In every traditional business model, operations always remain hidden inside every other department due to being the core of any organization. So is the immense contribution of any and every Chief Operating Officer, aka COO, remained mostly invisible. Breaking this age-old barrier today are the next-gen COOs like Shohreh Abedi, who are transforming the landscape of the United States of America’s operations. Also, earlier, she has served as an Executive VP, Operations and Technology roles in her vast career, managing budgets and capex of upwards of 2 to 3+ billion and over 4, 000 resources/team members.
Awarded multiple times for her tremendous contribution, Shohreh says, “I have been fortunate to be recognized as one of the top women leaders in Technology Operations. As an executive business and technology executive with experience in multiple industries, I have had the privilege of working for some of the best, most innovative companies in America. What I enjoy most is establishing and driving business, and technology transformation that fuel growth, customer experience, efficiencies, and innovations through developing high performing talent that deliver and execute them.”
Articulating Operational Excellence
Together with her teams, Shohreh has worked through complex matrix global organizations, bridged corporate and regional priorities, built efficiencies, and optimized delivery of transformational initiatives in support of the organization’s vision and strategy. Thus, with a leadership journey that reflects a rare blend of enterprise operations, technology modernization, and customer experience transformation, Shohreh is redefining the very role of COO. According to her, the modern COO’s mandate has evolved well beyond managing operations or optimizing back-office efficiency. Today, the COO is fundamentally a business leader responsible for turning strategy into sustained performance, she says. The role sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and culture—ensuring that vision is not only articulated but operationalized across the enterprise, she adds.
In practice, this means aligning people, processes, technology, and governance to deliver measurable outcomes for customers, shareholders, and employees. While functional excellence remains important, the COO’s real value lies in orchestration—connecting disparate parts of the organization into a cohesive operating system that scales, adapts, and performs under pressure, explains Shohreh.
A modern COO must also serve as a strategic partner to the CEO and board, translating long-term objectives into executable roadmaps, prioritizing tradeoffs, and ensuring accountability for results. The mandate is not to “run operations” in isolation, but to enable the enterprise to perform consistently, innovate responsibly, and grow sustainably, she states.
An Anchored Decision Making
Across her career, from being a manager to a board member, Shohreh has held responsibility for large, multi-billion-dollar portfolios and enterprise performance targets. However, during all this time, her decision-making has been anchored in a clear long-term strategy, with near-term actions treated as deliberate and disciplined choices—not reactions. “I believe that organizations fail not because they lack strategy, but because they allow short-term pressures to continuously override strategic intent.”
Every investment decision must answer two questions: What problem are we solving today, and how does this reinforce where we need to be tomorrow? Short-term outcomes matter—they build credibility, fund future investment, and maintain momentum—but they should never come at the expense of long-term value creation.
Shohreh relies heavily on data, scenario planning, and clearly defined success metrics. When tradeoffs are required, she prioritizes initiatives that deliver measurable impact while strengthening core capabilities. Flexibility is critical, but it must exist within a strategic frame. In volatile environments, the ability to adapt without losing direction is what separates resilient organizations from reactive ones.
Also, while leading operations supporting large customer/member bases across multiple service lines, Shohreh created consistent operating standards while still allowing the flexibility needed to perform across regions, markets, or verticals. She could achieve this rare feat because while consistency and flexibility are often framed as competing forces, she sees them as complementary. The key is to establish standardized intent and principles, while allowing localized execution where it creates value, she says.
At an enterprise level, this means defining common operating standards, governance models, performance metrics, and risk thresholds. These create clarity, comparability, and control. At the same time, markets differ—in regulation, customer behavior, maturity, and competitive dynamics—so execution must adapt accordingly.
Shohreh reveals, “I focus on building a multi-year operational roadmap that sets direction, priorities, and nonnegotiables, while empowering leaders to tailor solutions locally.” Resilience comes from this balance. Organizations that over-standardize become brittle; those that over-localize lose scale and coherence. The COO’s role is to maintain that equilibrium, she believes.
