How can leaders navigate a complex and unpredictable world? Lead with Her 2026 offered essential insights
Duke Corporate Education’s annual Lead with Her conference brought together an impressive roster of speakers and guests to mark International Women’s Month in London. Wide-ranging conversations spanned the power of authentic leadership, the challenges of influencing without authority, and the role of creativity in a world increasingly shaped by AI – alongside celebrations of remarkable initiatives to increase opportunities for women leaders.
Guests enjoyed the stunning setting of The Peninsula, London, with sweeping views of Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, and – fittingly, on St Patrick’s Day – the Irish Embassy. Yet despite the sunshine, the shadow of conflict in the Middle East was inescapable, as Duke CE’s CEO Dr Sharmla Chetty acknowledged. “Behind the headlines and the geopolitics are human stories,” she said. “Families are hoping for stability. Communities are trying to show resilience, and individuals are navigating this ambiguity when their sense of certainty has become more fragile.”
War in Iran has been the latest in a series of disruptive and destabilizing events, she pointed out. “We are seeing economic pressures affecting households across continents. Social divisions are visible in many societies. We are seeing more and more technological changes happening at a pace that our institutions are unable to absorb.”
These dynamics create deep complexity. “What truly defines this moment is not only the scale of these challenges. It is that they are all deeply connected,” she observed. “No nation, organization or leader can operate in isolation. The issues shaping our world are interconnected, which means the responses must be as well.”
Leaders need to convene diverse voices and draw on varied perspectives, said Chetty. “The challenges facing our world today will not be solved by one group alone. They will be solved when we recognize the value of many voices, many perspectives, many cultures.”
Influence without authority
Those opening themes were echoed by panellists throughout the day. Adele Trombetta, senior vice president and general manager for customer experience in EMEA at Cisco – the Platinum Sponsor for Lead with Her 2026 – discussed the challenge of leading across divergent groups operating in complex ecosystems. “With authority, you can command compliance. With influence, you can inspire commitment. That’s a huge difference.”
Deema Alathel, executive director of global strategic initiatives at IBM (and our interviewee in Dialogue Q2 2026) underlined the point. “Influence without authority is built on alignment, trust and shared ownership,” she said. “When teams feel accountable for shaping the outcome, change stops being imposed and starts being driven from within. That’s when execution accelerates.”
Leaders also need to recognize how technology has changed their role. “In the past, a leader had all the answers, but now someone else will know more: AI,” said Alathel. “What will really make the difference is our ability to ask the right questions.”
Trombetta’s advice was to the point. “Give your ego a day off! If we do that, we can create the space and environment for others to shine.” New realities also demand comfort with course corrections. “Don’t be afraid of saying: ‘I’m changing my mind, I’m changing my priorities, because the context has changed and the information I have has changed.’ If you do that, you will be credible and adaptable.”
Investing in women
Transformative investment in women was another enduring theme across the conference. Seema Hingorani, managing director at Morgan Stanley and founder of Girls Who Invest, shared her experiences of opening doors for women in investment management. “Of the roughly $100 trillion invested professionally globally, women manage 2%. Women of color – we don’t even show up in the data,” she pointed out. “That’s not good for business, and not good for societies.”
When founding Girls Who Invest, Hingorani regularly met senior – male – executives. “They all said: ‘Of course we’d want to hire more women, we just don’t get résumés from women. We have a pipeline problem.’ I looked at them and said: ‘Maybe that’s true. We can fix that.’“ In its first ten years, the organization has reached more than 4,000 women – investing in their development and nurturing their ambition through a supportive community.
The conference also heard about the impact of the remarkable #1,000Women initiative in South Africa, via a discussion between Charmaine Houvet, senior director Africa at Cisco and a past board member of the International Women’s Forum of South Africa (IWFSA); Ayanda Mafuleka, CEO of the Finance and Accounting Services Sector Education and Training Authority (Fasset); and Duke Corporate Education’s Angie Naidoo (see Dialogue Q2 2026 for more).
The critical role of funding was highlighted by Dr Sindi Mabaso-Koyana, managing partner at AWCA Investment Holdings (AIH), a private equity firm in South Africa. “Capital is not neutral. It carries the values of the person deploying it,” she said. It is an insight central to AIH’s approach. “We’ve started asking a different question: not just ‘What are the returns?’ but ‘What kind of society is this investment shaping?’”
Finding inspiration
Lead with Her also included an inspiring conversation between Chetty and luxury fashion designer and CEO, Dame Anya Hindmarch. “I’m a great believer that if you do things from a point of passion and curiosity, great outcomes happen. That has to be the best starting point,” she said. Staying humble, curious and keeping common sense as your guide have served as her North Star as a leader, she reflected.
Lady Linda Wong Davies, founder and chairman of the KT Wong Foundation, shared lessons from a career in the arts dedicated to deepening understanding between the West and China. “What drives me is a concept called metanoia – a Greek word meaning a fundamental transformation in how we see the world,” she reflected. Culture and the arts, she suggested, can be powerful catalysts for reshaping our perspectives and, by extension, how we lead.
It was a fitting reflection on the power of dialogue and connection in a fast-changing and uncertain world, where the capacity to transform our worldview is a prerequisite for leadership – and an endorsement of the power of Lead with Her 2026. As Chetty put it: “When people come together with openness, respect and a willingness to listen, something greater becomes possible: not just stronger organizations, but stronger societies.”
Patrick Woodman is editor of Dialogue
