Author: CIO Times

Artificial Intelligence transformation leaders are redefining how modern businesses operate, innovate, and compete. These visionaries, spanning executives, technologists, and data strategists, are not merely implementing AI tools; they are reshaping entire corporate ecosystems. One such visionary leader is Jessica Minghinelli, Director, Operational Excellence & AI Transformation. When reflecting on her dynamic career across industry giants such as Xerox, Google, and Salesforce, she highlighted how each chapter has uniquely shaped her philosophy on operations, leadership, and innovation, evolving from operational discipline to digital agility and ultimately to strategic transformation.

At Xerox, she built a strong foundation in operational excellence, mastering Lean Six Sigma, Systems Thinking, and ITIL principles to drive measurable and sustainable outcomes across large-scale environments. This experience instilled in her a belief that structure, discipline, and operational rigour form the bedrock upon which innovation can thrive. To her, efficiency extends beyond speed; it is about creating intelligent, repeatable systems that empower people to perform at their best.

Her tenure at Google deepened her understanding of how to scale creativity within an ecosystem defined by experimentation, data, and hypergrowth. She observed that structure and innovation can not only coexist but also reinforce one another. Jessica believes the most effective operations are those that are almost invisible, seamlessly supporting creativity and connection without becoming a constraint.

Over her nine years at Salesforce, Jessica’s leadership in global operational transformation marked her most profound evolution. She witnessed how technology, when infused with empathy and purpose, can elevate both efficiency and the human experience. Through initiatives that embed automation and intelligence into core operations, her focus remained on culture, ensuring that innovation strengthened trust, transparency, and inclusion.

Collectively, these experiences have shaped her conviction that the future of operational excellence is not purely digital but deeply human. She believes that tomorrow’s leaders will be those who translate data into empathy, automation into empowerment, and innovation into enduring cultural value. 

She shares, “My leadership philosophy recognises that true operational excellence leadership lies in the balance – structure with innovation and data with empathy.”

Empathic Intelligence

In her role leading Global Operations and AI Transformation, Jessica defines human-centred, data-driven service excellence as the intersection of empathy and insight where operational design respects human emotion while being guided by intelligent data. To her, true service excellence begins with understanding people, employees, partners, customers, and users and building processes, programs, and technologies around their real behaviors and needs.

In practice, this approach starts with voice-of-customer analysis and journey mapping to identify pain points and critical moments that define the experience. It then evolves into a cycle of experimentation, blending qualitative understanding with quantitative intelligence such as predictive routing that matches the right experts to specific cases. Automation and AI-driven decisions are always supported by human-in-the-loop mechanisms and defined escalation paths, ensuring judgment and empathy remain at the core.

Operationalising this vision involves equipping teams with role-specific tools, dashboards, and playbooks, while tracking a balanced set of KPIs, including CSAT, NPS, first-contact resolution, and cost-to-serve.

In 2024, Jessica’s teams deployed multiple Robotic Process Automations (RPAs) that generated the equivalent of 8.5 FTEs in recurring capacity redeployed toward higher-value, complex work, resulting in stronger SLA compliance, customer satisfaction, and OKR achievement.

Her philosophy is clear: human-centered automation transforms capacity into capability. When designed intentionally, data and automation amplify rather than replace the human element, enabling people to solve complex problems, anticipate needs, and deliver experiences that build trust.

Global Leadership Resilience

When asked about the strategies she relies on to foster resilience, collaboration, and adaptability within global teams, Jessica emphasizes that effective global collaboration must transcend time zones, cultures, and communication barriers. She believes resilient teams thrive on clarity, trust, shared purpose, and the transparency and direction that strong leadership provides, especially during periods of change and uncertainty.

Her approach is grounded in three core pillars:

1. One Team Mindset & Psychological Safety
   Jessica views a truly global team as one united by purpose, not proximity. She intentionally cultivates inclusion across geographies, ensuring that every voice is valued and that team members are encouraged to surface risks and challenge existing norms. This culture of openness fosters confidence and shared accountability, even in high-pressure environments.
2. Asynchronous Collaboration for Scalable Connection
   She champions the strategic use of asynchronous collaboration tools to minimize meeting fatigue, respect diverse time zones, and accelerate decision-making. This approach ensures that knowledge is captured, accessible, and easily transferred, sustaining momentum without causing burnout.
3. Standardised Work, Localised Execution
   According to Jessica, the challenge in global operations lies not in distance but in variability. Standardized processes, supported by clear governance and local flexibility, create resilience and agility. Through agile capability mapping, her teams can swiftly realign around new priorities or disruptions.

