Welcome to GreatConversations, a podcast about leadership and life from GreatAmerica Financial Services. Mitch Leahy, VP and General Manager for our Office Equipment Group hosts our NextWave Series of talks with thought leaders and innovators from across the business world.
On today’s episode of GreatConversations, Mitch hosts Ashley Carnes, Chief Strategy Officer at Impact Networking—one of the fastest-growing managed services providers in the nation. Ashley’s passion for lifelong learning and servant leadership earned her recognition as a 2024 Young Influencer by The Cannata Report. She shares her unexpected journey from an entry-level sales rep to leadership, emphasizing the role strong mentors had on her development and how motherhood helped shaped her empathetic and curious approach to leadership.
Listen to full podcast or read the abbreviated interview below!
Lifelong Learning, Leading through Service, and a Little Happy Luck | Ashley Carnes, Impact Networking
Mitch: Hello and welcome to another episode of GreatConversations. I'm Mitch Leahy of GreatAmerica, and today I'm excited to welcome a young woman who's really becoming a well-known name in the office technology space.
She's super smart. She's passionate about people, customers, and always challenging herself by taking on new roles. I am so glad to welcome Ashley Carnes of Impact Networking. Welcome, Ashley.
Ashley: Thanks, Mitch. You really know how to hype a lady up!
On Being a Lifelong Academic
Mitch: Of course! Your role at Impact is Chief Strategy Officer. Would you mind leading us off by explaining what that means?
Ashley: It's a relatively newer term across a lot of organizations, so it can take a lot of different forms. I did research around the role before taking on the title and I’d noted that it may mean a more financial background, expert in acquisitions, mergers, financial analysis, and so forth.
However, that is not my background. My heart and experiences lie in that of a strategic planner, and so my critical responsibility as Chief Strategy Officer is to synthesize and understand critical business needs, in alignment with long-term organizational goals, and bridge the gap between strategy and execution. To do so, it requires the alignment and synchronization of cross-departmental initiatives, strategic planning and leading of macro-economic projects (namely through cascading OKRs). All of this is in pursuit of our goal of $500 million. My current largest projects include maturing our Learning and Development function, executing our strategic workforce development charter, and supporting our global sales strategy.
Mitch: Clearly you are a part of an organization that has some big goals moving forward. As you mentioned, Chief Strategy Officer can mean a lot of different things, but Impact has set it up as a solid training and development platform where you can devote some consistent focus to acheiving your goals.
Ashley: Yes, that is a core and critical responsibility.
Mitch: So you have actually created sort of an internal learning institute within Impact?
Ashley: Correct.
Mitch: Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?
Ashley: It's funny. I didn't come from a professional background in training or education. I don't have my master's in instructional design, and so I've lived by the adage to surround myself with people far smarter than I. That’s what I've had the great privilege of doing in building out this team.
Essentially, I came to accidentally own training back in 2018 under my role as director of sales strategy. I only mention that because at that time, Impact as an organization had continued to not only see substantial growth but was truly undergoing a transformation in redefining everything from the go to market motions, the messaging, and the complexity of the product offering.
It's just the convergence of so many forces. Back then, the intention was to help standardize people, processes, and systems for scalability and repeatability to help support velocity of the sales process. So that inherently was meant to soundboard against training, among other functions. At that point, we were transitioning from a hardware-centric organization to the managed expert services space. With that, it just kept coming back to the need for more nuanced education, whether that was to help upscale sales professionals to take on managed services sales cycles, or other functions of the company to support the client at a new level; all roads kept pointing back to corporate education.
With that in mind, we founded the Impact Leadership Institute and it was really meant to embody not only a learning and development function, but a critical and strategic lever that could help propel the workforce to match and mirror the pace of goals that were set in front of us.
So that is how I came to accidentally own training, and it's just been such a wonderful ride and I keep getting to learn from teammates each day.
Mitch: That's incredible. What a what a fantastic message to new and existing team members that you've got such a formal, intentional setup in terms of training and development.
Ashley: It feels like I'm doing my life's work. I think it's important to call out; if there's one message that I could shout from the mountaintops, it's how critical it is to have a level adoption and make it a purposeful, intentional effort. Training is not a singular event. This starts with Frank Cucco. Frank is passionate about educating people and spending and investing in professional development. From day one, our president, Dan Meyer, has said we not only want to be a world class organization to our customers, but we also want to be a marketplace where folks can come and learn. Even if their lifelong careers aren't at Impact, we want their time here to mark who they are as individuals and as professionals. They have been not only supportive, but hell bent on making that a priority to the organization, and putting in the dollars, time investment, effort, trust and faith.
Aiming for Leadership
Mitch: What an incredible story. That's got to be really inspiring to have that support and contribution of resources. If I remember correctly, you started as a sales professional in a territory chasing new business, and then worked your way through that into a leadership position. Did you always know that you wanted to be in a leadership role or was that a hard transition to make from individual contributor to owning some development responsibilities for peers?
