Afroz D’Mello: The Art of Leading Without Needing to Be Needed

Global Head of Logistics Operations, CMA CGM Group | Marsh CEO Award | ET Inspiring Women Leaders 2025 | 100 Influential Femmes by FoxStory India | Outstanding Women Leadership Award

SheSight Cover Feature | An Expert Voices Conversation with Dr. CeeVee

There is a particular kind of leader who spends two decades in global operations and comes out the other side not chasing bigger titles, but asking a quieter question: what happens in the room after I leave it. Afroz D’Mello, Global Head of Logistics Operations at the CMA CGM Group, is that leader.

With over 20 years of experience scaling high performing organizations across international markets, D’Mello has led complex business transformation, operational excellence, and global delivery initiatives across multiple geographies, helping organizations create sustainable growth through people, process, and innovation. Her work has earned her the Marsh CEO Award, the ET Inspiring Women Leaders 2025 honor, a place among Forbes India’s 100 Influential Femina, and the Outstanding Women Leadership Award. In a wide-ranging conversation on SheSight’s ShePower podcast with Dr. CeeVee, she offered a masterclass in what leadership actually looks like once the theory falls away.

Clarity, Trust, Accountability

Ask D’Mello for the one thing she wants leaders to understand, and she does not hesitate: “Leadership today isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about creating clarity when the answers aren’t very obvious.”

For her, effective leadership rests on three pillars: clarity, trust, and accountability. People need to understand where the organization is going and why certain decisions are being made. They need enough trust and empowerment to make decisions without waiting on their leader every time. And when something goes wrong, and it will, there needs to be accountability that focuses on solving problems quickly rather than assigning blame.

“Leadership isn’t demonstrated when everything is going well,” she says. “You really need to see it when something goes wrong. Do you look for someone to blame, or do you create an environment where people can surface the problem quickly and solve it? That’s probably one of the biggest differences between managing work and leading an organization.”

Trust Is Built on Predictability, Not Agreement

D’Mello’s approach to building trust across teams is refreshingly unsentimental. It is not about everyone agreeing with her. It is about people knowing she will listen, be fair, say what she means, and behave consistently.

“In large organizations, if you wait for complete consensus, you will not have any movement on the work,” she explains. Her method: make sure people understand three things: what are we solving, why does it matter, and what is expected of each of us. Give people space to disagree before a decision is made, encourage them to challenge her openly, and then, once the decision lands, expect everyone to move behind it together.

“I found that people are much more willing to support a decision they didn’t personally prefer when they genuinely feel that their perspective was heard,” she says. Alignment, in her framing, does not mean everyone agrees. It means everyone understands the decision and is moving in the same direction.

Watch the full podcast of Ms Afroz D’Mello with Dr.CeeVee , Founder of SheSight Global on YouTube

An Accidental Leader

D’Mello did not set out to lead. “It was always about capability, it was always about skills,” she says of her early career. Leadership found her as she realized the impact a person can have extends well beyond individual output: “People remember your leadership style. People remember the brand that you create around you.”

Working across multiple geographies and cultures over the years shaped what she now calls her leadership signature, anchored firmly in empathy. “There are operational leaders, there are transformational leaders,” she explains. “Processes don’t get impacted by transformations, it is people that get impacted.” An organization can be transformed brilliantly on paper, but if the people inside it are not genuinely aligned six months later, “all of that fails.”

Her advice to women early or mid career eyeing a leadership path is direct: stop preparing to be the best individual performer and start preparing for responsibility. “A lot of times at the start of my career, it was about me doing my job well,” she says. “But when I became a leader, I learned that I cannot be solving all the problems. It is the delegation that you do. You have to create people who start understanding the basic gist of the business, who start understanding the problems like you understand them.”

Growth, she is careful to note, was never a straight line for her. “Not everything was like a bed of roses,” she says. “A lot of times I’ve had to retrospect, I’ve had to rethink my strategies, I’ve had to understand cultures a lot.” The destination can stay fixed, she says, but the route to it has to remain fluid.

Operational Leadership Versus Transformational Leadership

D’Mello resists ranking one form of leadership above the other, arguing organizations need both in equal measure. “An operational manager asks, how do we do this better. A transformation leader would ask, should we still be doing this in this way at all,” she says. Transformation, in her view, requires challenging assumptions that may have worked perfectly well for years.

What twenty years in transformation work taught her is that success is rarely about the plan itself. “Transformation isn’t a PowerPoint, a new system, or a project plan. You can implement everything perfectly on paper and you can still fail,” she says. “Real transformation happens when the organization starts working, thinking, and making decisions differently, even after transformation programs have ended. A project changes a process. Transformation changes the way an organization thinks and operates.”

She is equally candid about the cost of change fatigue. Decisions made without enough context, she says, rarely stick. Organizations end up reworking the same strategy repeatedly, and leaders need to stay cognizant of how much churn a team can actually absorb.

