A Shift in Perspective: From Performance to Stewardship
September 2026 | Economics of Mutuality Experts Series
A Conversation with Victoria Abramova
“Early in your career, everyone is an achiever. And at some point, you understand very clearly that you won't go far alone.”
Over more than two decades in consumer goods, Victoria Abramova, General Manager at Mars, has seen her understanding of leadership evolve. Her career – spanning L’Oréal and Mars, multiple markets and senior business leadership roles – has gradually shifted her perspective from leadership centered on individual achievement toward something broader: stewardship.
More recently, Mutual Value Labs’ Leading With Purpose program gave Victoria a framework for that evolution: how leaders can continue to deliver performance while creating the conditions for people, businesses and the wider ecosystems around them to thrive.
“An ecosystem where everyone can thrive”
Financial and market KPIs, performance optimization and cost management have been constants throughout Victoria’s career – and they remain important. But thinking about leadership as stewardship encouraged her to look beyond immediate business performance toward the wider system in which an organization operates.
One idea from the program that particularly stayed with her was the shift from thinking about “human resources” to human capital. For Victoria, the distinction matters. It changes the emphasis from what people can deliver for an organization to what enables them to flourish within it. She has become more deliberate about listening, empowering others and investing time in capability building.
“When people feel valued and trusted, and they are their best selves at work. This is where human capital can flourish.” It is a crucial part of what Victoria describes as creating “an ecosystem where everyone can thrive, and where value can be created sustainably.”
When purpose guides decisions
Purpose is common in corporate language. The harder test is whether it changes what a business actually does.
Victoria experienced its potential early in her career. At L’Oréal, she worked with skincare brands focused on improving the lives of people with skin diseases. One initiative created melanoma diagnostic days that helped hundreds of people access early diagnosis for potential skin cancer. Experiences like these showed her that business could achieve more than its performance indicators.
The Leading With Purpose program helped Victoria take that idea further, seeing purpose not simply as a direction an organization sets, but as something that can guide strategy, decisions and accountability. As she puts it: “Sometimes it's hard to make decisions, but the purpose is your best guide.”
That becomes particularly important when leaders are balancing immediate business demands with longer-term ambitions. Purpose provides a lens for asking not only what the business is trying to achieve, but who it is creating value for and what contribution it wants to make over time.
It also encourages leaders to widen their field of view, to “look much broader than just the usual stakeholders” and understand the wider ecosystem affected by their decisions.
Performance and purpose need each other
One idea at Mars that has resonated strongly with Victoria is that performance without purpose cannot exist – but neither can purpose without performance.
The relationship between the two is what matters. Purpose can strengthen performance by engaging people, shaping decisions and encouraging a longer-term perspective. Performance, in turn, gives a business the ability to deliver against its purpose.
For Victoria, this is where the idea of stewardship becomes practical. It doesn’t ask leaders to step away from performance, but to broaden their understanding of what performance is ultimately for – and to consider the people, relationships and wider ecosystem that make enduring value creation possible.
It is a shift in perspective, but an important one: from leading primarily for results to taking responsibility for the conditions in which those results are created, and the value they leave behind.
Explore a different way of leading
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Through practical frameworks, real-world examples and peer learning, participants explore how to put mutual value into practice within their own organizations.
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