During her tenure as Global Director of Partner Operations at Salesforce, these strategies resulted in a 17% resource optimization while maintaining full performance, demonstrating how resilience and adaptability reinforce each other in practice.

Purposeful Innovation

When discussing the integration of agentic AI and automation, Jessica emphasizes that true technological transformation must remain anchored in human creativity, empathy, and purpose. She believes that while AI can drive precision and efficiency, it delivers lasting value only when it amplifies what makes humans unique—their imagination, compassion, and intent.

She adds, “Sustainable transformation begins when machine precision meets human intention.”

Every automation initiative begins with a clear sense of purpose—why it exists, who it serves, and how it enhances people’s work.

At Salesforce, for instance, when introducing Agentic AI for Partnership Letters, she intentionally limited the initial deployment to the Public Sector. Though a broader rollout could have appeared more ambitious, narrowing the scope ensured meaningful impact—enabling partners and sales teams to respond to RFX faster and with higher quality, thereby accelerating revenue.

Jessica defines this as purposeful innovation impact over optics. Guided by Design Thinking and robust Change Management, she ensures every solution is co-created, ethically governed, and centered on people. To her, technology should never replace humanity—it should amplify it.

Empowered Leadership

When reflecting on how she empowers individuals to unlock their full potential, Jessica explains that true empowerment is not abstract; it is a structured, measurable system rooted in clarity, trust, and accountability. She believes that people perform at their best when they take ownership of their success, and it is a leader’s responsibility to create the conditions for that ownership to thrive.

Jessica’s leadership approach builds freedom within a framework. She defines clear outcomes, equips teams with the autonomy and tools to decide how to achieve them, and reinforces this through transparent metrics, shared dashboards, and consistent alignment on both performance and behaviors.

For her, empowerment becomes tangible when accountability and growth are connected. At the individual level, success is reflected in delivery and cultural contribution. At the team level, it appears through business outcomes and engagement health. And at the leadership level, it is evident in promotion velocity, retention, and internal succession.

During her tenure as Director of Operations, this philosophy yielded measurable results: 36% of her team promoted within 12 months, zero voluntary attrition across multiple transformation cycles, and a 100% Manager Effectiveness score over consecutive years.

She believes that when people feel trusted, informed, and equipped to make decisions, they don’t just achieve goals, they redefine what’s possible. To her, empowerment is the architecture that makes transformation sustainable.

Operational Transformation

When asked how her work in Alliances and Channels Operations (A&C Ops) contributesd to driving operational transformation at a global scale, Jessica explains that A&C Ops serves as the engine that operationalizes Salesforce’s culture of innovation and customer success. Its mission is to transform partner collaboration into capacity, innovation, and sustainable growth.

At its foundation, A&C Ops translates vision into execution through three key levers of operational excellence.

First, it focuses on incentivizing strategic capacity by designing global programs that align partner incentives with certification and specialization milestones. This approach channels investment toward high-growth innovation areas, turning Salesforce’s partner ecosystem into an agile innovation multiplier. Many of these initiatives have achieved remarkable results, delivering up to a 300% year-over-year increase in partner-sourced revenue within just a few quarters.

Second, A&C Ops drives standardization and digitalization for scale by simplifying complex partner interactions through automation within the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system, covering onboarding, deal registration, benefits, and support, to create unified and transparent global operations.

Third, Jessica has championed the embedding of AI into the partner experience. With the launch of Agentforce (Agentic AI capabilities), A&C Ops redefined partner engagement by introducing intelligent, 24/7 automated support that enhances satisfaction, efficiency, and scalability.

These initiatives have positioned A&C Ops as a critical catalyst in scaling Salesforce’s AI and data innovation, earning multiple industry awards in 2025 for excellence in global operational transformation.

Insightful Leadership

When asked about the distinction between data-informed and data-dependent leadership, Jessica explains that this difference defines how resilient organizations thrive in the digital era.

She notes that data-dependent leaders often treat data as a rulebook, reactive, backward-looking, and overly focused on dashboards and metrics rather than the underlying business problem or new opportunities that may not yet have measurable KPIs. In contrast, data-informed leaders use data as a compass, interpreting insights through the lens of business context, empathy, and intuition. While numbers describe reality, she emphasizes, they should never replace judgment.