Achieving the Maximum Impact
Moreover, much of Shohreh’s work has involved real-time, mission-critical operations where reliability and speed directly affect customer trust. At times, the most impactful transformation decisions, according to her, were those that reduce complexity, eliminate variability, and improve decision quality at scale. In her experience, the highest returns have come from digital self-service, common process execution, AI-enabled decisioning, and deep integration of people, process, and technology. For example, simplifying customer journeys through digital self-service not only reduces cost but also improves satisfaction and speed. Standardizing core processes across business units reduces error rates, accelerates onboarding, and enables more reliable forecasting. AI and advanced analytics, when applied thoughtfully, improve consistency and free leaders from low-value decision-making.
Critically, these initiatives only deliver impact when paired with strong change management and leadership alignment. Transformation is not about deploying tools—it is about changing how work gets done and how decisions are made.
Technology as an Operational Lever
In Shohreh’s leadership roles, technology hasn’t been a support function—it has been an operational lever. There were ways she adopted to ensure that digital modernization directly translates into enterprise KPIs like cost efficiency, service quality, speed, and growth. She explains that digital modernization fails when technology is treated as an end in itself. “I ensure success by starting with clear business outcomes and engineering technology solutions directly against enterprise KPIs.”
In fact, Shohreh approaches operations like an orchestra: each function—technology, finance, operations, risk, customer—is a section with its own expertise, but all must follow the same score, and collectively produces music in complete harmony as one piece.
Digital initiatives are designed with explicit targets for cost reduction, cycle-time improvement, quality, risk reduction, or revenue growth.
Governance is critical. Shohreh insists on clear ownership, transparent performance tracking, and rapid course correction. “When leaders see how digital investments directly impact their metrics, adoption accelerates and transformation becomes self-reinforcing rather than mandated,” she shows.
Also, while working closely with cybersecurity and enterprise risk in environments where trust is nonnegotiable, Shohreh made sure to embed cyber resilience into the daily operational mindset—not just the IT function. It is because she insists that cyber resilience cannot be delegated solely to IT or security teams—it must be embedded into the fabric of daily operations. She starts by ensuring that cybersecurity is owned at the board and executive level, with clear accountability and regular reporting.
From there, it becomes an operational discipline. Employees are trained continuously, not annually. Controls are tested regularly, not assumed to work. Incident response plans are rehearsed, not shelved. Most importantly, leaders model the behaviors they expect—from data hygiene to decision discipline. By integrating cyber considerations into process design, vendor management, and product development, resilience becomes proactive rather than reactive. The goal is not zero risk—that is unrealistic—but the ability to detect, respond, and recover quickly without disrupting customers or the business.
An Epic Moment
A standout element of Shohreh’s career has been leading large-scale teams and building leadership capability. She says there were some of the most effective ways she has found to develop high-performing leaders and sustain culture across a distributed workforce. High performance at scale is driven by leadership quality and cultural consistency, she claims. “I invest heavily in developing leaders who are not only technically capable, but emotionally intelligent, accountable, and adaptable.”
Her approach is grounded in trust and clarity. She set high expectations and stretched leaders beyond what they initially believed was possible, while remaining fully engaged to support them. Feedback is direct, timely, and constructive. Successes are shared; failures are owned and learned from.
Culture is sustained through consistency. When leaders say what they mean and do what they say, credibility builds. When people understand the purpose behind decisions and see fairness in execution, engagement follows. At scale, culture becomes a force multiplier—or a liability. “I work to ensure it is always the former.”
Breaking Internal Silos
While repeatedly operating at the intersection of business, operations, and technology, Shohreh developed various strategies to break internal silos and create cross-functional execution discipline at scale. Silos persist when leaders identify primarily with their functions rather than the enterprise, she reasons, and thus addressed this by reinforcing a simple principle: every leader is a business leader first. She ensures that objectives, incentives, and performance metrics are aligned end-to-end.
