Leadership Beyond Borders: Lessons from Chris Handley’s Global Career
Some people come into your life and change everything. Chris Handley is one of those people for me. He wasn’t just my boss at the largest university hospital in Pakistan—he was the kind of leader who saw potential in people before they saw it in themselves. He was my champion, mentor, and sponsor. He gave me the courage to take risks, push boundaries, and step into leadership with confidence. And it wasn’t just me—Chris has spent decades building diverse teams, empowering people, and creating spaces where different perspectives are valued.
Across industries and continents, he has led transformational change while ensuring that leadership isn’t just about strategy—it’s about people. No matter where he was, he made it a priority to ensure women had a seat at the table and a voice in the room. He didn’t just believe in fairness—he made it happen. He led by example, built teams that thrived, and fostered a culture of trust, encouragement, and growth.
His leadership has spanned countries, industries, and cultures, but one thing has remained constant—his belief in people. I’m honored to share this conversation and the lessons from someone who has built teams, driven change, and empowered others to succeed.
Your Journey to Leadership
You have an impressive career, from leading IT transformations at global institutions to mentoring future leaders like myself. Can you share your journey into leadership in the tech space and what inspired you to pursue this path?
I started out my career by teaching university students the basics of Psychology and attended Graduate School while working because I thought that computers might help me manage the large numbers of students. Computing set my brain on fire with the possibilities for positive change.
In the workplace computing provoked and enabled me to instinctively ask four questions all the time about issues that I came across:
Why is it this way?
How can it be better?
When can it be better?
Who can make this better?
This ”fire” and the four questions drive me to this day.
Tell us about the 'BADdest' challenge you’ve faced—the boldest, most authentic, and driven moment in your career or personal journey. How did it shape your outlook?
Workplace culture is the Sticky-est challenge that I have ever faced and I face it constantly. I had to recognize that I have my own internal culture of my past and my current expectations. Once I admitted that, I had to realize that the new cultures I encountered were valid and to be taken seriously and not to be converted wholesale. Cultures often need to be selectively revised as they face new challenges but not changed based on prior opinion.
Institutions have cultures. Culture is pervasive and people are loyal to their institutional culture in every organization that I have worked.
Culture is emotional and incredibly powerful and whether you are implementing an ERP with new ways of doing business, or ensuring that performance reviews are objective, honest and meaningful or increasing the amount that the organization spends on training and development of each employee, or changing “we can’t have women in software management because women can’t code”, you WILL come up against the culture of the past: “We can’t do that because we have never done that”.
My solution is to learn to pick my spots and accept as much of the new culture that I am meeting as I can while being effective.
And sometimes I have had to speak out where I worked and be known as a disturbing force but first I had to establish that I was trying to increase effectiveness or fairness and not just because I was pushing my culture on top of someone else’s culture.
Championing Women in Leadership
You’ve always been a vocal advocate for women in leadership roles. What sparked this passion?
I came from a very traditional family and was the eldest male child of six and I quickly learned how to take care of very young kids.
In my 20’s, I read that men and women were equal but different and also that rigid gender rules were harmful to both men and women.
I had never thought about this before and it was eye opening. My parents’ generation generally did not agree with that and my understanding continues to evolve. Looking back, I don’t know how I got there but it wasn’t a big shock to me personally.
In the workplace, I found that practices often reflected the culture of the last generation and that women were often in subordinate roles when they often seemed to me equally or more competent than the men that they were helping. Once I realized this reality, I developed an intent to make hiring and promotions competency based and, more directly, by explicitly encouraging women to dream and think big about their careers.
You have always created an environment where I, as a young woman, felt empowered to grow and lead. How did you ensure that women were given opportunities to succeed? How do you think leaders can create workplaces where women and other underrepresented groups feel empowered and valued?
As a leader, I always knew that the ultimate measurement of me was what I created which survived when I left the job. I had two deliverables: the project and the people and, of the two, the second was the most important because it was the most enduring.
A successful technology implementation with an enduring and robust support team who have absorbed the principles and practices has a high rate of survival, initially and ongoing. We call that digital transformation.
A technology implementation with an inadequately trained and experienced resident support team is a brief success embedded in an expensive lesson which will need to be repeated. We call that digital dependency.
I became very focused on developing the competency of the implementation teams and also the transition to solidly educated and empowered support teams. It was obvious that proper staffing with trained and competent professionals was the “secret sauce” for successful implementations.
In my first expat contract, I was surprised to find so few women in the upper ranks of the IT organization, When I investigated, I discovered that women progressed early but, when they got married, they were supposed to live with their husband’s family and it was a matter of family respect to be able to support the new bride so that she would not work. Their careers were truncated.
