As part of a Women in Tech community event, Olesia Ulianova, founder of IT Grow Center, Ph.D., MBA, USAID mentor, and expert in leadership development for technology businesses, delivered an inspiring talk titled “Challenges for IT Leaders in 2023+ and How to Overcome Them.”
The session brought together hundreds of women from across the IT industry — all seeking balance between leadership, change, and personal resilience.
The BANI world: when old rules no longer apply
“The world isn’t just fast anymore — it’s brittle, anxious, and unpredictable.
Today’s leader must not only plan but also know how to improvise,” — emphasized Olesia.
She explained that we now live in a BANI environment — Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible — where traditional management models no longer work.
To stay effective, a leader must be:
🧩 Build up — able to rebuild and create anew;
👁 Attentive — mindful of people and context;
🧠 Non-dogmatic — open to new ideas and unafraid to question assumptions;
💫 Intuitive — capable of transcendent thinking, guided by intuition and experience.
What helps women leaders stay strong
Olesia shared key principles of open and inspired leadership:
Practice what you preach — authenticity over “being right.”
Responsibility is always personal — don’t delegate it to the system.
Don’t work with those who don’t believe in themselves — trust in the team starts with belief.
Teams thrive when taking action feels easier than staying still.
To be ready for change, you need a dose of “healthy social nonconformity” — courage and inner freedom.
“The leader of the future is not a superhero — she’s an architect of an environment where others can grow,” — noted Ulianova.
Next-generation soft skills
During the workshop, participants explored the skills that are becoming critical for women leaders in tech within the BANI reality:
💡 flexibility and the ability to unlearn;
⚡ energy management — both personal and team;
💬 empathy that reduces anxiety and builds trust;
🎯 communication with clarity — “speak to be understood, listen to understand.”
A particularly strong response came from the discussion of the SCARF model — five basic human needs: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness, which form the foundation of motivation and mutual respect in teams.
The key message
“Women in technology today are not about gender —
they are about vision, resilience, and the ability to create meaning even in chaos,” — concluded Olesia Ulianova.
