Amazon's Mariangela Marseglia on Rising by Lifting Others

Mariangela Marseglia has spent 15 years climbing through Amazon, and she has arrived at a simple conviction about what to do with the altitude. Be deliberate about lifting others as you rise, she says, a line that doubles as a summary of how she thinks leadership should work. Now vice president of Amazon European Stores, she treats the reach that comes with the job less as a reward than as a set of doors she is expected to hold open for the people behind her.

Her own ascent gives the idea weight. Marseglia joined Amazon around 2011 and spent the years from 2018 to early 2025 as vice president and country manager for Italy and Spain before moving into her current continental role in March 2025. Each step up, in her telling, meant giving something up rather than simply adding to a resume.

Learning to be a beginner again

Every transition, she says, required her to deliberately unlearn something, to resist the temptation of expertise and start again as a beginner. It is an unusual thing for a senior executive to celebrate, the deliberate surrender of hard won mastery, but she frames it as the price of staying useful. Her career before Amazon, which ran through PricewaterhouseCoopers, Unilever, and Mars, gave her plenty of expertise to shed along the way.

That comfort with discomfort is central to how she operates. She describes a willingness to be uncomfortable, to walk into the room where she is the least experienced person and treat that as a privilege rather than a threat. The posture keeps her learning, and it quietly models for younger colleagues that not knowing everything is a normal part of moving up rather than a disqualification.

Access, not talent, is the barrier

Marseglia is pointed about why so few women reach the top, and she rejects the idea that ability is the bottleneck. Talent is not the limiting factor for women in leadership, she says. Access is. Sponsorship is. The distinction matters to her, because it moves the responsibility away from the women who are overlooked and onto the leaders who decide who gets seen, backed, and promoted.

She tries to be that kind of backer herself, and she does not pretend the effort is evenly distributed. I invest time in this disproportionately, and I am transparent about that choice, she says of the mentoring and sponsorship she offers. It is a rare admission from a corporate leader, that lifting others is not a side project squeezed in around the real work but a deliberate allocation of scarce hours.

The platform she is working from is substantial. Amazon has become a significant presence in Luxembourg, where it employs more than 4,250 people drawn from over 100 nationalities and says it has added 8.1 billion euros to the country's economy since 2010, generating an estimated 0.73 euros of extra value for every euro invested. For Marseglia, numbers like those are the backdrop to the more personal project she keeps returning to, using each rung she reaches to make the climb a little easier for the next person.