Ashley: That's a great question. It's a thoughtful one. There's been a lot of nostalgia this month, looking back on my early career. I was always an academic. I put a lot of pride on a sense of accomplishment. I never thought I was the smartest person in the room or the prettiest person in the room. However I always took pride that I could be the hardest working person in the room. From a very young age, that's where I put a lot of my stock and found a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment in that.
Because of that, it felt like a natural transition from a very overloaded collegiate and academic schedule of extracurriculars and taking on leadership positions within that context. As an associate news editor at the paper in college or a president of chapter societies within my college campus, I gravitated to those types of activities naturally. That transitioned pretty seamlessly into the working world where my love of sales blossomed. I loved the idea that you could put in as much as you wanted and be in control of your own destiny. Specifically at Impact, there was always the sentiment of rapid career advancement and that was intoxicating and addictive to me as a young professional hungry to get to work, make a splash and see what I could do. I met the perfect organization that championed that. I think it was a bit of serendipity, and a bit of happy luck.
Speaking of serendipitous luck, the way I ended up at Impact in the first place was a bit of a funny story. It was waiting tables in college, paying my way through school, and I was in between obligations at the newspaper and classes and working at the restaurant. I asked for an hour to go do a lap at the career fair and I bumped into someone at the Impact booth. They started telling me about the role. Back then Impact was a young company of about 70 employees, but they had big dreams and aspirations. Funny enough, my mom was a single mom in tech sales, so I always said that I would never go that route because I'm a writer. But this person at the Impact booth got me to commit to a ride day. And the funny story now is that this person is now my husband. Everything about my time at Impact feels serendipitous because I've grown up with the company and there's just been such transformation. It feels so personal because it's just been such a close group, building and building and imagining and collaborating. I feel so fortunate to have that experience.
So to answer your earlier question about whether or not I always knew I'd be in a leadership position: No. I just knew I wanted to keep working, chasing, pushing and challenging myself. Even when I wasn’t carrying a manager title, I loved taking on the responsibility of gathering the troops, giving the rally cry, and pushing everyone to take action.
But I really credit all of this to unbelievable mentors and influences in my early days at Impact. It's standing on the shoulders of giants.
Mitch: Well said. I think the gratitude that you have for an organization that thinks about things in development the same way that you do, it's pretty fortunate. You mentioned there being only 70 employees when you started. What's the company up to now?
Ashley: We're just breaking 1,000.
Mitch: That's incredible. How many years have you been with Impact now?
Ashley: In just a few weeks it will be my 13th year.
Keeping The Magic Through Growth
Mitch: I've been with GreatAmerica for 16. Back when I started, I think we were somewhere near 240 employees and we're now sitting at around 760. When I get on the elevator, some days I don't know everybody that gets on with me. It’s just different. It’s a good thing and a great opportunity to meet new people, but it feels so different than it used to.
Ashley: Yes, with that growth, we get a lot of questions around how we keep the magic. I think that is a real challenge for any organization that's redefining the culture, because you can't take that for granted. You must keep actively building it, contributing to it, and stretching it. Especially as your leadership group becomes stretched geographically because essentially, what could be a really rich, all-hands-on-deck, in-person feel, can become thinned down with the logistical challenges.
For me personally, the very nature of the culture changing with organizational growth has kept me so engaged. Each milestone represents a new set of challenges. There is always something to solve. No two days are the same and that was true in the earliest days of selling and supporting different customers; being the master of your own schedule, getting to set the pace of your day and your book of business.
But even then, as we are shepherding the growth of the company, the challenges we're solving for tomorrow aren't going to be the same things that will continue to sustain into the future. You are constantly chasing new puzzles to crack. It’s addictive and very enticing. I love that kind of excitement and that kind of ferocious energy, so I feel fortunate for that, because I wouldn't bode well in stagnation.
Hitching Your Wagon to The Right Mentors
Mitch: That is easy to see from the little time I've known you. You talked about having some great peers, mentors, and leaders in your time at Impact. You’re mentoring some now, too and are well sought out both within Impact and even outside of Impact as you become more well-known. For instance, congratulations on your recent 2024 Cannata Report Young Influencers recognition!
As someone who has had a great career so far, is relatively young, and is who I would consider a strong female leader in an industry that doesn’t have a lot of females in the C-Suite: What are some things you’ve learned that you are trying to impart on others?
Ashley: What an important question. I’ll perhaps first identify a few things that I believe fundamentally shaped me as the person and the leader that I am today.
