Summary: What if meaningful organizational change begins not with a grand strategy, but with a leader who notices what others may have overlooked? Hanneke Faber’s leadership offers a powerful example of how curiosity, adaptability, and a willingness to challenge the familiar can create meaningful transformation.
Some leaders enter an organization with a five-year plan already mapped out. Others begin by looking, listening, and asking questions. Hanneke Faber appears to be one of those leaders.
As CEO of Logitech, Faber is leading a global company through a period when artificial intelligence, hybrid work, technology, and changing customer expectations are reshaping how organizations operate. But her leadership story didn’t begin at Logitech. Her career spans more than 30 years and includes senior roles at Procter & Gamble, Ahold Delhaize, and Unilever, where she led businesses through growth, innovation, and transformation.
Rise & Lead Women recently recognized Faber as one of its 2026 Changemaker Honourees, highlighting leaders whose work creates opportunities, transforms organizations, and makes an impact in business and society. What interests me isn’t simply the recognition. It’s what her career can teach us about how change actually happens.
Before Organizational Change Comes a GLIMMER
We often talk about organizational transformation as though it begins with a strategy: a new technology, a restructuring, a new CEO, or a new set of goals. But what if transformation begins somewhere much smaller? A question. A possibility. A realization that the way we’ve always done something may no longer be the way we need to do it.
A GLIMMER is that moment when something catches your attention and refuses to be ignored. Faber’s career offers several examples of what can happen when a leader pays attention to those moments. At Ahold Delhaize, she helped build its e-commerce business into a global top-50 player while driving omnichannel operations. At Unilever, she led major nutrition and food businesses spanning more than 150 countries. And at Logitech, she stepped into a technology company whose future is increasingly connected to AI, hybrid work, collaboration, gaming, and digital experiences.
The industries changed. The technology changed. The customer changed. And her leadership evolved with them. That’s an important distinction.
Change isn’t something that happens once. It’s something leaders continually learn to navigate.
The Patterns Organizations Stop Seeing
Every organization develops patterns. Some are productive. Some are outdated. And some become so deeply embedded that nobody remembers why they started in the first place.
This is how we make decisions. This is how we communicate. This is how we’ve always served customers.
Eventually, the pattern can become invisible. That is where leadership gets interesting. One of the most important things a leader can do is notice what everyone else has stopped noticing.
Faber’s career has repeatedly placed her in businesses experiencing significant shifts. Her experience across consumer products, retail, e-commerce, food, sustainability, and technology suggests a leadership approach that isn’t dependent on one industry or one business model. The constant isn’t the industry; it’s the willingness to adapt.
Change Requires More Than a New Strategy
Here’s where I think Faber’s leadership becomes particularly relevant for today’s organizations. You can announce change, but you cannot command transformation.
People have to understand why the change matters. They have to see where they fit. They have to believe that the future being created is worth moving toward. That requires more than strategy. It requires connection.
When Logitech appointed Faber as CEO, the company highlighted her experience driving growth and transformation, her focus on innovation, her connection with end users, and her work in sustainability. Faber also spoke about joining Logitech with a willingness to learn while bringing experiences from throughout her career.
A leader who believes she already has all the answers has very little room left to discover anything new. A leader who can say, I have experience, and I still have something to learn, creates a different kind of organizational environment—one where curiosity can survive.(opens in new tab)
The GLIMMER Is Often in the Tension
This is something I see repeatedly in my work with leaders. The GLIMMER often appears in a contradiction.
We want innovation, but we punish failure. We want collaboration, but reward individual competition. We say people are our greatest asset, but overload the very people we depend upon. We say we want change, but keep measuring success using yesterday’s standards.
The tension is the signal. The question is what we do with it.
Faber’s career has been built around navigating those kinds of transitions. Her leadership has required her to work at the intersection of what exists and what is coming next. That is where meaningful change happens—not entirely in the old world and not entirely in the new one, but in the space between them.
The Five-Part Journey
In my work, I describe the movement from automatic reaction to greater awareness in five parts:
Trigger → Pattern → Pause → Ugly Middle → Choice
The Trigger gets our attention. The Pattern tells us how we have responded before. The Pause gives us an opportunity to look again. Then comes the Ugly Middle—the uncomfortable space where the old way no longer feels sufficient, but the new way isn’t completely clear.
This is where organizations often struggle. People want certainty. Change rarely provides it.
The leaders who can stay present in that uncertainty create space for something new to emerge. And then comes Choice. Do we go back to what is familiar? Or do we move forward with what we have learned?
The Question Hanneke Faber Leaves Us With
We often look at successful leaders and ask, What did they do? I think there’s another question worth asking: What did they notice?
What did they see before it became obvious? What signals told them an industry was shifting? What questions caused them to rethink an established pattern? What possibilities did they recognize while others were still operating from the old model?
That is where the GLIMMER lives.
It may be a new technology, a frustrated employee, a changing customer, a contradiction in your culture, or simply a quiet thought that says, There has to be another way.
The question isn’t whether your organization is changing. It is. The question is whether you are paying enough attention to recognize where the change is already beginning. Hanneke Faber’s career reminds us that meaningful leadership isn’t about predicting every turn. It’s about staying curious enough to notice the turn when it arrives—and courageous enough to follow it.
To your success,
Sylvia Lafair
