# Season 4: Andy and Frances in conversation with Zarina Ward, Chief People Officer Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003/season-4-andy-and-frances-in-conversation-with-zarina-ward-chief-people-officer Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003/season-4-andy-and-frances-in-conversation-with-zarina-ward-chief-people-officer.md Podcast: [Unlocking Aliveness in Leadership](https://stenobird.com/podcast/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003) Published: 2026-04-17T07:32:26+00:00 Episode link: https://unlockingconversations.com/podcasts/ Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/6722652377f0e7cbfb9d670a/e/69e1e20ad2febdbec982a44f/media.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003/episodes/season-4-andy-and-frances-in-conversation-with-zarina-ward-chief-people-officer Duration seconds: 1688 ## Resource Andy Rogers and Frances Armes are very pleased to share the first episode of Season Four of our podcast Unlocking Aliveness in Leadership. In today’s episode we are in conversation with Zarina Ward, a Chief People Officer. Zarina spent the early part of her career in recruiting before moving into HR. Most of her career has been in professional. Zarina candidly talks about being a commercial HR leader, understanding what the organisation needs to achieve commercially and managing the workforce to achieve those goals. She shares her experience of linking commerciality with empathy and humanity, which she openly admits is a tough line to walk. When talking about what leadership means to Zarina, her answer of shaping the conversation and create followship, felt a very natural follow on from the discussion around being a commercial leader and Zarina shared a great quote from John C Maxwell “ he who thinks he leads but has no followers, is only taking a walk ”. When talking about her leadership purpose, Zarina was very clear, to leave everyone she works with better off, with some more skills, or something more than when she met them and some of her proudest moments came from developing great successors ‘making life a little bit easier for the people that are walking in your shadows and behind you’. As far as regrets, Zarina recalled a point in her life when she considered retraining as a life coach, and after discussion with those around her, decided to continue on the more traditional people focused career path and her reflection was she shouldn’t have listened to the naysayers. Zarina’s aliveness comes from seeing the tangible impact of her work, she also sees this in the pro-bono work as a trustee for an organisation that supports people who have experience… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003/episodes/season-4-andy-and-frances-in-conversation-with-zarina-ward-chief-people-officer/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/unlocking-aliveness-in-leadership-7103003/season-4-andy-and-frances-in-conversation-with-zarina-ward-chief-people-officer.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.