A Playbook For Authentic Human Leadership

Julie Averill, the CIO behind lululemon’s rapid growth from $2 billion to $10 billion shares in her new book, Chief Impact Officer, a roadmap for executives and technology leaders navigating today's AI revolution and reveals why authentic human leadership is your competitive advantage.

Prior to lululemon, she led omni-channel and digital transformations at Nordstrom and REI, navigating system failures, crises, and the complicated work of integrating technology with business strategy at scale.

“Technology doesn’t transform companies. People do,” says Averill. “AI will amplify whatever leadership exists, strong or weak. The goal isn’t to build better workers. It’s to develop better humans who happen to do extraordinary work because you helped them become more capable, more confident, more fully themselves. That’s what this book is about.”

In the highly personal Chief Impact Officer, Averill pulls back the curtain on what happens when you try to transform a company. This isn't a polished case study or a consultant's framework. It's the messy, deeply honest story of leading through a pandemic, building technology teams across three continents, and much more.

Some of my favorite key takeaways of the lessons Averill learned along her impressive leadership journey are the following:

You don’t need a title to lead. You don’t need authority to lead in a crisis. You need relationships, credibility, and the willingness to act. The leaders who wait for permission to lead rarely get it. The ones who step in when something’s broken earn the authority that follows.

Own the outcomes, not just the tools. The lesson is never to outsource. It’s never outsource accountability. You can partner with vendors for execution. But you must own the outcomes, own the relationships, and own the ability to see when things break.

The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who never need help. They’re the ones who know when to ask for help and how to create environments where asking feels safe. The goal isn’t to prove you don’t need anyone. It’s to build something bigger than what you could do alone.

You must earn trust from people who have no way to evaluate your work except by how you show up, how clearly you explain the unexplainable, and how quickly you solve problems they don’t understand. That’s true for any leader driving transformation others can’t fully see.

Stop failed projects openly. You will have failed pilots, models that don’t work, and vendors who overpromised. Discontinue those projects openly. Explain what you learned. Show that failure is acceptable when you face it honestly. The organizations that hide failure perpetuate failure. The ones that confront failures openly build cultures where people surface problems early.

Success is what continues after you leave. The goal is not to be indispensable. The goal is to make the organization stronger without you in the room. Capability that depends on a single leader is not real capability.

Julie Averill

Averill shares these additional insights with us:

Question: Reflecting on your extensive leadership experience, what is the most important leadership trait a leader should have and why?

Averill: Emotional intelligence. Leadership is less about having all the answers and more about getting answers out of others. That takes someone who can build trust, create safety, motivate people, and handle conflict. A leader's emotional management sets the tone for the whole team and the bar for how people treat each other. As AI absorbs the technical work, the uniquely human traits become the differentiator.

Question: How rewarding for you was authoring the book and why?

Averill: Incredibly rewarding. It required me to reflect on the significant moments of my life and understand what I learned in those moments. More than once I realized the answer was different than the tape I had playing in my head. That time to reflect, analyze, write it down, and then edit to what was truly significant caused me to see my own career differently.

Moments I had filed away as failures turned out to be the chapters with the most to teach. And moments I thought were about technology turned out to be about people. Authoring the book didn't just document what I learned. It added depth and clarity to what I believe.
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Finally, this book is for executives, technology leaders, and anyone responsible for driving change. It's for leaders tired of AI hype who want the truth: transformation requires psychological safety, not just algorithms. It demands vulnerability, not just vision. And it needs leaders who understand that culture isn't a soft skill - it's your competitive infrastructure.
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Averill advises boards, CEOs, and founders at the intersection of AI capability and organizational readiness, the place where most transformations stall. She speaks globally on leadership and helps organizations build what technology can't deliver: teams that tell the truth, leaders who can turn pilots into real change and cultures that sustain transformation instead of performing it.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

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