Zeina Abdo brings an international, multidisciplinary background spanning strategy, marketing, communications, and commercial development. A graduate of EHL Hospitality Business School, she has worked across sectors including finance, real estate, and medical devices, holding both operational and strategic roles with a consistent focus on connecting people and organisations.
She is also the founder of an NGO in Nepal called Smile for Hope, which provides holistic care and support to paediatric cancer patients from underprivileged backgrounds and their families. She has contributed to leadership communities, served as Associate Director for Alumni & Industry Relations at EHL, and engaged in various social impact initiatives.
Her last corporate role saw her leading a department of 30 people within a world-leading institution operating in highly sensitive environments linked to government security. Today, she is the co-founder of KEYIZ, a Switzerland-based initiative focused on rethinking leadership and the human dimension of business.
At the heart of her work sits a simple yet deliberate proposition. “Vitamin L” is a voice for love, care, authenticity, and human connection, framed as essential rather than optional in the way people connect, work, and lead. “Infused with Vitamin L” extends this idea into a broader movement, bringing together people and organisations seeking to align performance with humanity.
Launched by Zeina Abdo, the initiative positions itself as co-created, shaped with the leaders who participate in it rather than defined solely by its founders.
What first prompted the idea that leadership needed to be “re-infused” with human connection?
I did not start with a theory about leadership. I started with an observation. I believe the roots of “Infused with Vitamin L” are deeply personal. Before I ever gave it a name, I witnessed it through my father. He built and grew a company of over 250 employees, but what stayed with people was never only the business itself. It was the way he led. His kindness, humanity, dignity, and genuine care for people left a mark that still lives on today, more than ten years after his passing. What moves me most is that, despite the turmoil the company later went through, many employees remained profoundly loyal to his memory. They still speak of him not simply as a successful businessman, but as “a great leader,” “a grand man,” and even “our father.” That says something far deeper than any performance metric ever could.
I think that was my first real encounter with human-centred leadership: understanding that leadership is not only measured by what you build while you are there, but by what remains in people long after you are gone. In many ways, the essence of Vitamin L comes from there, the idea that care, humanity, and the way people feel in your presence are not secondary to leadership. They are the legacy of it.
Across the many environments I have worked in, corporates, governments, family businesses, hospitals, education, and humanitarian work in Nepal. I kept seeing the same contradiction: highly intelligent, high-performing people becoming increasingly disconnected from themselves and from one another.
At the same time, organisations were becoming more sophisticated in the way they spoke about people, culture, and purpose. Yet the numbers remained alarming: burnout, exhaustion, disengagement, quiet quitting, isolation, and much more. Leaders themselves are also struggling. There is a loneliness at the top that very few people speak honestly about.
The younger generations refuse to separate performance from humanity. Not because they are weak or naïve, but because they watched previous generations erode and burn themselves out for institutions that often-treated people like commodities.
“Infused with Vitamin L” emerged from that tension.
Not from the idea that we need to become softer, but from the conviction that human connection, care, authenticity, and trust are becoming necessities in a world accelerating through AI, uncertainty, and hyper-digitalisation.
The “L” stands for love, yes, but not in a naïve or sentimental sense. Rather, it is the ability to see people beyond function.
At what point did “Infused with Vitamin L” move from concept to initiative?
“Infused with Vitamin L” did not begin as a business idea. It emerged organically, almost accidentally, long before I understood what it would eventually become.
About eight years ago, during a very different chapter of my life, I was working as a holistic health coach and teaching yoga. At the same time, I created a homemade granola recipe that I still sell today. On the packaging, I wrote a phrase that intuitively became part of the identity of my coaching practice: Infused with Vitamin L.
People would taste the granola and ask what made it different. I would list the ingredients, but then explain that the real secret was the ingredient binding everything together: Vitamin L.
Naturally, they would ask:
“What is that? Where do you buy it? Is it in speciality stores?”
And I would answer:
“No. You already have it within you. Plenty of it. And it is all around you.”
When I finally revealed that the “L” stood for love, people would laugh, but something stayed with them.
Over time, it became a kind of shared language within my immediate community. We started describing places, people, restaurants, hotels, companies, and even hairdressers as being “Vitamin L.” Interestingly, the criteria were always the same: genuine care, authenticity, warmth, and human presence.
My boys themselves would use the expression whenever something deeply touched their hearts.
Looking back, I think that is when the initiative truly started — not formally, but culturally. It became evident that there were “Vitamin L” people everywhere in the world, across industries and generations, often recognising one another instinctively without having the language for it.
