In today’s business landscape, women leaders don’t just bring diverse perspectives—they spark innovation, resilience, and measurable impact. When women step into decision-making roles, organizations thrive with stronger performance, sharper resource efficiency, and a culture of inclusion that fuels growth.
At the forefront of this movement stands Zainab Lakhani, Director of Change Management at United Airlines, a leader whose superpower is boundless energy. She channels that energy into driving agility, breaking barriers, and inspiring teams to embrace change as opportunity. Her leadership is not only about navigating challenges like unequal representation or structural bias—it’s about transforming them into catalysts for change.
Zainab embodies what it means to lead with vision, vitality, and purpose: championing change that is not just managed, but mastered. Her journey into change leadership was never a straight line; it was shaped through real-life experiences, quiet resilience, and the deep belief that transformation only truly happens when it’s done with people, not imposed upon them.
Growing up in poverty with a single mother battling trauma, she learned early that kindness is always within reach, even when everything else feels scarce. Service, giving back, and showing up with compassion became her first lessons in what leadership really means. Later, living with Graves’ disease taught her discipline and grit, powering through invisible battles on days with low/no energy and willpower. These chapters became the biology of her Change-ology: environmental growth, building resilience, lived adversity shaping empathy, and science giving structure to it all.
Human-Centered Evolution
Zainab’s career has unfolded like a shifting kaleidoscope, every industry adding its own color to the leader she has become while shaping her evolution into a digital transformation strategist and change leader. Banking grounded her in discipline and the value of precision. Retail taught her the pulse of customer-centricity, where choices immediately touch real people. Pharmaceuticals brought a sense of rigor and responsibility, reinforcing that transformation is ultimately about lives, not just processes.
Academia nurtured her curiosity and strengthened her ability to turn complex ideas into accessible stories. Aviation revealed scale, safety, and the intricate choreography behind global operations. Technology, at last, became the place where all these experiences intertwined, where human insight powers digital acceleration.
She adds, “The defining experience was realizing that transformation is not about technology alone—it’s about people.”
Every industry showed her that change only takes root when it connects emotionally as much as operationally. That understanding molded her into a strategist devoted to leading digital evolution with humanity at its center.
The Birth of Change-ology
For Zainab, Change-ology reflects her philosophy and practice of human-centric transformation, shaped by what the question highlights: the foundations, experiences, and science that define her approach. It is:
- Biology Rooted: Through environmental growth and personal struggles, she learned that adaptation is survival, and change remains life’s only constant.
- Experience-Driven: Every industry she worked in showed her that change only succeeds when it connects on an emotional level.
- Science-Backed: Prosci provided the structure to validate and scale what she had long been practicing intuitively.
At its core, Change-ology reduces the “people tax” of transformation, the fatigue, resistance, and disruption individuals face when moving away from the familiar. By weaving empathy, energy, and discipline into the process, she helps minimize disruption and accelerates innovation, organically.
Creative Discipline
Zainab sees strategy as a dance between art and science. Creative vision gives the spark the zest that moves teams to imagine what could be. Data offers the scaffolding, the structure that stops ideas from collapsing under their own weight. She balances both by beginning with storytelling, painting a vivid future that stirs real emotion. Then she anchors that vision in analytics, KPIs, and measurable outcomes.
For shaping organizational roadmaps, she often turns to analogies such as likening change to a symphony. Creativity sets the melody, while data keeps the rhythm steady. This blend helps her inspire yet stay credible, allowing leaders to recognize both the dream and the discipline with shared intent.
Adaptive Strengths
Zainab’s ability to move through industries with agility is rooted in the core strengths that anchor her adaptability and shape how she leads transformation in unfamiliar environments. These strengths include:
- Analytical Thinking: She sees patterns where others see chaos, connecting dots across industries with her Change-ology.
- Emotional Intelligence: She turns complexity into clarity, often using humor, analogies, or cultural references to make change feel humanized and relatable.
- Empathy: She leads with heart, ensuring people feel seen and valued even when times are turbulent.
From lived experience, resilience has been her foundation. Every industry shift was a step into the unknown, yet she learned to reframe uncertainty as possibility. Her CliftonStrengths profile strengthens this futuristic vision, connectedness, and positivity, fueling her ability to thrive in new and unfamiliar terrain.
Along the way, she has been inspired by thinkers who shaped how she leads, weaving their ideas naturally into the way she approaches transformation:
- Brené Brown taught her that “vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.” Those words remind her that leading change calls for honesty, humility, and the willingness to show up imperfectly, but wholeheartedly.
- Jon Levy reinforced the power of connection, reminding her that “our lives are shaped by the people we spend time with.” His insight strengthens her belief that change is never a solo act, it is a collective journey where trust and relationships accelerate transformation.
- Simon Alexander Ong inspired her with the idea that “energy is everything.” Energy is her superpower, the spark that ignites belief, sustains momentum, and transforms resistance into resilience. She channels it not just as enthusiasm but as intentional fuel to help people move through the toughest waves of change.
Agile Change Foundations
In shaping what Agile ECM should look like within a global organization such as United Airlines, she sees three elements as essential for building a successful Enterprise Change Management framework at scale.
- Catalytic Leadership Fusion:
Blending diverse leadership strengths into a powerful force for change; energy with velocity, creating waves of resonance to amplify each other’s impact. - Cultural Resonance:
Any framework must adapt to the many cultures across geographies, ensuring people everywhere feel included, ignited, and represented. - Iterative Coaching:
Change is never a single moment; it is an on-going journey. Coaching at every level helps sustain agility and keeps momentum alive.
At United, Zainab and her team have been championing ECM as a living system, flexible, iterative, and deeply human-centered. The true success factor lies in weaving change into the organization’s DNA, treating it not as a standalone project but as a fundamental way of working.
