“The most powerful thing I ever did wasn’t coming out. It was coming home to myself. Because when you stop editing your truth to make others comfortable, you stop disappearing. You start leading from alignment instead of fear.” —Julie Averill in Chief Impact Officer
Very few LGBTQIA+ people (or women in general) have ever reached the top level of the US corporate ladder, which continues to be dominated by cis straight men. Only 10% of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are women, with less than 1% openly Queer; furthermore, only 15% of CTO and CIO roles at Fortune 500 tech companies are held by women.
But among those statistics, Julie Averill has been a rare exception to the rule.
Averill, who lives in Bellevue, Washington, with her wife Cindy and their three children, served as CIO of Lululemon from 2011 to 2025, and before that at Nordstrom and REI. In light of current anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-DEI business sentiments under Trump, as well as the widespread advent of tech layoffs in favor of AI automation, this former CIO looks to impart both life and leadership lessons accrued over a career managing some of Seattle’s biggest multinational corporations in her new part-memoir, part–leadership advice book, Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human—Not Just Artificial—Intelligence.
Foundations
The first part of Averill’s book, entitled “Foundations,” explores her origin story, from her father and grandfather (both named Earl Averill) being MLB players, to her mother Patricia Averill creating her own upholstery business after her boss refused to pay her the same wage as others.
“Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is refuse to participate in a system that doesn’t value you,” she writes about what she learned from her mother.
Averill also goes through how being trapped in, and eventually leaving, an abusive relationship as a teenager taught her the importance of how to recognize abusers and their systems of control, which would help her in her career.
“Walking away taught me that self-respect isn’t negotiable. And it taught me to recognize a pattern I’d see again in corporate America too many times: Abusers test boundaries to see what they can get away with. No consequence means violations escalate. The faces would change, but the dynamic wouldn’t,” she writes.
Her love for technology systems and computers from a young age is what ultimately led her to pursue it as career, despite her first taking a trial-and-error approach to get there during college.
“Discipline matters more than motivation,” she writes of the experience and that “self-reliance has a cost. I proved I could do it alone, but I also learned that refusing help isn’t strength. It’s often pride disguised as independence. Years later, when I built teams, I had to unlearn this learning. The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who never need help. They’re the ones who know when to ask for it.”
In chapter 3, “The Cost of Hiding,” she evaluates the cost of minimizing herself and what it was like hiding her personal life as a Lesbian. One example was of her assistant Sharon. Although she showed genuine interest in learning more about Averill, the fear of coming out and stigma kept them from forming a deeper connection.
“I saw a domino chain. Sharon learns about Cindy, tells another assistant, word spreads, and suddenly I’m exposed. So I stayed at my desk. I asked Cindy to only call when I wasn’t in meetings.”
In an interview with the SGN, Averill talked further about how the impact of being closeted affected both her personal and professional lives during those years.
“I hid for over a decade, from my late teens probably longer than that, to my early thirties, right? I edited my wife, Cindy, out of everything, and it made me smaller. I edited myself. I presented myself as the person that I felt like the room needed me to be, and so I explore how this notion of silence is really a leadership failure,” she said.
In a later chapter, “When Love Expands,” Averill discusses how adopting their child Ermias from Ethiopia taught her the importance as a leader of trusting others, having curiosity, and forming connections with others of different life experiences.
“I had spent years building walls to protect myself at work. Performing competence. Managing perception. Making sure no one saw the parts of me that felt vulnerable or uncertain. And here was this six-year-old boy teaching me that real connection only happens when you stop performing and start being present,” she writes.
“It forced me to see that the most powerful transformations don’t come from optimizing processes. They come from expanding who you’re willing to become for someone else.”
Workforce equity and diversity
A major theme throughout Averill’s book is the business advantages of building diverse teams in the workforce, both at home and around the world.
In chapter 10, “Building Bangalore”, she writes how in late 2020 at Lululemon, three-fourths of the company’s labor budget went to contractors who did not have what she called “long-term commitment to the company.”
She argues that her desire to move a portion of the company’s workforce to South Asia was more than just a simple business decision, so as to reduce labor costs in comparison to hiring full-time employees in the US.
“We weren’t just checking a diversity box. We were tapping into the deepest pool of technical talent on the planet, in a country that had evolved from the world’s back office to the world’s innovation engine,” she writes.
During her interview, Averill explained that of the 47% of Indian women graduating college at the time, only 34% worked in tech.
“We saw that as a pipeline problem,” she said, “or like as an opportunity that our competitors were looking past, and so we built an organization that had systems designed for women, and we hired for women as well as men.”
She went on to say that after two years, 46% of Lululemon’s Bangalore workforce was women, and that the business culture was so positive there that their team won Nasscom’s AI Gamechangers Award three years in a row, as well as awards for being the best place for women to work in India.
“It became like a team that delivered consistently, and had a lot of empathy to the business and built good relationships with their North American counterparts and focused on the business results. To me, that was an example of a team in action that really proved the theory,” Averill said.
Another element throughout her book is the importance of equity.
“I talk a lot about in my book how I believe that equity is really a key to business success,” she told the SGN.
One example she gives is when her moment of vulnerability helped convince the REI executive team in 2015 to publicly come out in support marriage equality.
“That moment wasn’t about me looking brave or progressive,” she writes. “It was about using the platform I’d built to create certainty for people who didn’t have access to that table. Every LGBTQ+ employee in every REI store across the country would know where their company stood. I was no longer hiding; I was using my influence to stand up for the community I was a part of.”
And in the current climate. where major tech companies like Amazon and Facebook are rolling back DEI initiatives, Averill also stands out for her advice in the book that corporate leaders foster a culture where they and others can “speak [their] truth, and be respected and treated with dignity.”
She argues that this is the key for companies to “unlock innovation at speed,” at that “when you and I are both able to show up in a room, and we don’t feel like we have to show up as less than ourselves, then we can say the ideas that seem really crazy until they’re not crazy anymore.”
AI challenges
Adaptation and implementation of new technologies is another core theme throughout Averill’s book. In the chapter about working at Nordstrom, Averill reflects on how the challenges her company faced then (creating an online ordering system without adjusting for the impact it had on employees and business operations) is pertinent to how people are feeling about how companies are integrating AI in the workplace now.
“People fear change, it’s just our nature,” she writes. “And transformation means change. AI just puts it under a spotlight. People don’t fear technology itself; they fear becoming irrelevant to it. They fear being left out of the story. Leaders today are failing when they’re framing AI as an efficiency play when it’s actually a transformation play.”
She told the SGN that the biggest mistake corporate and tech leaders are making in this “transformation” period of AI is that they are neglecting the human element of their rollout.
“I was compelled to write this book because I think it matters now in this age of AI that it’s still the age of humans. We are still here, and actually, how we’re successful with AI is hugely dependent on the humans that we bring along the journey.”
Lastly, Averill was asked to reflect on what had been most instrumental in her forming her worldview as a corporate leader.
“I’ve had a lot of incredible opportunities in my life, but the thing that I value most of all is the perspectives that I’ve been able to get by being around really incredible leaders,” she said. “I think it’s helped me develop a really unique point of view, specifically on what’s happening in the world right now.”
Julie Averill’s Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human—Not Just Artificial—Intelligence comes out on June 11, and is available for preorder online.
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