Jessica outlines three key differentiators that separate the two leadership mindsets:

• Context over Correlation: Data shows what is happening, but experience, inquiry, and empathy reveal why. For instance, while reseller onboarding data once indicated inefficiency, deeper analysis uncovered that excessive customization, not the process itself, was the root cause. Addressing this behavioral issue shortened onboarding by nearly 12 days.
• Data Governance & Integrity: Reliable, standardized, and ethically sourced data forms the foundation of sound decision-making. Without it, even advanced AI models can amplify errors and accelerate poor outcomes.
• Human Discernment: As AI makes analytics more accessible, human interpretation becomes the real differentiator. Exceptional leaders question anomalies, connect analytics to customer truths, and preserve strategic creativity.

For Jessica, true leadership means treating data as dialogue, not just reading the numbers, but reading between them.

Responsible Automation

In her approach to implementing AI and robotic process automation (RPA) responsibly and sustainably, Jessica emphasizes that responsible automation begins with intention. Technology should enhance human potential rather than replace it. To her, automation is not merely an efficiency initiative but a people-driven transformation rooted in trust, ethics, and adaptability.

Her methodology is anchored in three guiding principles:

1. Prioritize Human Impact
   Jessica believes every automation initiative must start by understanding its effect on people. She focuses on assessing how roles and experiences will evolve, committing early to redeploy and reskill employees so they become process owners and advocates of transformation.
2. Build Compliance by Design
   Ethical and regulatory governance, she notes, cannot be retrofitted. Preventative frameworks such as documenting rationale, integrating feedback loops, and monitoring bias create sustainable automation. For autonomous AI, transparency and traceability are essential for trust.
3. Design for Sustained Value
   Long-term adaptability defines true sustainability. She ensures automation remains relevant by tracking both performance and process health through metrics like uptime, adoption, automation rate, and drift.

This philosophy has been externally recognized, with Salesforce earning honors for Revolutionizing Partner Support with AI at the Operational Excellence Awards (May 2025) and the Digital Transformation & AI Awards (June 2025). Jessica’s approach demonstrates that with strong governance, automation becomes a true catalyst for sustainable growth.

Sustainable Transformation

Across her journey from driving process optimization at Xerox to leading digital transformation at Google, and most recently spearheading strategic AI initiatives at Salesforce, Jessica identifies a single unifying principle: evolving systems and people together. For her, transformation is not an abstract ideal but a disciplined, structured practice grounded in operational integrity and scalability.

She believes standardization must precede automation, as technology amplifies whatever it touches, structure or chaos. By stabilizing processes first, organizations ensure that automation scales excellence rather than inefficiency. Every new initiative is assessed through the Design for Six Sigma framework to validate scalability, compliance, maintainability, and long-term stability before rollout.

Jessica also anchors transformation in integrity and governance, embedding Compliance by Design through transparent documentation, decision rationale, and proactive bias monitoring. During her leadership of Reseller Operations at Salesforce, these principles guided a tenfold ecosystem expansion (58% CAGR), establishing a robust data model that enabled automation, saving over 4,000 hours of sales capacity in the first year and exponentially more as the network scaled.

Her commitment to ethical innovation earned her an Ethics Trailblazer recognition from the Salesforce Office of Ethics & Integrity.

Ultimately, she believes sustainable transformation occurs when culture and capability evolve alongside technology. 

She adds, “The real work of an operational excellence leader is to ensure humans remain accountable for outcomes, connecting creativity and structure, people and progress, innovation and integrity.”

Future Leadership

As AI continues to redefine the future of work, Jessica believes that the next generation of operations leaders must be visionary, capable of connecting technology, purpose, and people with equal fluency. She asserts that future-ready leaders will distinguish themselves not only by how they manage change but by how they interpret it, anticipate its direction, and translate it into meaningful progress. 

Quoting Vince Lombardi, she often notes, “Visionary leaders create a compelling picture of the future and inspire others to make it real.”