Employee First
Retail taught her that every interaction matters, and that early grounding now shapes how she approaches employee experience and end-user adoption in the context of what the question highlights about customer-centricity running through her career. She treats employees as the first customer of change; when they feel valued, empowered, and supported, adoption at the end-user level follows organically.
She designs change strategies with empathy, listening to employee voices, addressing their pain points, and celebrating their journey. Just as retail required close attention to the customer journey, she now brings that same lens to the employee journey, ensuring change feels personal rather than imposed.
She says, “My Change-ology is about perceiving challenges as opportunities, never giving up, and always seeking the win/win.”
She walks together with her people to feel empowered rather than disrupted.
- Grace: Honoring the human side of transformation.
- Grit: Powering through invisible battles with discipline.
- Energy: Infusing zest, zeal, and zing into every change journey.
With minimized disruption, faster and organic innovation, the above trivia enables her to empower people forward and extract productivity.
Learnings from the Past
She integrates her experiences by weaving them into a narrative tapestry. She recognizes that orchestrating events sequentially highlights the power of collective energy,
Zainab asserts, “The Masterclass of Full Circle Leadership illustrated that structured growth is not constraint—it’s the choreography of change, where passion meets precision.”
Successful technology adoption begins with a human-centered approach that prioritizes the ‘why’, empathy, and inclusion, while leadership fusion demonstrates the art of influence.
In designing change strategies that resonate both emotionally and operationally, she combines these threads seamlessly. For instance, she might launch a transformation initiative with a storytelling event, follow it with structured micro-learnings, embed technology adoption, and sustain it through leadership fusion.
Value-Based Evolution
Zainab believes that leading change within global aviation relies on a seamless synergy between culture, leadership, and technology. She catalyzes culture evolution by amplifying values such as kindness, gratitude, and resilience, qualities that resonate across borders. Unified leadership ensures these values are consistently infused, while technology becomes the enabler to weave them into day-to-day operations.
To keep teams aligned and inspired through continuous waves of change, she draws on rituals celebrating people, sharing stories of impact, and reminding teams of the larger purpose. Albeit on-going change can feel exhausting, she frames it as progress toward a shared vision, turning it into an energizing experience.
Empowered Change
She has experienced that a recurring challenge across aviation and technology is resistance to change whether stemming from legacy systems, cultural inertia, or fear of disruption.
She adds, “Aviation and technology both operate at high stakes, where mistakes can be costly. This breeds caution, sometimes bordering on paralysis.”
She addresses this by reframing change as empowerment rather than disruption. At Sabre, she emphasized culture as the engine of transformation. At Microsoft, she bridged technology adoption with strategic value. At United Airlines, she highlights change agility as a form of resilience. Across all her experiences, personified storytelling and empathy have been her most effective tenets for overcoming resistance.
Trusted Leadership
Zainab believes that change management often encounters resistance, especially in high-stakes, multi-stakeholder environments. She builds trust through transparency and consistency, addressing challenges honestly while highlighting opportunities. Friction is eased by creating safe spaces for dialogue, where leaders can share concerns without judgment.
She shares, “To ensure leaders effectively champion change, I leverage storytelling to connect change to their personal values and organizational legacy, turning their potential into purpose.”
When leaders see themselves as protagonists in the transformation story, they naturally become its most passionate advocates.
Future-Focused
At Microsoft, Zainab bridged the gap between technology enablement and long-term strategic value by shifting conversations from features to futures. While technology was the starting point, she focused on connecting the dots to show how it drives growth, resilience, and innovation.
She shares, “I used analogies to make this tangible—for example, comparing cloud adoption to building highways for future traffic, supercharging the why.”
This approach helped clients see beyond immediate enablement to long-term value creation, ensuring adoption was not only technical but also strategic and human-centric.
Unified Transformation Approach
Zainab believes that modern transformation demands cross-functional collaboration with change harmonics. She relies on frameworks like Prosci for structured change and agile ceremonies for iterative collaboration, while emphasizing that personified experiences with empathy and storytelling are just as important.
She harmonizes perspectives by creating a shared language, using metaphors that resonate across functions. For instance, she describes transformation as a relay race, where engineering, operations, customer experience, and leadership each carry the baton. This metaphor fosters unity, reminding teams that success depends on collective effort.
Empathetic Leadership
Zainab nurtures empathy by modeling it, listening actively, acknowledging emotions, and validating experiences. She fosters connectedness through rituals of gratitude, where teams recognize/celebrate each other’s contributions, and give back weekly. Responsible leadership is cultivated by emphasizing legacy, reminding leaders that their actions today shape the culture of tomorrow.
In high-pressure digital programs, these practices help prevent burnout and sustain morale. She believes that each of us has a responsibility to elevate culture via recognizing/appreciating our people by connecting their valuable contributions to a larger purpose.
Future Skills of Focus
Zainab radiates energy as she champions the skills that will define visionary leadership in an era of AI, automation, and cloud-driven transformation. With her trademark zest, zeal, and zing, she believes future leaders must cultivate:
- Digital Literacy: Harnessing emerging technologies with confidence to drive informed, impactful decisions.
- Empathy: Infusing human connection into automated systems to keep people at the heart of progress.
- Resilience: Channeling energy to thrive amid disruption and turn challenges into opportunities.
- Storytelling: Inspiring teams with narratives that spark imagination and align vision with action.
- Ethical Foresight: Ensuring technology advances responsibly, serving humanity with integrity.
She emphasizes that these skills, powered by boundless energy, will distinguish leaders who don’t just survive disruption—they thrive, transform, and inspire.
