Leading through change: A conversation with Melika Carroll, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Cohere

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior-level executive search, leadership assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Julian Ha: Hello, I'm Julian Ha, partner in Heidrick & Struggles' Washington DC, office and global managing partner of the Government and Corporate Affairs practice. Today I'm joined by Melika Carroll, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Cohere. Cohere is a security-first enterprise AI company. Melika has 20-plus years of experience in startups, blue-chip technology companies, and government at the local, state, national, and international levels.

Before Cohere, Melika led public policy strategy for Fortune 500 technology companies such as Intel, Micron, HP, and Salesforce. She also worked for national elected officials in both Canada and the US, guest lectured at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University, and the Washington campus, and co-founded the Global Women's Innovation Network.

Welcome, Melika.

Melika Carroll: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Julian Ha: Your career has spanned government, Fortune 500 tech companies, startups, and now AI. How have your experiences within those different environments shaped the way you lead today? 

Melika Carroll: There's three big themes that I take away from how my career has evolved and how it's shaped my leadership.

First, if I think of the political leaders I've worked for, they've really taught strong values. When you work for a political officeholder, that is the business. The leader is the business, and so their values really come through in how you do the work, and that's been very important in framing value set for how I show up as a leader.

In particular, one thing that I've learned from these fantastic leaders that I've had a chance to work for in both countries was the importance of a team that is willing to give you direct feedback, including when it's not aligned with what you think. I've had the pleasure of having some leaders that were very thoughtful that way, and that's really shaped how I show up and how I encourage my team to show up with me.

The other thing that's been really important from a corporate point of view is starting at a company like Intel. It's really shaped how I approach management, maybe in a more structured way. You know, [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove is the master of high-output management and OKRs, and that really shaped how I think about managing a team and delivering for the company.

And then lastly, the startup environment has really emphasized the importance of a growth mindset. It's given me a little higher tolerance for risk. And so all of those things have really shaped how I show up as a manager and a leader today. 

Julian Ha: Excellent. At Cohere, you're helping navigate a global AI policy landscape that's evolving extraordinarily quickly.

How do you lead effectively when the technology, regulation, and expectations of stakeholders are all changing at the same time? 

Melika Carroll: Yeah, that's a great question. There's really two things when I think about this. The first, most important thing is staying close to the business. Like the political environment, the business is constantly evolving and changing really, really fast.

So if I can stay close to where the business is heading, understanding our strategic goals as a business, and then translating that to the team, that's the most important thing I can do to make sure that we're aligned and supporting the business for where it wants to go—prioritizing the right issues and the right strategies.

The second thing that I think is really critical in this environment is hiring the right people. It's always important, obviously, but hiring really good people, giving them clear direction about where the strategy is, how it may be shifting, and then really empowering them to do their best. You really have to trust the team to show up and navigate in the moments because things are shifting so quickly.

And I think for that, a team that, again, is really focused with a growth mindset, who's open to a changing environment and who can manage that is really important. 

Julian Ha: Totally agree that talent matters a lot. AI presents enormous opportunities while raising questions around security, privacy, trust, and accountability, as you know.

What role should senior leaders play in ensuring the balance between innovating quickly and innovating responsibly? 

Melika Carroll: As leaders look to adopt AI, the most important foundational thing for an organization is to have a really strong overarching governance framework for how they will adopt AI. What are their guardrails? What are their goals? How they want to use the technology is super important. 

With that overarching framework, once that's in place, then the important thing is really empowering the teams to use it, to get comfortable with it. And I think from that point of view, training is important, making sure that everybody feels that they are able to use the technology in a way that's going to support the business objectives.

And I think, for some people, that comes naturally. There's a way for some teams to iterate and develop those skills naturally. But I think this is such an important technological shift, and it's going to have so much impact on business competitiveness that you really want to make sure that the team has the tools it needs, the training it needs to really maximize the use of technology.

Julian Ha: Let's talk a little bit about leading in changing environments. I mean, Melika, you've helped CEOs and C-suite leaders engage with policymakers across North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America. What have you learned about leading and influencing across different cultures, political systems, and stakeholder groups?

Melika Carroll: There's a lot of variety in how we show up in different parts of the world in this work. I think the most important thing to start is understanding the local culture, the political culture, the stakeholders, and sort of the environment that you're going into. And for that, again, going back to strong talent, is really having the right internal talent in those geographies or even consultants, right?

