Kellogg Chronicles: EMBA classroom insights with boardroom impact

A Forté Fellow and Drake Scholar, Kaly Queiroz ’24 MBA is a recent graduate of the Executive MBA Program. While at Kellogg, Kaly was vice chair of the historian committee and liaison for EMBA’s board of women. In her professional career, Kaly is a strategic leader and licensed engineer with over 11 years of experience in driving large-scale infrastructure projects that deliver impactful improvements within our communities. She is currently vice president – aviation at EAC. Known for her expertise in cross-functional collaboration and regulatory stakeholder management, she has successfully led teams through every stage of the project execution lifecycle.

Kaly has partnered with clients to secure and, more efficiently, deploy federal grant dollars, while developing strong relationships within local, state and federal agencies. Born in Brazil and fluent in three languages, Kaly spends her downtime hanging with her husband and pups (Mango and Nola), eating delicious food and traveling the world. Her ideal day involves doing all three of these activities simultaneously. Here, she reflects on the transformation of her business leadership through the Executive MBA Program.

This content was originally published in Poets & Quants.

By Kaly Queiroz

Many of the biggest decisions in our adult lives require a significant time and financial commitment. Should you buy the house? Move to a new city? Apply for that dream role? Deciding to pursue an Executive MBA was no different than these big hairy decisions. It was intimidating.

This past December, I graduated from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management Executive MBA program. Since then, I’ve been reflecting on this two-year journey that began with a daunting choice. As the dust settles, I realize how incredibly rewarding and transformative Kellogg has been. The fellowship of brilliant minds — classmates, faculty, mentors and friends — inspired me to embrace complexity and tackle challenges with purpose. This included exploring possibilities beyond geographies, prototyping ideas and learning from both success and failure. Reflecting on key takeaways, particularly lessons on adaptability, has reshaped my perspective as I transitioned between the classroom and the boardroom.

Foundation for an organization’s longevity 

At Kellogg, I developed a crucial understanding of organizational adaptability that has fundamentally changed my approach to leadership. The program highlighted that about 50% of businesses close within five years after opening. However, organizations that adapt, innovate and transform can significantly improve their chances of survival. This adaptability mindset, combined with an understanding of global interdependencies, shapes an organization’s resilience and relevance in an ever-changing landscape. By bridging classroom insights with real-world governance, Kellogg helped me develop the foundational tools to navigate these challenges.

Over the past decade, I have led large-scale infrastructure projects, managed cross-functional teams, engaged in industry advocacy and served on a nonprofit board. Through these experiences, I noticed a recurring pattern: as organizations grew, so did their complexity. Some firms successfully tackled these challenges, while others struggled and closed up shop. The varied ways organizations responded to these challenges sparked my curiosity and inspired me to seek a deeper understanding. This curiosity led me to Kellogg, an institution renowned for developing leaders equipped to navigate change and thrive amidst complexity. Enrolling was a purposeful step towards honing the skills needed to drive meaningful transformation in an increasingly interconnected world.

Seeking to deepen my understanding of business adaptability strategies, I enrolled in the 2024 winter electives at the school’s Evanston campus. I took the Leading Organizational Transformation class taught by former Kellogg Dean Sally Blount. This sought-after course lived up to its reputation, offering lessons that directly applied to my professional roles at the time.

Transformation often occurs between the boardroom and executive suites, making it invaluable to learn from faculty like former Dean Blount and guest speakers like Robert Ford, CEO at Abbott. Their first-hand experience leading large organizations provided strategies and frameworks to navigate critical business inflection points. Their real-world examples enriched class discussions, making lecture themes tangible and actionable.

Here are a few key learnings from Leading Organizational Transformation that gave us such a unique perspective on understanding a firm’s stages of growth and its specific needs:

