Author: CIO Times

As professionals, we are surrounded by an innovation-focused economy. We come across business leaders who adopt several different measures, like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). These are visionaries who embrace change management and are flexible enough to experiment. They do not want to “fit in.” Such a stand-out business leader is Steven Fuller, Group Communities Director, at The IN Group. Growing up in a musical family, his parents and elder brother played musical instruments. He looked up to his elder brother. Steven himself was classically trained in the Piano, Violin, and Trombone. He then decided to continue his studies as a Jazz Trombonist; where he studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. 

He then received an invitation from a close acquaintance who was a professional drummer to rehearse with a promising new pop artist. What started as a single collaboration quickly evolved into years of global touring, performing in stadiums and on main stages at world-renowned festivals, as well as contributing to albums and singles that reached number one on international pop charts.

Following the global financial crisis in 2009, he made a strategic career transition by pursuing teaching qualifications. He went on to teach in both mainstream and special educational needs schools, eventually serving as Director of Music and Performance in 2015.

While he found teaching deeply rewarding, Steven was eager to explore new avenues beyond education. This led to an introduction by a friend to James Cox, now CEO of BioTalent (part of The IN Group), who introduced him to the world of Quality Assurance within the Life Sciences sector. Since then, Steven has specialized in supporting clients across the globe with their life sciences needs, combining his diverse professional background with a passion for excellence and innovation.

Equity Catalyst

During the pandemic, Steven took time to reflect on both his professional and personal experiences, particularly the way organizations were engaging with global clients and the perceptions held by both employers and the diverse talent they sought to attract. 

He asserts, “Due to lack of representation across STEM subjects, and from my educational experiences, I founded Race in STEM, which targets how to drive equity for people of colour in STEM careers.”

What began as a series of insightful podcast interviews featuring industry professionals has since evolved into a global initiative. Today, Race in STEM has grown into a recognized platform that delivers keynote speeches at international conferences, facilitates coaching and leadership workshops, and collaborates with organizations to develop practical toolkits that promote inclusion. Under Steven’s leadership, the platform continues to catalyze dialogue, awareness, and meaningful change, driving greater recognition, understanding, and opportunity across the STEM landscape.

Inclusive Leadership

Steven defines true equity and inclusion as a shared responsibility that begins with leadership and extends across every level of an organization. He believes it is achieved through constructive dialogue, honest reflection, and the courage to challenge existing norms in a way that fosters learning rather than defensiveness. For him, equity is not simply about representation; it’s about cultivating an environment where diverse perspectives are heard, valued, and acted upon.

In both business and education, he emphasizes the importance of an inquisitive mindset, one that encourages curiosity, empathy, and open discussion without fear of judgment. He believes that senior leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping this culture by setting clear expectations, modeling inclusive behavior, and creating the psychological safety needed for meaningful conversations to take place.

True inclusion, in his view, is built through consistent investment in awareness, education, and support. When leaders actively champion these principles, organizations can move beyond policy to create environments where equity becomes not just an initiative, but a lived experience for everyone involved.

Community-Driven Inclusion

Steven believes that the foundation of meaningful DEI progress begins within communities, as they represent the true future of talent. He views community engagement as the bridge between awareness and action, an essential driver of lasting cultural transformation across industries.

From his perspective, senior leadership teams, HR professionals, and talent acquisition specialists play pivotal roles in shaping that change. Their influence extends beyond policies and programs; through everyday visibility and decision-making, they help define the cultural dynamics of an organization. By championing inclusivity at the recruitment stage and ensuring diverse voices are represented throughout the employee journey, these leaders set the tone for equitable growth.

For Steven, community and leadership must work hand in hand because creating meaningful DEI change is not just about hiring differently, but about fostering environments where people feel seen, valued, and empowered to contribute authentically.

Evolving Leadership

Steven’s journey across industries from the world of music to the life sciences has shaped a leadership philosophy grounded in accountability, empathy, and continuous learning. Each professional chapter has offered distinct challenges and rewards, reinforcing his belief that adaptability and patience are essential qualities for any effective leader.

He approaches leadership with a mindset of curiosity and humility, prioritizing understanding before influence. For him, true leadership is not about authority, but about listening deeply, learning constantly, and creating space for others to grow. He recognizes that no leader is ever completely growth is a continuous process shaped by experience and reflection.

When it comes to community building, Steven believes success lies in genuine connection and open-mindedness. People bring their own emotions, perspectives, and lived experiences to every interaction, and he sees it as a leader’s responsibility to meet them with empathy and respect. By fostering trust, valuing diverse viewpoints, and remaining inquisitive, he has built communities where collaboration and shared purpose thrive.

Empowered Communities

As Director of Communities at The IN Group, Steven approaches collaboration with underrepresented communities as both a responsibility and a privilege. He believes meaningful engagement begins with creating spaces where people feel seen, heard, and empowered to contribute authentically. Under his leadership, The IN Group partners with several community-led initiatives that focus on amplifying the voices of those who have historically been overlooked, ensuring that inclusion is woven into the organization’s culture, not treated as a separate effort.