External talent to really guide you through that environment. That's really, really critical to show up well in any country, in my experience. I think also knowing who your allies are at home and in that market. So how you show up if you're representing an American company in Brussels, understanding how America is perceived in Brussels in that moment in time is really important.

So understanding how you're gonna be perceived in that way, and then how your allies are going to help you. Who are your allies in that market, and who are your allies at home that are gonna help you navigate or push in that market, right? And how that's gonna show up. The other thing that's really important is how do we translate back to the company what's happening in that market?

And I was told this really early in my career as I started in Brussels. I had the knack for explaining what was happening in Brussels to Intel and Silicon Valley, which was very foreign at that moment, right? The industry wasn't regulated. Brussels had a very strong approach to privacy regulation in this particular moment, and so explaining and translating what was happening in Brussels to an American audience in Silicon Valley and being able to do that was really, really important.

Julian Ha: That's a really interesting insight. So you have experience leading a diverse range of businesses. So when you step into a new sector or unfamiliar business environment, how do you determine where you need to adapt to meet your new environment? Which aspects of your leadership style and instincts remain the same no matter the context?

Melika Carroll: One thing that has really evolved, Julian, in our careers, I think, is how corporate affairs has really evolved to become a Swiss Army knife. If you take that approach—if we've got a range of skills, these teams, communications, government affairs, public policy, ESG. The most important thing when I start in a new company is understanding, again, going back to the core, what does the business need?

Understanding the business, understanding the culture, and then from there, looking at our Swiss Army knife and deciding how is this range of expertise going to show up to help the business in this moment, in this need. And that will impact everything, the focus of the work, the priorities of the work. It might be policy, but it might also be commercial transactions.

It might be, how do we help the company fundraise? It might be navigating business risk. And so the range of things that I think these functions can help with and have to help with today—brand building, all of those things—really depends on what the company's priorities are in that moment. So understanding the business and then really leveraging all the competencies of these functions to help grow the business and meet it where it's at is really, really important.

So pretty consistently, I think that's what I go back to if I'm starting with a new company or joining a board. 

Julian Ha: As AI becomes embedded across organizations, what do boards and executive teams most need to understand about AI governance, and where do you see the biggest gaps in leadership today?

Melika Carroll: Understanding the technology, really understanding your choices of the tools that you're using and what it means for the enterprise, for your data, for your control, where you have control, where you don't have control over the data, the use cases, etc.

All of that is really important for a company to make the right decisions about how to use AI. And based on that understanding of the technology and the tools you're choosing to use, what are the trade-offs, and what are the risks associated with the trade-offs? So, for example, at Cohere, we can deploy our models and our tools in a completely air-gapped environment in a company on premise where they completely control the modeling and the tools on top of it and the data.

We don't see anything that they do with it. It's important to understand that to make a decision about what you're going to use those tools for and how you might use that differently than how you're using an open API, right, an internet access tool, where the data is going to be sent somewhere else. So understanding the technology and those choices are really important for how you decide to use it.

The other important thing is thinking about how this technology is going to really fundamentally change your business. How are your competitors using it? How can you use it to really leverage a strength or address a weakness that you have as an enterprise? Those are the really core places where you want to think about how to deploy using the technology.

One thing I'll say on sort of the gaps in leadership, possibly in sort of the regulatory environment, we really focus our business in regulated sectors, and so they want reassurance that if they adopt and deploy AI, they want to know that they're doing it according to the regulators' intentions, right? That it's going to show up in a way that's gonna comply with the regulations. 

And so as regulators in different sectors, whether it's energy or banking or whatever, hesitate to give clear guidance on AI, that's making the industry more hesitant to deploy it in some use cases, which is unfortunate. I think, you know, we want to make sure it's well used, and agreement on how that's going to be done is important.

Julian Ha: Excellent. During periods of rapid growth or transformation that we're experiencing today, I mean, leaders can lose sight of the effects of big changes on their organization's culture. How can leaders preserve what makes an organization distinctive while still allowing its culture to evolve? 

Melika Carroll: Yeah. I feel like that's been true for the bulk of our career in some way or another, whether it was the beginning of the internet or social media or all of the evolutions.

