to that question is actually quite revealing about what leadership looks like in general.
If you're constantly looking for easier paths with less resistance, you may be missing the exhilaration of the climb and what it feels like to reach the top and know that you're capable to do it. And the funny thing is that once I had decided to take path A and climb that mountain, the experience began to feel less intimidating. Each step I took and the continued exposure to a high degree of complexity helped me to adapt quicker than I thought.
As humans we learn to adapt to our new normal much faster than we think we will.
As humans, we learn to adapt to our new normal faster than we expect. That banging noise in your furnace that was driving you crazy a few days ago, by next week, you won't even hear it anymore. From a brain science perspective, this adaptation to the new environment is part of neuroplasticity. Our brain thrives on processing new experiences, learning new skills, and being challenged.
It's one of the ways we can keep our brain healthy and vibrant. And each time we operate in this new, more complex environment, we're strengthening the new neural pathways that are forming that will make it faster and easier the next time we do it. Our brains are always building these incredible mental shortcuts.
So it may be no surprise that within a few weeks of being exposed to this complexity at Amazon, I began to have an understanding of the big picture. And the scope didn't seem quite so enormous anymore. Within a few months, I knew a majority of the partners and the major priorities, and I had established a rhythm with my team. New neural pathways had already started to form. And within a year, I felt at ease switching between dozens of teams and projects on a weekly basis.
What had initially seemed insurmountable had slowly become foundational to my everyday experience. The intensity and the noise of all those work streams was no longer clouding my radar, but rather it was something I could tune into and select where my focus should be. The longer I was at Amazon, the more precisely I could tune into what was important and let go of what wasn't. And that process took time and repetition, and it wasn't easy, but it was worth it.
Proving to myself, or proving to yourself, that you're capable of taking on big challenges is a really rewarding aspect of leadership. So I would summarize this first leadership lesson at Amazon like this: Learning to lead at scale requires sitting in discomfort and intensity for longer than you'll want to, but be patient with yourself because your brain is working overtime to make this your new normal, and you will adapt if you stick with it. Brain science proves it.
And the reward for the hard work and the commitment is a level of confidence in yourself that continues to grow. If I can do this hard thing, what else will I be capable of?
So now I would ask you, where are you currently up against a big challenge that seems daunting or maybe impossible? And where are you feeling that tension of doubt or resistance holding you back?
What if instead of letting that fear overwhelm you, you faced it head on with the confidence that your brain will figure things out as you go. What if you saw yourself depositing a gold coin into the bank of future you? that each time you face that resistance, you are choosing to make an investment in yourself and you're gaining a wealth of knowledge in the process. And if you started to do that today, what would change about your life?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. So send me a message on LinkedIn or Instagram. I would love to hear from you.
I hope you enjoyed this mini episode and I look forward to seeing you at the next one.
If you'd like to make sure that you're not missing any of my episodes as I release them, you can subscribe at worthytoleadpodcast.com/subscribe. Until next time, I wish you the best on your leadership journey and believing that you are worthy to lead. Bye for now.