I tried to create an environment where there was a structured career break which would not prevent upwards progress into management. Looking back, don’t think that I was there long enough to make that happen structurally. However, having those discussions with women individually and in our Women’s IT group, created an environment where women felt comfortable to talk about this issue in their existing and evolving families and so some women started to progress through the ranks by staying in the workplace until pregnancy. These discussions also encouraged women to return to work once they were comfortable with their child-care arrangements.
Leaders can make change in two ways: the most powerful one is to talk about it publicly and discuss various opinions to begin the organizational conversation. The next way, less public but equally essential, is by reinforcing small steps and encourage risk taking by individuals for their hesitant examples to become the norm.
A Mentor’s Influence: Pushing Boundaries and Taking Leaps
You encouraged me to take risks, challenge norms, and believe in my potential as a leader, while staying truly authentic. How do you identify and nurture potential in young professionals? What do you think is the most important quality a mentor can instill in their mentees?
In my experience and practice, a mentee self-identifies if you really pay attention. The best way to see that is to gently offer a path for self-development and see how the person responds. Some hesitancy is normal, and gentle encouragement allows the ambition to be expressed. Crucially, the ambition has to come from within and cannot be pushed from the outside. No intrinsic ambition means no enduring progress.
I don’t think that you can instil a quality, but you can encourage a trait which is there in the person. The trait I always look for is resilience. There is no career that does not have ups and downs and no important lessons can be learned without experiencing failure at some point. Mistakes are not a disaster but a way of learning.
Ambition plus resilience inevitably produces success and both traits need to be resident in the person that you mentor. The mentor can identify, encourage and, very occasionally, offer comfort and support when the workplace can be unreasonably cruel. Mentors are people developers, mentors softly provoke, mentors comfortably challenge and often value the mentees more than they value themselves. Mentors know that “all we have is people” and the mentor must walk that that talk every day.
One of the biggest lessons you taught me was courage—walking into boardrooms with confidence and a clear voice. What does courage mean to you as a leader, and how can others develop it in their own careers?
Courage is taking risks with confidence based on identifiable data, experience, clear communication and resilience. One of my strategies is to encourage colleagues to take risks and view any failures or misses as lessons on the way to being competent. This resilience is a fundamental and lifelong habit which underlies confidence. While some may be born resilient, most of us learn resilience the hard way by getting out of bed the morning after a failure and starting all over again with a little more knowledge and an increasing drive to make today better.
If you do your own research, know the goals of your department and the overall organization, reduce your ideas to simple principles and create a clear plan then your resilience builds on a sound foundation. Now you can operate at a conversation level with board members where you seek their advice and discuss the principles of your proposal to encourage the development of a joint idea rather than simply seeking permission.
Confidence, plus goals, data and simple principles, calmly presented can equalize power discrepancies based on developing a common understanding and mutual respect.
Strength in Diversity and Cultural Insights
You have probably worked in almost every continent—Asia, Africa, Australia, North America, and Europe. How have these experiences shaped your leadership style and strategies?
The more places I worked the more I learned that I still have a lot to learn.
Different cultures showed me what to avoid at first and then taught me how and where to grow. I may have taught some people in other cultures how to identify, plan, budget and implement projects but they taught me that growing up in a homogenous culture often makes for a very narrow perspective.
The more your team members are individually different from each other and from teams in other countries, the more they represent the end user in an increasingly heterogeneous world. Differences in experience make the teams more sensitive to our customers and therefore more effective in the implementations.
I would sum up by saying that building effective multicultural teams teaches you how to invent from the delivery point backwards into the core technology rather than just pushing the technology solutions outwards.
What cultural differences or similarities have stood out to you when managing teams across regions?
Except for the accents and the logos on the coffee mugs, there are more similarities than differences between teams in different countries.
Everybody wants to do the right thing but many team members want to be told what the right thing is.
In some cultures, tech support staff will always do exactly what you ask, even though they know that you are asking for the wrong thing.
In some cultures, people dislike giving negative feedback or disagreeing, even though they know that it is the right thing to do. I ended up thinking that this approach was “Go along to get along.”
When you are managing teams across regions who are jointly inventing / implementing technology it feels like you are walking a tightrope while dancing.
What do you see as the strength in diversity within teams, and how can leaders harness it effectively to drive innovation and success?
The thing I try to remind myself of is the fact that our customers are diverse and can’t always be expected to behave the way that the system, the manual or the consultants predict that they will. Therefore, the diverse and authentic voices within the team are embedded change management and should be encouraged to represent the eventual customers of the project to increase effectiveness of the product.
Diversity can create a creative friction which can stress test a deliverable.
Managers at all levels can become obsessed with their particular vision of success. If freedom of expression is encouraged within and across the teams there is a higher chance of errors being identified during mid-creation rather than remaining hidden until testing or stress testing reveals a weakness which causes re-engineering of the product.
Being open to feedback from a diverse team will deliver a greater quality breadth of feedback for the leader.
What’s Next in Tech: A Leader’s Perspective.