Leading Across Cultures

Much of D’Mello’s career has unfolded across continents, and she is candid about how differently leadership travels. “When we say the word global, we automatically think that everything needs to be uniform,” she says. “But it rarely works that neatly. Different cultures communicate differently. Some challenge you openly, some won’t. Silence can mean agreement in one culture and discomfort in another.”

Her working principle: be consistent about the destination, but stay fluid about the route. Control does not scale across global teams, she says, so the job becomes building a strong leadership layer beneath you, giving them context and decision rights, and then genuinely trusting them to act on it.

One line from the conversation stood out as a quiet challenge to how most organizations actually operate: “Proximity should not determine visibility. The people sitting closest to the leader shouldn’t automatically get the greatest opportunity or recognition.”

Building trust across dispersed, multicultural teams, she adds, comes down to predictability, a willingness to agree to disagree, and genuinely listening to the most junior person in the room, even when they are challenging you directly.

Innovation Without Execution Is Just an Idea

On the AI moment every industry is currently navigating, D’Mello resists the hype cycle. “Organizations sometimes create a very false choice between innovation and execution,” she says. “Innovation without execution is just an interesting idea, but execution without innovation eventually makes an organization irrelevant.”

Her counsel to leaders: resist adopting technology simply because everybody is talking about it. Start with the business problem. What are we trying to solve? What becomes faster, better, or fundamentally different because of this technology? Pilot something, learn quickly, measure the outcome, and only then scale what works. “Technology should enable the strategy. It should not become the strategy.”

Developing the Next Generation of Leaders

D’Mello is unusually direct about a gap she sees across organizations: senior leaders who stay so focused on solving today’s problems that they neglect building tomorrow’s leaders. Her advice to anyone climbing the ladder is blunt: “Stop preparing for titles and start preparing for responsibilities.”

“As you become more senior, leadership becomes increasingly less about what you can personally accomplish and more about what happens because you were there,” she says. “Did you build stronger people? Did you leave behind a better organization? Did people become capable of making decisions without you?”

She warns explicitly against building a career on being indispensable. Being the person who knows everything and solves every problem can feel valuable in the short term, she says, but it can also be exactly what prevents someone from progressing to the next level. “Your job as a leader is ultimately to bring and build capability, not dependency.”

Staying Curious, Twenty Years In

For D’Mello, learning is not a phase that ends once a certification is earned or a title is secured. Early in her career, she chased certifications for the credential itself. Over time, she came to see many of them as checkboxes. “When I interview people and ask about a certification they’ve done, the moment I ask a detailed question, how did you manage this risk or this scenario, they start fumbling,” she says. “If a certain topic does not relate to your workplace, don’t waste your time and your money getting a certification that’s going to be useless over a period of time.”

What matters more, she says, is staying genuinely curious about the market, the competition, the geopolitical backdrop, and the shifting expectations of a multigenerational workforce. As a mother raising a Gen Alpha child, she says she often learns as much from her son and her younger team members as she does from any formal source. “It’s about the curiosity that you put in to learn, and the humbleness that you need to have to unlearn at the same time.”

Claim the Seat at the Table

When the conversation turned to being one of few women in the boardroom, D’Mello did not offer a polished answer so much as an honest one. The lump in the throat, she says, does not disappear with seniority. “I would have that lump in the throat even then. But the key is preparation. How well do you read the room.”

Reading the room, for her, is a discipline. “Tell them what they want to listen to, not what you want to tell them,” she says. Too often, presentations become one-way downloads of information rather than a message that actually lands. Leaders need to know who is in the room, what their agenda is, and be adaptable enough to shift course mid-conversation when the cues change.

Her advice to women stepping into leadership is unambiguous: claim the seat at the table. Do not wave someone else forward into the chair closest to the decision makers. Do not, when accepting recognition, deflect every ounce of credit to everyone else in the room. “Say thank you. Be proud of your own accomplishments.” And make full use of the leadership development programs, coaching, and training that organizations increasingly offer. “Don’t stay behind. Don’t undermine your capability.”

The Legacy Question

D’Mello closes the conversation on the idea that has clearly shaped her most: leadership is not measured by how many people need you, but by how many people become better because they worked with you.

“We need to build something that does not need us in order to survive,” she says. “Did you create an environment where people can disagree with you? Did you leave behind capability rather than dependency? Did you make the organization stronger than you found it? Ultimately, leadership isn’t about how many people need you, it’s about how many people become better because they worked with you.”

It is a fitting note for a leader who has spent two decades learning that the most powerful thing you can build is not your own indispensability, but everyone else’s readiness to lead without you.

“If I can leave every role having built stronger people, stronger leaders, and a stronger organization,” she reflects, “I think that’s a legacy worth having.”

-Afroz D’Mello

This is the kind of leadership SheSight exists to spotlight: quiet, deliberate, and built to outlast the person who led it.

This interview was originally featured on SheSight Magazine’s ShePower Special Podcast. For more inspiring stories of women breaking barriers and creating change, visit our podcast series.

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