Leaders are expected to understand upstream and downstream impacts, not just their own domains. Cross-functional forums are structured around outcomes, not updates, and decision rights are explicit, she feels.
When the ‘what’ is clearly business-led and the ‘how’ is owned by functional experts, collaboration improves dramatically. Silos dissolve when leaders are united by shared goals, mutual accountability, and a clear understanding of how value is created.
Beyond the Balance
Also, Shohreh’s experience across highly regulated, high-accountability sectors shaped her operational leadership style. Yet, she had to balance compliance, risk management, safety, and customer experience—without one undermining the other. She says compliance and risk management are foundational—they protect the enterprise and are nonnegotiable. “However, beyond regulatory requirements, I believe in taking calculated risks to improve customer experience and competitive positioning.”
Clear mitigation plans, contingency options, and escalation thresholds support every risk decision. Innovation requires movement beyond the safest path, but it must be disciplined. “I encourage teams to experiment responsibly, learn quickly, and scale what works.”
The most successful organizations are those that treat risk as a design parameter, not a blocker. When compliance is built into processes from the start, customer experience and innovation can thrive without compromising trust, she emphasizes.
An Award-Winner Grounded in Collective Efforts
Furthermore, Shohreh adds that any recognition she has received is a reflection of collective effort, not individual achievement. “It has reinforced my belief that inclusive leadership drives superior outcomes.”
Transparency, open communication, and shared ownership are central to her approach. She works to ensure that diverse perspectives are heard and valued, particularly in decision-making. When people understand the rationale behind choices and feel they have a voice, execution accelerates.
Recognition matters—not as an end goal, but as validation that inclusive cultures outperform. “It strengthens my commitment to building environments where people can do their best work and see a future for themselves in the organization.”
Breaking Through the Biggest Barrier
In hindsight, Shohreh reflects that the COVID-19 pandemic was the most intense operational challenge she has faced. “We were required to keep the business running, protect our people, support customers, and continue executing strategic priorities—simultaneously and under extreme uncertainty.”
Within two weeks, they transitioned thousands of employees to remote work with minimal disruption. This was possible only because of trust, clear decision-making, and disciplined execution. Leaders were empowered to act, communication was constant, and priorities were explicit. The experience reinforced that resilience is not built in a crisis—it is revealed. Organizations that invest in culture, leadership, and operational discipline are far better equipped to absorb shocks and emerge stronger.
Institutionalizing the Transformation
Again, Shohreh has seen a transformation from both the strategy layer and the execution layer. According to her, the difference between organizations that ‘announce transformation’ and those that truly institutionalize it lies in outcomes and behaviors. “Organizations that merely announce transformation focus on systems, structures, and messaging. Those that institutionalize it change how work gets done and how success is measured.”
True transformation simplifies processes, improves productivity, reduces cost, and changes decision-making norms. If KPIs do not shift, if behaviors remain the same, and if customers do not feel the difference, then transformation has not occurred.
Institutionalized transformation becomes self-sustaining. It is embedded in governance, talent development, and culture. Over time, it ceases to be a program and becomes the way the organization operates.
Harnessing the Advancing Tech to Illuminate the Tomorrow
Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, Shohreh predicts that some capabilities will define the next generation of COOs—and strategies that enterprises prioritize now to stay competitive in operations, technology, and trust. She says, “Future COOs will be defined by their ability to harness technology—particularly AI—to enhance, not replace, human capability.” AI will remove noise, automate routine decisions, and surface insights at unprecedented speed. The COO’s role will be to ensure these tools are trusted, governed, and aligned to business value.
Equally important will be leadership capability. As execution accelerates, clarity of purpose, ethical judgment, and people development will differentiate great COOs from competent ones. Organizations must invest now in AI-enabled operations, cyber resilience, and leadership depth.
Technology will accelerate execution, but people will always define vision, culture, and impact. The next generation of COOs must excel at both.