With your extensive experience in IT and leadership, what do you see as the most critical technology trends that organizations should prepare for in the next 5 to 10 years, and how can leaders stay ahead of these changes?
What I am most concerned about is the complex and rapid development of AI within the customer base, the IT industry and within the hacker environment.
I can see AI having some immediate benefits for example, in automating, replacing, augmenting and systematizing the complexity of large project management planning, tracking and reporting tools.
Beyond that, I cannot predict the concrete opportunities and risks. To create a competent awareness and knowledgeable risk taking we need to raise the educational depth and breadth of three groups: the IT staff, the customers of our technologies, and the top three levels of executives in each of our organizations. Each of these three groups needs to heighten their awareness of both opportunities and risks because each of them is a possible significant entry for AI-enabled risk.
Increasingly AI is in the hands of a wider breadth of people in different countries with different perspectives and different motivations. This multiplicity of erratic or invasive random products is harder to predict than the weather since there are global, local and individual winds of risk.
The role of the leader is to be aware of developing trends of the double-edged AI sword and have ongoing conversations about the trends and encourage the beneficial use of AI, such as in Medical Imaging or Diagnostics, while remaining alert to the security risks such as image and speech manipulation by AI.
The behaviour of the leaders is the loudest voice and quiet complacency can be fatal.
Personal Reflections and Inspiration
You’ve impacted countless individuals, including me, through your leadership and mentorship. What keeps you inspired to lead, innovate, and empower others in this ever-evolving industry?
I still love the work. It still sets my brain on fire. There are always new people, products, projects, problems and opportunities. Who would not like such a diverse and active set of challenges? I love being a mentor and watching people develop and catch fire themselves. People development is addictive.
We cannot clearly predict the future with any accuracy, and I find that unknowability both exciting and sometimes intimidating. We cannot know exactly what our problems will be but we can know that we exist to solve these problems, keep our customers safe and serviced and successfully ride the increasingly steeper waves of change.
I love how we jointly strive to understand present practices and how to make them better in a world that is increasing complex, risky, sometimes dangerous, changing at the speed of AI tools and more in need of constant education every day. If this current risk-reward work environment does not set your brain on fire, nothing will.
Tech She Secures is about inspiring and empowering individuals to be courageous and pursue success on their own terms, whatever that may look like. What message or advice would you give to our readers—especially those navigating challenges in tech and striving to define their own paths?
If you want to succeed in tech, find a flavour of IT employment that you love. Simply taking the next step up the career ladder contains all of the risk and little of the benefit. This is why many people try to retire as soon as they can.
Recognize that IT is fundamentally about change, and we are all changing ourselves to keep up and, even more, to develop the enjoyment of our daily work lives.
Recognize that: ALL WE HAVE IS PEOPLE. When we forget this and don’t keep IT employees current our risk escalates proportionally as the humans protecting us become less capable as time passes.
We have a structural bad habit in IT: We don’t train our IT coworkers constantly and strategically and yet these resources are the Creators, Supporters and Protectors of our institutional knowledge.
In most organizations we spend 1 to 3% of our “salary plus benefits budget” on training and education of our IT staff.
In contrast: we spend roughly 20% to 30% every year of the purchase price of our ERP systems on annual maintenance and support costs.
In contrast: we spend roughly 10% to 20% of the purchase price of our hardware every year to vendors for service contracts.
I would love to change this because, to remain current and capable in a rapidly changing IT environment, our IT people need training every year:
1/3 on the tools they use today,
1/3 on the evolving tools that are just now entering the workplace.
1/3 on the soft skills of human relations with their team-mates and with the people we serve, our customers.
Closing Reflections
Some leaders focus on results. The best ones focus on people—because they know that when you invest in people, success follows. Chris, you are that kind of leader. You didn’t just teach me how to navigate boardrooms—you gave me the confidence to know I belonged there. You encouraged me to take chances, challenge the status quo, and step into leadership in a way that felt true to who I am.
Even after all these years, I still carry the lessons you taught me, and I know I’m not the only one. You have shaped careers, built strong teams, and created opportunities for so many people across the world. Your leadership has never been about titles—it’s been about lifting others up, making space for different voices, and ensuring that the next generation is stronger than the last.
To everyone reading this: find the mentors who push you to be better, the leaders who make space for you, and the people who remind you that you belong. And when you’re in a position to do so—be that person for someone else. Leadership isn’t just about what you achieve; it’s about who you help along the way.
Chris, thank you for everything. The world needs more leaders like you, and I’m grateful to have learned from one of the best.
Maliha
Disclaimer: The content on this blog and website reflects a combination of my personal experiences, perspectives, and insights, as well as interviews and contributions from other individuals. It does not represent the opinions, policies, or strategies of any organization I am currently affiliated with or have been affiliated with in the past. This platform serves as a personal space for sharing ideas, lessons learned, and meaningful reflections.