Steven views community engagement as more than corporate social responsibility; to him, it’s a long-term investment in people and potential. Through collaborative programs, mentorship initiatives, and educational partnerships, his work helps create opportunities that span from early education to executive leadership levels.

By fostering genuine dialogue and building bridges between individuals, institutions, and industries, Steven ensures that every interaction reflects mutual respect and shared purpose. His vision is to transform community collaboration into a cycle of empowerment where today’s emerging talent becomes tomorrow’s leaders, continuing the mission of representation and inclusion across every level of business and society.

Bridging Inequities

Steven believes that the challenges surrounding racial equity and representation in STEM begin long before individuals enter the workforce; they start in schools. He emphasizes that early awareness and encouragement in STEM subjects are crucial, yet many students from diverse backgrounds face subtle bias that shapes their educational paths. From his own experience, he recalls being naturally gifted in music and encouraged to pursue it, while his deeper interest in English Literature and Engineering received less support. Although these subjects required more effort and understanding, they represented his true passion, one that could have flourished further with the right guidance at a pivotal stage in his academic journey.

He notes that this early bias often echoes later in professional environments, where systemic gaps persist in leadership representation and equal opportunities. True change, Steven suggests, demands that leaders intentionally evaluate their workforce composition and create pathways that support inclusion at every level. He highlights several key approaches leaders can implement to foster lasting equity and representation across industries:

• Recognizing transferable skills from other sectors that bring new perspectives and innovation to STEM roles.
• Investing in apprenticeships to create accessible entry points for diverse talent.
• Empowering talent acquisition teams to understand business needs while prioritizing inclusivity and long-term goals.
• Providing continual coaching and mentorship for all employees, ensuring equitable professional growth opportunities.

Steven’s perspective underscores that progress in racial equity is not achieved through isolated initiatives but through consistent, intentional actions that begin with education and extend into executive decision-making.

STEM Impact

This year, Steven collaborated with a global engineering company seeking to create a programme for their internal professionals to deliver STEM education to students ranging from age 7 through university. Leveraging his community network, he facilitated a partnership with Google at their London headquarters, where 15 students were invited to pilot and contribute to educational materials. This initiative has since opened pathways to job opportunities, apprenticeships, and further projects across the company’s global locations.

Through his work with Race in STEM, he also partnered with a privately owned global manufacturing company aiming to establish a presence in three new U.S. states and recruit 250 employees. By connecting both the company and his community network, he played a key role in identifying top talent, enabling individuals to explore new career opportunities and advance professionally.

Consistency is Key

Steven observes that STEM is set to evolve rapidly, with growing opportunities for talented individuals who bring niche ideas and creative perspectives. He emphasizes a mindset focused not on failure but on continuous improvement. Educational institutions are increasingly working to make STEM subjects more relatable, connecting them to everyday activities and practical applications, which he believes will play a critical role in shaping the next generation of innovators.

Impact Through Inclusion

Steven measures impact both within his corporate role and through initiatives like Race in STEM, primarily through feedback, which indicates how effectively goals are being met with the people they engage. He aims for 90% of participants to experience a positive impact and for 90% to learn something new.

As a speaker and facilitator, he emphasizes that many individuals underestimate their ability to drive change. He believes that inclusion, collaboration, and transformation allow people to enhance their existing skillsets and develop new capabilities. In today’s rapidly evolving world, adapting through these principles is essential.

For emerging professionals looking to champion diversity and inclusion in traditionally underrepresented sectors, Steven advises combining passion with awareness. Observing the existing environment, recognizing those who have paved the way, and understanding global sensitivities are crucial. By making subtle, thoughtful interventions, professionals can achieve meaningful and lasting impact.

 Aiming for Equity  

Steven’s legacy would be to provide equity with opportunities. He also wants to create an understanding and awareness by inculcating inquisitiveness. He wishes to witness diverse and inclusive companies scaling high through not only appearances but through thought leadership. 

A market launch strategy is all about turning ideas into real, measurable impact. Leaders who excel focus on deeply understanding the market, identifying opportunities early, and empowering their teams to act with confidence. By combining clear messaging, smart timing, and adaptable strategies, they turn plans into tangible results that resonate with customers. When speaking of go-to-market strategy, we cannot miss out on the name Markus Marsch, Global Head of Go-To-Market Execution @SAP. When teams move together with purpose, businesses don’t just enter markets; they make a meaningful impact, driving growth, building loyalty, and creating value that lasts. He is the epitome of a seasoned professional in the go-to-market strategy arena — a leader whose thinking increasingly extends beyond the boardroom and into a more personal, public narrative he openly shares.

Dual Roles

His career has spanned global roles across SAP, from strategic operations and value experience to product learning and now global go-to-market execution, shaped by a series of pivotal experiences. It began long before SAP, in an environment few would associate with future global technology leadership. At Aliaxis, he mastered the fundamentals of operations, S&OP cycles, planning, and manufacturing complexity, gaining the grit that comes from real supply-chain work and an operational DNA that continues to guide his leadership decisions.