1. Diagnosis: Before jumping into a plan for your organization, it’s crucial to diagnose its needs. Where are you in the growth trajectory? Greiner’s model, which outlines the different phases of organizational growth, can be helpful here. Depending on the challenges, the degree of change required can be further defined (e.g., turnaround or alignment). Using Greiner’s model, we assessed a partner firm’s staffing needs and identified that they were in the “crisis of autonomy” phase. The firm had outgrown its initial leadership structure, causing decision-making bottlenecks. By promoting internally and redistributing authority among team leads, they improved decision-making efficiency and overall stakeholder satisfaction.
2. Defining Vision: What are you looking to achieve through these changes? Articulating a clear and compelling vision for change and aligning it with organizational goals and stakeholder expectations is key to achieving transformation. When tasked with reimagining the development approach for our global junior staff, I applied Dean Blount’s emphasis on setting a vision. Rather than solely focusing on internal opportunities, I worked with my Global Co-Chair Joe Cannon to articulate a compelling vision that connected our junior staff to external industry thought leaders. Our vision was to foster a network of industry connections that extended beyond our organization. This shared vision unified our globally dispersed staff, encouraged curiosity, and inspired professional development.
3. Pace of Change: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a great film, but a terrible way to approach the pace of change. Developing a pace of change that inspires trust instead of triggering cynicism was one of the most unexpected takeaways from the course. After learning about the importance of pacing change, I restructured the implementation timeline for a major regulatory compliance initiative in one of my projects. Instead of overwhelming teams with simultaneous changes—such as design progression, client demands, rising budgetary constraints and shifting regulations—we created a phased approach. With clearer milestones, this deliberate pacing reduced resistance and improved adoption rates among the team.
4. People Structures: Understanding organizational structures can help support and sustain change. For example, by changing how we communicate during our weekly team calls, we can encourage new types of data exchanges. I saw a big opportunity to improve data sharing for one of our clients. So, I set up a bi-weekly coordination call that brought together different organizations for the same client. This helped us share information more effectively and work better together. These meetings also saved the client time, as they no longer needed to act as the information courier between different firms. By dedicating time to discuss different projects and goals, we facilitated cross-organizational problem-solving and proactively managed risks for our shared client. This approach led to innovative solutions that saved the client tens of thousands in costs. 

Fiduciary Responsibilities 

Beyond adaptability, Kellogg also deepened my understanding of leadership’s responsibility in ensuring long-term impact. At its heart, the Kellogg experience taught me that leadership is about more than strategic oversight—it’s about stewardship grounded in creating lasting, positive impact for both organizations and communities. Ethical tendencies, often strictly associated with board-level decisions, can and should be applied in senior and mid-level leadership. This fosters a balance between the demands of immediate challenges and a commitment to a forward-looking vision. The program challenged me to think critically about how decisions align with values, ensuring that long-term goals are not overshadowed by short-term gains.

This principle was tested during one of my leadership tenures in an industry association. When faced with an opportunity offering a short-term gain that potentially conflicted with our long-term mission, I applied Kellogg’s ethical decision-making frameworks to guide our discussion. Rather than focusing solely on immediate metrics, I encouraged the team to consider long-term factors like reputation, strategic alignment, and sustained member value.

As I consider the challenges in the infrastructure industry—such as rapid urbanization, climate resiliency, and fluctuating capital availability—it becomes clear that fostering adaptability at every level of leadership is critical. Thriving organizations must not only respond to change but also anticipate it. This means embedding adaptability into their core practices, including policies and bylaws.

The recent Davos discussion with Chancellor Rachel Reeves highlighted the UK’s vision for airport expansion, including the contentious third runway at Heathrow. This discussion underscores the challenges that both companies and governments face: balancing adherence to net zero targets while supporting economic growth. This real-world example illustrates the intersection of adaptability and governance. It echoes Dean Blount’s insights on fostering growth and Professor Zajac’s lessons from our Corporate Governance course. Successful leaders in both public and private sectors must navigate the tension between immediate economic pressures and long-term stewardship responsibilities.

As UK policymakers navigate growth initiatives against climate goals, they face the same tension between short-term wins and lasting impact that Kellogg taught us to address through values-based decision making. This challenge highlights the need for evolving regulatory frameworks and financing models. Infrastructure projects must thrive amidst competing priorities while ensuring long-term resilience and safeguarding past investments. This delicate balance between economic prosperity and stewardship principles has directly informed how I approach decisions in both my professional and personal life.

Transformative journeys often begin with decisions that feel larger than life, daunting even, and my time at Kellogg was no exception. As I look back on this incredible chapter, I am profoundly grateful for the wisdom gained, the friendships that now feel like family, and the personal and professional growth that continues to shape me.

Graduating from Kellogg is not just a milestone; it’s a call to action—a reminder to lead with humility, make an impact that matters, and remain endlessly curious. True leadership, I’ve learned, is about more than navigating complexity. It’s about leaving the world a bit better than we found it, balancing adaptability with an unshakable commitment to our values. And now, with gratitude in my heart and new lessons in my toolkit, I’m ready for my next challenge.