I think, at the end of the day, it's really important to listen to employees. There's a variety of mechanisms to do this, right? But to understand how employees are feeling about the changes that are happening is really, really important. And then from there, thinking through auditing your values. Should they still be the same? Have they changed with this moment in time? 

And then protecting the core of the values that I'm sure some don't change. Some are pretty core to the business. Protecting those and making sure that you're communicating those clearly, that consistency clearly of what is still the company values, but then also building some comfort and support for change because it's such a fast-moving pace.

To me, it's finding a balance between being clear about what the core values are that are consistent, but then also enabling change, which can be really difficult in a company environment for employees to navigate.

Julian Ha: So we're gonna pivot and look a little bit into the future. Let's talk about you, Melika.

You've co-founded the Global Women's Innovation Network, also served in board roles alongside your stellar executive career. How have those experiences influenced the way you think about developing and creating opportunities for the next generation of leaders? 

Melika Carroll: Yeah. I think about this work as a team sport.

Victories in corporate affairs, government affairs, communications are rarely one-person victories; they're really done in a team, and that's how I've thought about developing talent as well. And if you think about GlobalWIN, the Global Women's Innovation Network that I co-founded with Helen Milby, that was kind of the idea behind it is: How are we gonna help each other advance and grow in our careers, and how do we provide a network, resources, and tools to do that?

And I think about that broadly in the community through things like GlobalWIN, but then at the company, it's really, really important to attract and keep the best people. Really good people have options. They have options to go do other things, and so how do you prioritize your team, these people at an individual level, helping them, training them, supporting their career path, investing the time and feedback to understand their career path, giving them feedback on how they can get there?

It's maybe a little bit easier in a startup environment, but if you can, give employees the professional opportunities that they need to go to the next step in their career. Again, it's a little easier in a startup where everything is being built, but if you can really take a moment to give your team the opportunities to grow in their careers where they wanna grow, the company's gonna benefit because you're getting a lot of commitment and enjoyment from the employee, and the employee's gonna benefit because you're really investing in giving them those experiences that they're gonna need to get to the next level.

For example, like in a tech company, it could be harder to get management experience than in government, for example, so how do you help the employees with that growth potential to give them some management experience? Maybe it's just one person to begin with, but how do you help them develop that capacity?

Getting international experience can be difficult as well, and so how do you help employees do that? So I think it's really listening to each of them, your key players, and enabling them to develop the skills they will need to grow into that Swiss Army knife. Another thing I think, Julian, that's really shaped our careers here over the last 25 years is a merging of government relations and communications in some way. And so giving the communications team some political experience working on projects where they'll be able to sort of build that muscle and giving the government affairs team some communications experience in reverse.

So how do you help them do that, I think, is really, really important to keep the best people. 

Julian Ha: That's some excellent advice there, Melika. Looking five to 10 years ahead, what do you think will distinguish leaders who successfully navigate the AI era from those who struggle, and what should today's leaders start doing differently now?

Melika Carroll: Well, I hope that everybody is doing this. I think understanding the technology and using it, and using it in a way that maximizes your function's impact, whatever that might be, is really critical. And if you don't know how to do that, take the time to ask for help, whether it's external coaching, internal coaching, really making sure that you're leveraging the technology because it's not going away.

You're gonna have to use it, and so I think that's super, super important. I also think that knowing your added value and your gaps as a leader, AI is going to transform how we work. Being the best person at summarizing or preparing memos for the executive team, all of those skills are gonna commoditize in some way.

So as a leader, understanding where do you really add value, where are your gaps, and then really investing in those gaps, and I think those are sort of skills. So for example, my core competencies have been in government affairs, public policy, international relations. I have spent a lot of time hiring and watching and coaching strong communications people because I'm learning a lot from them. I know that that's where I need to develop my own skills. 

So I think it's really understanding how to leverage the technology and then working on understanding what your strengths are and then working on your gaps for where you wanna go. What are the pieces, the skills that are missing that a leadership role is going to require from you in five to 10 years?

Julian Ha: Melika, thank you so much for making the time to speak with us today and sharing your excellent insights. 

Melika Carroll: Julian, it's been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you inviting me. Thank you.

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About the interviewer

Julian Ha (jha@heidrick.com) is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles' Washington, D.C., office and global managing partner of the Government and Corporate Affairs practice.