A key turning point came while implementing ERP systems in China, where he learned cultural humility, adaptability, and the importance of earning people’s belief in technology through empathy, communication, and persistence. Joining SAP marked another inflection, offering him the chance to build, scale, and modernize global organizations across learning, strategy, and go-to-market execution, while observing firsthand the approach of senior leadership. Here, he was empowered to challenge norms, accelerate shifts to cloud and AI, and redefine how employees and customers are equipped for the future.

Today, his most defining moment is unfolding: stepping away from the security of a global executive role to build his own SAP consulting business while preparing for his first professional MMA fight. Rather than keeping this transformation private, Markus is intentionally documenting the journey in real time — sharing the physical, mental, and professional realities of reinvention on Instagram under @marsch.mma. Though seemingly different, both pursuits are driven by the same philosophy: discipline, ownership, and the courage to bet on oneself — a testament to a career that continuously blends bold ambition with grounded experience.

Execution Mastery

As the Global Head of Go-To-Market Execution, he defines a modern, effective GTM framework for a global technology organization during an era of cloud transformation and AI-driven expectations as customer-backwards, data-first, and execution-obsessed. Cloud transformation eliminated the luxury of long sales cycles, heavy implementations, and post-go-live silence. Today, value must be realised continuously, measurably, and predictably.

AI further raised the bar with near-instant expectation cycles. His approach centers on three principles: radical simplicity to eliminate friction and unify teams; closed-loop value cycles that feed data back for improvement; and human-plus-AI orchestration, where AI scales precision and humans drive trust, creativity, and courage — the same balance of structure and adaptability that defines both his leadership philosophy and his training for the cage.

Skill Growth

Having previously led Product & Solution Learning worldwide, he approached the challenge of continuous learning, upskilling, and capability development for SAP’s vast global workforce with a clear focus: it wasn’t about teaching more, it was about teaching what mattered most, at the right moment, and ensuring learning stayed at the top of decision makers’ agendas.

He centered the approach on three pillars:

1. Personalization at scale – Leveraging AI to create learning paths tailored to role, skill level, performance data, and project history, with learning embedded directly into the tools, platforms, and decision points employees use every day.
2. Modular, bite-sized learning – Recognizing that in cloud environments, knowledge has a half-life measured in months, not years.
3. Learning alongside peers – Emphasizing that learning in a dedicated environment with peers, guided by experts, remains the most valuable way to make learning stick and foster lasting communities.

Execution with Rigor

His early foundation at Aliaxis, working on SIOP cycles, ERP implementations, and supply-chain projects, profoundly shaped his leadership style in a technology-driven environment. It instilled two core principles that continue to guide him today:

• Respect for complexity – Operations teaches humility. He learned early that even the most elegant strategies can collapse without disciplined, meticulous execution.
  • Bias for action – Handling physical products meant delays had real financial consequences. That urgency became embedded in his leadership DNA.

Even now, in cloud and AI-driven environments, he carries the same operational rigour: clear processes, measurable outcomes, and a firm belief that execution remains the ultimate measure of success — a standard he now applies publicly as well, holding himself accountable to progress he openly shares with a growing audience.

Strategic Versatility

From operations and supply chain to product learning, strategy, and GTM, his career has bridged multiple disciplines, and the leadership qualities that enabled his success across such diverse domains have remained consistent throughout. Four qualities, in particular, have carried him through every shift:

• Beginner’s Mindset – He never assumes he knows enough to stop learning.
  • Pattern Recognition – He connects insights across worlds, from supply-chain planning to cloud GTM to AI-driven learning.
  • Courage to Reinvent – Reinvention, for him, is no longer episodic but continuous. It’s the same force that drives him into the octagon and fuels his “From Boardroom to Octagon” philosophy — a transition he transparently chronicles on Instagram (@marsch.mma), exposing the discipline, doubt, and resilience behind the scenes.
  • The Power of Getting Started – He believes one of the biggest risks in large-scale transformations is getting lost in slides, setups, and alignment calls. Starting early dramatically increases the likelihood of hitting the target.

Defining Milestone

Yet the milestone likely to define his legacy most is the one he is pursuing now: stepping away from the security of a global executive role to build his own business while preparing for a professional MMA fight. This phase reflects what he believes leadership truly demands: courage to enter uncertainty, discipline to rebuild from the ground up, ownership of the next chapter, and a refusal to become static.

It may appear unconventional, but reinvention rarely follows convention. In business, many speak about strength and delivery, yet reality often tells another story. In MMA, nothing can be concealed; performance must be precise, without excuses. By choosing to share this journey openly on @marsch.mma, Markus removes the last layer of abstraction — making reinvention visible, measurable, and real.

Reinventing Global Leadership

Above all, he intends to live in alignment with purpose. His aim is to build things that matter and become someone his future self would respect. For Markus, leadership has never been defined by job titles; it is defined by movement, growth, and courage. The next chapter is not an extension of his career. It is a reinvention he is willing to live — and show — in public.

Read the live digital edition now – The Most Iconic Business Leaders Shaping 2026

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.

1. 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.
2. Cultural Resonance:
   Any framework must adapt to the many cultures across geographies, ensuring people everywhere feel included, ignited, and represented.
3. 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.