A New Platform Connects Women Executives Across Three Continents — and Asks What Leading Is For

The most interesting detail in this story is not that a woman holds an executive vice presidency at a global technology company. It is what she is doing with that seat. Sandrine El Khodry is using her position to build a platform whose entire purpose is to produce more people like her — more women leading across Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. That inverts the usual logic of authority, which tends to treat a hard-won position as something to guard rather than something to spend.

This tension sits at the center of the initiative. El Khodry already holds significant power; the platform exists to extend that kind of power to others. Those two things can pull against each other, and the source is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. We know the platform launched in June. We do not know its results, its participants' motives, or whether it will change a single boardroom. One executive's involvement is not proof that the leadership gap is closing. But the direction of the effort is worth noticing on its own terms: authority organized around widening the table rather than keeping it.

Christian teaching has always run this same direction, and it is one of the faith's more countercultural claims. Leadership, in the biblical portrait, is stewardship rather than possession. The shepherd's job is the flock, not the staff. The trusted servant in Jesus's parable is praised not for keeping what he was given intact but for putting it to work — multiplying it, putting it into other hands. By that measure, the question asked of anyone with influence is not how high they climbed but who climbed because of them.

Most of us will never run a global sales organization. But every one of us holds some door that someone else is waiting to walk through — a workplace, a household, a committee, a project. So the practice this week is small and concrete: name one person you could actively equip to lead beside you, not merely after you, and take one step toward doing it.