Cynthia Unegbu is an international technology and energy executive who has led engineering, operations and commercial teams across Europe, Asia and North America, with responsibility for people and operations spanning roughly fifteen countries. Her track record includes the accelerated delivery of Eni’s Jangkrik deepwater gas project in Indonesia and completions execution on Anchor, which became the first producing deepwater development rated to 20,000 psi in 2024.
— Less than people assume, at first. Moving to a new market does not automatically make anyone a better leader. What changes things is what you do once you are there: whether you are willing to question the approach that worked back home and actually listen to why it might not fit here. I have had responsibility for people and operations across roughly fifteen countries at this point, and the pattern that repeats itself every time is that the market rarely adjusts to you. You adjust to it, or you struggle.
— Exposure means you’ve been somewhere. A global leadership mindset shows up in how the place changes your thinking. I led the execution team on Eni’s Jangkrik deepwater gas project off Kalimantan, which reached first production within three and a half years of sanction, ahead of its original schedule. That kind of pace depends on people across several organisations and disciplines working from the same understanding of what needs to happen and when. Getting that alignment right meant people taking the time, project by project, to understand what mattered to each team before asking them to move faster.
— It was my first international posting, and I arrived without speaking Bahasa Indonesia, which was the language most of my team was more comfortable working in. That forces a kind of attention you don’t develop when everyone already understands you. I had to check whether we had actually reached a shared understanding rather than assume it, and pay closer attention to context and tone, not just words. That habit stayed with me well beyond that one assignment. It matters just as much now, leading the multidisciplinary team behind Anchor, as it did in that first year.
— Purpose and values travel with you. How you get people there rarely looks the same twice. I have never found it useful to apply one leadership approach everywhere and hope it lands. Leading the completions deployment on the pre-drill wells for Statoil’s (now Equinor) Mariner development in the North Sea needed a completely different operating rhythm from the offshore Indonesia gas project I’d led before it, even though the underlying engineering discipline was the same. The direction has to stay clear. The path to it is allowed to look different depending on the culture, the team and what the market actually rewards.
— Cost discipline is part of it, but the harder judgment is deciding what capability you protect while you’re reducing cost, because that decision shapes whether you can compete once demand comes back. Rather than pulling back everywhere during one downturn, I chose a handful of opportunities carefully and grew through them, including securing longer-term contracts in North America. Growth during a downturn only makes sense if it strengthens the business rather than simply adding activity.
— By treating it as part of the business strategy from the start. Technical depth in a handful of people only gets an organisation so far. Real capability means that judgment is spread wide enough that no single person’s departure sets the team back. Across the teams I’ve led, that has meant deliberately expanding people’s responsibilities beyond their comfort zone and putting them in situations where their judgment actually gets tested. I’ve mentored somewhere around sixteen women over the years, through formal programmes at work, and one recurring lesson is that career progression comes down to access: who gets pulled into the room early enough to build the track record that later gets them promoted. That’s part of why I still make time to speak publicly about it, including a keynote in Houston built around resilience for women coming up through leadership roles in this industry.
— It slows the room down in a useful way. Complex engineering and commercial problems rarely have one obviously correct answer, and a team with different technical backgrounds and cultural instincts will notice different things wrong with the same plan. The harder part of the job is making sure the person with the most relevant insight actually speaks up, not just the most confident voice in the room. That depends on people trusting they can question an assumption without it costing them something. Lose that trust, and information stops reaching the person who needs it before a decision gets made.
— I don’t think it’s just rhetoric this time. Complexity has always been part of leadership, but the challenge now is making decisions as several conditions change at once. PwC’s most recent Global CEO Survey, drawn from thousands of executives across more than ninety countries, found leaders naming geopolitical volatility, technological disruption and uneven AI adoption together as a live operating condition rather than a background risk. Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends research points the same way: organisations are being asked to deliver performance and protect their people at the same time, without much room to trade one off against the other. Practically, that means leaders can no longer treat “unfamiliar” as an occasional event to plan around. It’s closer to the default operating state now, and it’s exactly the muscle international experience trains.
— Breadth alongside depth. My own path moved through technical, operational and commercial responsibilities before I landed in a role that’s really about setting technology direction for the wider business, and each shift added a layer the previous role hadn’t required. These days, a good part of my own focus is connecting that engineering background with digital and AI capability, so that field experience feeds back into faster decisions instead of sitting in someone’s individual notes. Deep expertise in one function will always matter, but businesses now cross borders, disciplines and time zones in ways that make a single lens increasingly limiting. The leaders who manage that well tend to have enough curiosity to take an unfamiliar problem seriously, and enough clarity about their own purpose that people can follow them through genuine uncertainty. International experience puts you in enough unfamiliar environments that you eventually build both, or the role outgrows you.
