What are the key milestones on your path to leadership?
My path to my current role running innovation management and marketing at Mastercard Labs has been rich. I’ve been privileged to work in a variety of industries and in over 42 countries around the world. The common thread across all of my leadership roles has been a neverending curiosity and thirst for discovering new spaces and building new things. Before Mastercard, I was at Citi Ventures for over 7 years, which was an incredible learning ground. It was there that I began to embark on my innovation management path. I began to source, invest in, and commercialize startups and established an award winning internal incubator program, called Discover10x to create new products and businesses for Citi. Right before I moved from Citi Ventures to Mastercard, I helped establish an emerging technology practice focused on helping businesses and customers understand the impact of emerging technology on their business and future business models.
Prior to Citi Ventures, I helped launch Citi’s social marketing, content marketing, and digital partnerships as a part of the Global Consumer Marketing Group. Before Citi, I worked at a mobile payment and marketing startup in the UK called InternetQ. Prior to that , I ran my own media consultancy for about 8 years, providing brand consulting to countries, working with governments and private companies around the world. I have experienced many leadership milestones throughout my career - from learning how to run a diverse global team, to building and scaling new businesses in emerging areas and navigating challenging business environments through three major crises over the past two decades.
What are the key challenges you have faced as a leader?
Navigating the unknown has been a recurring challenge and very prevalent in the uncertain times of technological change we live in as well as the unprecedented disruption we face in today’s environment. What I have learned – and I don’t think I appreciated enough when I was younger – is that you can't really control where you're going to go, especially when circumstances around you change. There’s a Greek folk poet, Cavafy, and in his poem Ithaca, he writes about the importance of enjoying the journey. Life is going to take you down a path, so rather than being focused on a particular outcome and depressed if the world around you changes, you need to enjoy the journey. That is probably one of the biggest challenges that I see with women and younger talent: they think they have to have to be on a particular path and achieve specific things – get married, buy a house, be in a certain position by a particular time in life. When in reality, being open, adaptive, taking measured risks and being resilient to where the journey takes you can be super enjoyable, satisfying and surprising.
Describe your leadership style / what are your core values as a leader?
I have always been a very proactive person. That probably comes from being a first generation immigrant. As an immigrant, I learned early on that if I wanted to achieve something, I would have to pave my own path and make things happen for myself. Because of that, I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit and respect others with non-traditional backgrounds and experiences. As a leader I build teams that can bring adaptability and a variety of complementary skill sets.
I’m also very inclusive, collaborative and straightforward. I have always valued transparency, rooting in my work in commercial truth. While data and evidence guide our productivity, I am also deeply empathetic and believe in building long lasting human relationships. My transparency and honesty have been crucial in building trust with partners and the teams I lead.
Beyond that, I’m adaptive and flexible. I wear several different hats in my current role at MasterCard. One hat is focused on understanding signals and stimulus from the external marketplace, so that I can help our customers and clients understand where the world is going. The second hat I wear is broader innovation management, where I focus on helping the organization develop the skills and muscles to be able to innovate throughout the organization. The last hat is in new product development for a couple of our Labs product portfolios. As you can imagine, in all those different roles I have to adjust to who I’m working with. Beyond the need to adapt and be flexible, the role is global in nature. So not only is it important to adapt to who I’m in front of, but I also have to understand the local and regional nuance of their culture and way of working.
What advice do you have for women who are trying to establish themselves as leaders?
Surround yourself with mentors and build a strong network. Drawing from my own experience, I’d recommend establishing both an internal and external network. For my external network, I make sure to spend time meeting new people and exposing myself to new things outside of my company to make sure that I don’t live in a bubble. It’s always been in my nature, and the reality of my work is to expose myself to external stimuli and signals, so that I can see and understand from first hand experience how the future is being shaped. I meet with academics, founders, and thought leaders in specific subject matter areas, to help understand different perspectives and inform my own. At the same time, it’s important to cultivate a strong network within the organization that you are a part of so that you are in touch with the pulse of your organization and the leaders who can support your development.
I would also advise to keep your end user in mind. As a leader, it’s important to be open and understanding of what the needs of your end users are and put yourself in the customer’s position as your focus and compass. At the end of that day, it is the end user that guides our work. I keep myself customer focused because it allows me to ground every conversation in what's best for the customer. It helps eliminate internal politics because ultimately that's the true value we’re trying to create.
How would you advise organisations who want to foster diversity and gender equity in leadership?
Culture is everything. If you are looking to create change, it starts and ends with culture. You can try to change it, but if it's just lip service, and it's not something that represents a true belief from the top all the way down, then it is all just lip service. What I love about MasterCard is that we have an incredible culture that permeates from the top down and genuinely advances diversity and gender equity across the company. Our values brought to life through our Decency Quotient and our Mastercard Way guide the way we operate and interact with ourselves as employees and with the world. It is a value system that guides everything we do in terms of how we work with one another and how we focus on our customers, and how we align all of our incentives. Building a culture of innovation or developing any kind change within a large company goes far beyond creating the right processes, because if you don't have the right culture in place to drive that change, it won’t happen.
To drive a greater culture of innovation specifically at Mastercard, we have a number of programs to teach people skills and provide them with opportunities throughout the year. We also host big events and challenges that bring the entire company together, executives and more junior employees alike. Ultimately, the only reason these things happen and are successful is because we believe in them. They are supported by the culture and the outlook is set forth from the very beginning.
In terms of gender equality, we support women in three ways: by creating an inclusive work environment and supporting the development of our talent, by creating products that meet the needs of women and supporting women entrepreneurs globally, and by supporting ecosystem initiatives with other partners who share the same mission. One of the first things we did as a company is to ensure that women are getting equal pay to the dollar. Beyond that, we put programs in place to teach skills such as how to serve on a board of a company to help promote more women in board leadership roles. We also have women leadership development programs, internal mentorship and cross industry mentorship initiatives like the 30% club that connect women in similar levels across different industry organizations so they can mentor and support one another in their roles.
In the broader ecosystem we help support women founders and entrepreneurs with business advice and promote financial inclusion. Through our Start Path Empower program, we have a partnership with USAID to advance women’s economic opportunities and create a more inclusive digital economy for women in Colombia. We also created a dedicated program for pre-funded and seed funded fintechs led by women and minority founders and are aiming to support 10 startups in the first year. We are providing them with support for program operations, ecosystem engagement, startup stipends and increase their visibility. Finally, our volunteer initiatives include partnerships with nonprofits such as Girls4Tech and Black Girls Code, which help set up girls for success through STEM education early on. That is something that other organizations need to do more about, not only for their own organization but for society. What can they do to drive impact beyond their organization?
What's your advice for leaders in times of uncertainty?
How you act now and in the months to come will determine your future. The people you touch will remember how you showed up for them and how you joined them in this journey. Remember that even in the most difficult times, new opportunities surface. Adopt a growth mindset and lead your team to a new arc of growth.
