Conversation with Stela Lupushor

State your name, title, and briefly share your role in forging gender parity.

Stela Lupushor, Founder of Reframe.Work Inc. I am on a mission to humanize the workplace. My work focuses on helping organizations transform workplace practices to enable all talent to thrive and reach their full potential. Through my consulting, research, writing, and speaking engagements, I help organizations design human-centered workforce strategies that create fair access to opportunities and supportive work environments. My books Humanizing Human Capital and Humans at Work explore evidence-based approaches for organizations to invest in their people in ways that drive both individual fulfillment and business success.

As we’re now settling into 2025, what are you most curious or excited about for the rest of the year?

I’m fascinated by how organizations are adapting their business models and work structures as AI capabilities continue to get better and better. We’re witnessing a fundamental reimagining of everything we know about knowledge work – ways of working, roles, performance metrics, and skill development approaches. What excites me most is the opportunity to design work experiences that are personalized, more engaging, and sustainable for everyone. The companies that successfully blend emerging technologies with human-centered design will create competitive advantages through their people – making work better while delivering stronger business outcomes.

What impact has sponsorship had on your career?

Sponsorship has been transformative in my career journey. Beyond mentorship, having leaders who actively advocated for me when important career decision were being made created opportunities I might not have accessed otherwise. These sponsors didn’t just open doors—they encouraged me to take risks and bring my authentic perspective to the table, even when it challenged me a lot. Now, I prioritize paying this forward by actively supporting others, particularly those whose potential might be overlooked in traditional context.

How do you define parity?

I define parity as ensuring everyone has equivalent opportunities to succeed based on their talents, skills, and contributions—not limited by factors unrelated to their capabilities. True parity exists when advancement pathways, recognition systems, and leadership opportunities are accessible to all qualified individuals. It’s about creating workplaces where talent and contribution determine one’s ability to succeed and lead. This isn’t just about fairness—it’s about unlocking the full potential of an organization’s talent pool.

What do you think are two of the biggest challenges today to achieve parity?

• The AI-driven transformation of work: As AI changes how we work, we risk creating new inequities in who benefits from the value that AI generates. Organizations need thoughtful approaches to ensure that technological advancement expands rather than limits opportunities across their workforce, and that the economic value created through automation and AI is distributed fairly. This redistribution of value is critical to prevent widening gaps between those who own or design AI systems and those whose work is being transformed (or even displaced) by them.
• Outdated work models that don’t reflect today’s realities: Many workplace structures still operate on assumptions about careers in linear ways which don’t necessarily align with how people actually live and work today. Creating environments that accommodate different life circumstances and responsibilities—from parenting and caregiving to continuing education—will be very important for enabling everyone to contribute their best work and integrate their work and life effectively.

What are three words you try to live by and why?

• Reframe: I believe the way we define problems fundamentally shapes the solutions we discover. By challenging conventional perspectives and reframing challenges, we can unlock solutions that might otherwise remain hidden. My favorite start of the question is “How might we…”
• Empathy: Understanding different perspectives is so important for effective decision-making, designing better solutions, and building the trust that is indispensable to meaningful collaboration.
• Impact: I measure success by the tangible difference my work makes in people’s lives and organizational outcomes. This focus on impact helps prioritize efforts that create meaningful, lasting change over activities that simply show motion.

What do you wish people understood about DEI/allyship/gender parity efforts?

That business performance and inclusive practices are complementary, not competing priorities. The era of workforce management like supply chain management—where people are simply interchangeable resources to be optimized—is over. We now have the tools, analytics, and AI capabilities to create personalized, humanized environments where people can be productive without being bogged down by unnecessary bureaucracy and outdated processes.

When organizations design their systems to enable all qualified people to contribute fully, they tap into broader talent pools, different perspectives, and increased innovation. This is a core element of building resilient, adaptive organizations that can thrive amid the constant change around us. The most successful companies understand that how people experience their work directly influences their level of engagement, performance, and retention. Humans at work want and need humanized experiences!

Please feel free to share links to any of your books or websites that you think our audience would like to access to learn more about your work.

Humanizing Human Capital: https://www.humanizinghumancapital.com

Humans at Work: https://www.koganpage.com/product/humans-at-work-9781398604230

I also share insights regularly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slupushor/