First off, you're correct that, this industry is a bit male dominated even still. However, I’m grateful for my earlier experiences in Chicago as an entry level sales rep because we actually had a pretty even gendered bullpen, which was a rarity. The females were powerhouses, and there was one, who is still a good friend to this day, who was my first real mentor. I was a young entry-level rep, and she was a senior-level rep. I shadowed her and stuck with her closely. We ended up doing all our blitzes together. We'd run meetings together. We'd work opportunities together. She was just a selfless servant leader. She wasn't protective or territorial. She just brought me under her wing. She had this unbelievable air of confidence to her and was just the ultimate consummate professional. With her example, I realized the importance of first impressions and how you carry yourself as a professional, regardless of if you're a man or a woman.
I'll never forget cold calling with her and something as simple as knocking on a door and handing over an invitation to our technology showcase. One instance in particular stands out. She had knocked on the door, handed the person an invitation, and began explaining what this event was. But the person wrote her off. They told her they didn’t accept solicitors and then threw the invitation in garbage right in front of us. I remember I was prepared to just to turn around and be on my way, but my colleague stuck her foot in the door and said, "Excuse me, pick that up. If you don't value this invitation, then certainly I have clients that will.” So, this person knelt down, plucked it from the garbage, and gave it back to her.
This experience stands out to me because that's how she was. She taught me from a young age to not discredit myself and not forget the worth of my own value and time. She commanded respect, and it was something that I'll never forget. From that point forward, I was conscious not to minimize the value of myself or any seller.
A tantamount principle in our own sales training today is to make it an equal equation. It's not a “put the prospect on a pedestal” arrangement. This is a peer-to-peer interaction with shared and equal value and exchange of time.
Another one would be from my executive vice president, Tom Peters, who I had the privilege of reporting to when I was a young sales manager. I was at a point in my career when I was really afraid of failing because I wasn't just carrying my own career, I was now managing eight other people for the first time. I felt the weight of their career in my hands and that was almost crippling to me because I am a perfectionist by nature. I had a sense of urgency to impart that on everyone else and I was just so hungry for their success. I felt immense pressure to deliver for them. I just remember telling Tom that I wasn’t ready for this. I still don't know enough. I'm still not good enough. He just said to me, “Ashley, you're enough. Take the faith. I have the faith. Take it for yourself.”
That stays with me because I would never have felt ready. That kind of faith from leadership that gives you the freedom to fail and fail forward. It means so much. Tom specifically has an unbelievable way of bringing people's best potential out and I feel so fortunate for that.
There's been so many other influences along the way. I think of the likes of Patrick Layton, who's built this unbelievable managed IT division with over 300 employees here at Impact. It’s responsible for more than half our revenue now as an expert services model. This ability to innovate, fail forward and to dive headfirst is so important to this company.
For my own team, I hope to be an empathetic leader. I hope to put forth a core value of freedom to fail so that people can feel free to innovate, experiment, tinker, and try new things.
And there's a couple other core principles, but it all begins, in my opinion, with truly empathetic leadership, servant leadership and cultivating an environment that you can both care personally and challenge directly, which is the direct page out of Kim Scott's book, Radical Candor.
Those are just a few influences.
Leading with Empathy
Mitch: I love that and it’s so great to hear a story of someone who felt they were thrust into a role they weren't ready for yet, but somebody saw the potential and was willing to stick with them and mentor them.
You mentioned the word empathy a couple of times and being an empathetic servant leader. What does that mean to you? I'll just start off by saying if someone were to ask what's something you've learned and has helped shape you in even most recent years as a leader,
I would say it is to lead with empathy, not assume the worst, and know that you only understand a fraction of what's going on in the day of a team members or even a customer. What does that mean to you?
Ashley: A servant leader, I believe at the core, is elevating the needs of their people, their desires, their ambitions, and their goals. It's understanding that you need to manage to the person individually and understand what makes them tick, what motivates them, and how they prefer to be communicated with. It’s synchronizing all of those things into a unified team management and leadership style that is balanced by principles and not by feelings.
That is in reference to an initiative that we have going on right now under ‘Twin Thieves’ which is a book and professional development program that is being led right now here at Impact. The notion of being governed by principles rather than feelings creates the psychological safety necessary for teams to thrive. There's been a lot of workplace studies showing that psychological safety alone is the single greatest determinator of a successful thriving team, long term. Governing with fear will only yield short term results. It's more hostile and not a sustainable nor an empathetic practice for the long term.
So those are just a few of the principles that stand out to me in servant leadership. Those principles are important to me and I hope that's been demonstrated throughout my career, but I would be remiss to say that it took time to understand. I think there was a maturity that happened over time and perhaps becoming a mother has even softened me a bit. I've been learning the importance of letting go of perfection so that your people can fail productively, fail forward, and learn and do for themselves.
It's all a journey. So those are a few of the elements that stand out to me.