According to Jessica, tomorrow’s operations leaders will be shaped by four essential competencies, each measurable, cultivable, and critical to sustained success:

1. AI Literacy and Digital Fluency – Going beyond tool proficiency to understanding how AI strategically augments human capability and decision-making.
2. Resilience and Comfort with Ambiguity – The ability to adapt and thrive amid constant reinvention and disruption while maintaining service excellence.
3. Constructive Risk-Taking and Accountability – Innovating boldly yet responsibly, fostering a culture of ownership and psychological safety.
4. Emotional Intelligence and Active Collaboration – Leading with empathy, self-awareness, and cross-functional cohesion within hybrid human–AI environments.

Jessica emphasizes that as AI reshapes the workplace, true leaders will be those who transform change into progress by uniting human insight with digital intelligence.

Ethical AI Leadership

Jessica defines Ethical AI Transformation as the deliberate alignment of AI systems with human values and organizational integrity far beyond a compliance checkbox. In her view, responsible AI is about harmonizing innovation with ethics, ensuring technology enhances rather than replaces the human experience.

As Director of Operational Excellence, she treats ethical AI not as an abstract principle but as a practical governance framework translating moral philosophy into measurable, repeatable business practice.

1. Governance: The Ethical AI Operating Model
   Ethical transformation begins with a robust governance structure:

• AI Ethics Council: A multidisciplinary body representing diverse stakeholders that defines ethical standards, reviews high-risk use cases, and enforces accountability.
• Algorithmic Transparency: Every model must document its intent, data sources, limitations, and bias testing results before deployment.
• Operationalized Fairness: Fairness metrics, such as the Disparate Impact Ratio (DIR), are embedded into development to ensure equity by design.

2. Process: Augmentation Over Automation
   Jessica emphasizes capability enhancement over workforce reduction.

• Job Redesign through Augmentation: Machines should manage the “four D’s” dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous while humans focus on empathy, creativity, and complex problem-solving.
• Closed-Loop Human Oversight: Human feedback loops help correct and retrain models, keeping decision-making grounded in judgment.

3. Culture: Data Literacy and Accountability
   Ethical AI thrives only within an informed and accountable culture.

• AI Literacy for All: Organization-wide education reduces ethical blind spots and builds informed trust.
• Defined Accountability: Every AI-assisted outcome must have a responsible human owner; there is no such thing as an “AI decision.”

She believes the true measure of Ethical AI is not operational efficiency but its ability to amplify human potential. When guided by empathy, governance, and accountability, AI becomes a force for a more equitable and human-centered future.

Continuous Learning Culture

Jessica believes that continuous improvement begins with empathy when individuals see themselves evolving through change, progress becomes both personal and self-sustaining. For her, cultivating a culture of learning and growth within high-performing teams is about designing human excellence with intent.

Guided by Lean Six Sigma principles, she focuses on eliminating the “waste of unutilized talent”, ensuring that creativity and potential are fully engaged. By embedding structured learning into operational capability and prioritizing AI literacy and digital fluency, Jessica transforms apprehension about change into a source of energy and innovation.

She designs hybrid human-technology teams where AI amplifies human contribution, enabling people to reimagine their roles and reskill with confidence. Within this framework, learning is not incidental but systematic, built on clarity, trust, and psychological safety, where mistakes are viewed as data, not failure.

Through this disciplined approach, continuous improvement becomes a measurable and self-reinforcing outcome of an empowered learning culture.

Intelligent Empowerment

Jessica shares, “My vision for AI-driven operations transcends mere efficiency and cost reduction; it centres on enabling growth that amplifies human potential through operational intelligence, workforce transformation, and ecosystem collaboration.”

Operational Intelligence will advance from reactive to self-optimising systems through the integration of Digital Twins, virtual, real-time replicas of operations that continuously analyse internal data, partner inputs, and market dynamics. These models will predict risks, simulate outcomes, and autonomously fine-tune performance, creating adaptive, intelligent value chains. Jessica emphasises the importance of maintaining balance between automation and human oversight in managing such a transformation across global teams.

Workforce Transformation will see AI augmenting, not replacing, human capability. She highlights how AI Agents can expand roles by allowing professionals to act as trainers, validators, and ethical overseers, ensuring technology magnifies human judgment and creativity.

Finally, Ecosystem Collaboration will harness AI to connect federated systems across regions and partners. For Jessica, this vision underscores leadership’s role in establishing trust frameworks and robust data governance, ensuring that global operations not only scale intelligently but also empower people universally.

Read the edition now: Top 5 Directors Shaping the Future of Operational Excellence in 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.