Mitch: Those are some important ones. I don’t think you said it directly, but what you're sort of emphasizing is you've got to be willing to learn from your experiences. Things are changing all the time. I mentioned early on, we've got the width of the generations from one end to the other of who's in the workforce today. I think if you're so dead set in what you're doing, and not willing to engage resources, coaching, or mentorship, it’s going to be a rough and steep learning curve. I'm glad to hear you say that.
I think the last few years have been challenging. I think all the way back to 2019 and that window there where we were working from home and balancing the hybrid expectations while expanding the organization dramatically. There's plenty of opportunities to learn every single day and we've got to be open to those and show our team members that we're willing to learn too.
Staying Curious
Ashley: That's exactly it. A growth mindset and a never stop learning mindset is certainly something that we champion, of course, being the learning team. But curiosity for me is perhaps the most undervalued quality, especially in a leader. Curiosity is a through line to empathy and to servant leadership because you have to carry curiosity instead of making assumptions. When a mistake was made, it could be easy to call it, make assumptions as to why it was made, and perhaps even attribute a characterization or a deficiency as to why that mistake was made.
But curiosity is, to me, an exercise in restraint. The adage from the Twin Thieves book is “curious before furious.”
If you bring that mindset to your people, it's amazing how you can create that psychological safety to foster and showcase the healthy tolerance of mistakes. Then you can really get to the bottom of what's going and make more prescriptive calls to action or courses of action based on that. Is this a lack of skill, a lack of will, a lack of effort? What's going on here? For me, this is the most important quality that oftentimes is overlooked.
Achieving Work-Life Harmony
Mitch: I completely agree. We've talked a lot about work and leadership and thank you for your valuable insights there. What does Ashley do outside of the office? What do you do to kick back, relax, and disconnect?
Ashley: I am wholly and unapologetically immersed in the wonders of toddlerhood. I have a three and a four-year-old and I'm also a stepmom to an amazing 11-year-old boy who's our leader of the pack. That is my happiest place. I think it's given me such a sense of wonder and such a sense of presence. I don't want to just spend the rest of your podcast talking about my kids. No one wants to hear that.
Mitch: It's okay if you do. I think it’s important to recognized that we all have a work life harmony that we're trying to achieve, and we have priorities that sometimes overlap and conflict even. I think it's important to just be honest about where those are for us.
Ashley: Right! In fact, our VP of talent acquisition and a partner in the company, Cynthia, helped spearhead an initiative around ERGs and women at Impact were one of the first and it's been a wonderful resource. We participated in a panel where I spoke briefly about the fallacy of work-life balance and even that phrasing alone assumes a bit of a zero-sum game, like one is robbing the other and you're constantly teetering on a scale. That is a recipe for disaster for me and so harmony is the word I love to use because work and life must be integrated.
For me, Impact has always been this energetic and fun and family-like environment, and so many core friendships and even marriages have been built here, but I would also say in my young career it was a beehive of social activity.
Now I want to be home. I love getting to do what I do here at Impact. It's given me such a purpose when I'm here to fill my days with purpose-driven work and to love what I'm doing here. But now I'm just as happy, filled, and fueled by getting to spend my off time at home, disconnected, and on the floor chasing my kids. That's just the most important time to fuel me for what I could then bring to the office the next day.
Whether that's putting them in the stroller and trying to go for a run or fit in some exercise or just playing, puzzles and coloring, it's what fuels me. Beyond that, I am trying to find my way to the mat more. I am most inspired by our director of L&D programs, Kendra. When she's not at impact, she is working at three different yoga studios, so she's superhuman. She's started to spark this sense of intention that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, which was always my mindset. She's really helped me incorporate this philosophy that just find your way to the mat. It could be five minutes. You don't even have to move, it can just be breath work. But give yourself five minutes of movement as a gift. I have been slowly incorporating more of that by just keeping a yoga mat under my bed so when I wake up, I just pull it out and give myself that small gift. Not everything has to be all or nothing, and that’s been another learning lesson in life.
Mitch: Exactly, just making time amongst the all the “free” time that you have. Three, four and 11 are busy ages. I'm sure you get plenty of exercise chasing them all around. So lead with empathy, be curious and find your way to the mat.
Ashley: That's it!
Mitch: Those are some great bullet points for us to close out with. Ashley, we've taken all the time that we've committed to today. It's been so enjoyable to hear from you and to learn more about how you think about things. And congratulations again on the recent recognition you received. It's well deserved. Thank you again so much for making time to join us today. I really appreciate it.
Ashley: Thanks so much, Mitch.
This has been Great Conversations, a business podcast from GreatAmerica Financial Services. We hope you found some helpful takeaways from this episode as you're charting your own leadership journey. We'd love to hear your feedback for future episodes. Reach out to us on Facebook and LinkedIn, or learn more at our website. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time for more GreatConversations.
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