What exists today is really the continuation of that organic evolution: the idea that perhaps these people, places, and organisations do not need to remain isolated examples. Perhaps they can be connected, made visible, and eventually form a different kind of ecosystem — one where humanity is not treated as weakness, but as infrastructure.
How do you define “human-centred leadership” in practical, day-to-day terms?
A human-centred leader is able to perform, be accountable, responsible, and human at the same time, especially under pressure.
Concretely, it means a leader who listens before reacting, creating psychological safety without lowering standards, while understanding that people are not machines delivering output, but human beings carrying stress, ambition, fear, personal lives, and invisible pressures into work every day.
Employees today observe leaders far more than they listen to corporate value statements. Human-centred leadership means your behaviour under stress still reflects the values you claim to stand for.
It also means people are held accountable not through fear, humiliation, or control, but through clarity, ownership, trust, and mutual respect. In a nutshell: who are you when no one is watching?
In my view, accountability is actually stronger in human-centred environments because expectations are transparent, conversations are honest, and people understand the impact of their actions on the collective. Care does not remove accountability, it makes it more meaningful.
It can be as simple as having difficult conversations without humiliating others, or creating clarity instead of confusion.
Human-centred leadership requires even more courage. It asks leaders to stop hiding behind hierarchy, process, or corporate language, and instead engage with integrity and honesty.
In this VUCA world, trust, discernment, emotional intelligence, presence, and ethical judgment are becoming strategic competencies, not optional “soft skills.”
Ultimately, human-centred leadership comes down to one fundamental question:
When people leave your presence, your team, or your organisation, do they feel reduced… or do they feel more human?
What gap in traditional leadership models were you most intent on addressing?
There are three gaps I want to address.
1. The gap between the values on the wall and the reality in the hall
Traditional leadership models have often rewarded control, emotional detachment, hyper-performance, and the ability to endure pressure at all costs.
Many leaders learned to survive by over-adapting — becoming less emotional, less vulnerable, and less themselves in order to be perceived as credible or strong.
For a long time, organisations reinforced that model because it produced results. Yet we spend thousands of hours and significant resources in workshops about “values” and “what we stand for.”
The hidden cost of this gap has been enormous: disengagement, burnout, loss of meaning, erosion of trust, and increasingly fragile cultures beneath polished corporate narratives.
2. The loneliness of leadership
Another gap I wanted to address is the loneliness and isolation many leaders experience privately.
There is enormous pressure to perform, reassure, absorb uncertainty, and keep everything moving, while often having very little space to speak honestly themselves.
Many leaders are exhausted behind the role they are performing.
3. The intergenerational disconnect
And finally — the one I am most passionate about — the intergenerational disconnect.
Younger generations are not simply looking for salaries or titles. They are observing coherence. They want to know whether organisations genuinely live the values they communicate.
Because preparing young people for the future is not enough anymore. We also need to build organisations worthy of them.
Can you point to a moment in your career that most clearly shaped your thinking on leadership and care?
One moment that deeply shaped my thinking on leadership was being yelled at and insulted by a superior. I physically felt it, losing my breath, like being punched in the stomach.
What struck me most is that I knew it was not personal. This was simply his way of leading. But in that instant, something broke. A line had been crossed, and I could no longer genuinely respect or fully give my energy in the same way afterwards.
That experience made me realise that fear may create short-term compliance, but it quietly destroys trust, engagement, and loyalty.
It reinforced my belief that accountability and high standards matter enormously, but the way leadership is exercised matters just as much as the results it produces.
How do you ensure that values like empathy and connection are not diluted when placed in a business context?
Actually, I think the real question is: why have we accepted the idea that empathy, care, and human connection somehow do not belong in business in the first place?
Businesses are human systems. They are made of people making decisions, leading teams, building products, negotiating, solving problems, and creating value.
That is why I see empathy and connection as fundamental operational competencies that many organisations have underestimated.
The issue is that for decades, certain business cultures associated humanity with weakness, and emotional detachment with professionalism or authority.
That model is clearly out of date.
So rather than protecting these values from business, we need to reintegrate them into business as serious leadership capabilities.
What does co-creation look like in practice within “Infused with Vitamin L”?
Co-creation within “Infused with Vitamin L” means the initiative is not built for people, but with them.
I never wanted to arrive with a rigid methodology claiming to have all the answers about human-centred leadership.
The project evolves through real conversations, lived experiences, tensions, and reflections shared across generations, industries, and cultures.
In practice, it means organisations and individuals actively shape what Vitamin L looks like in their own reality.
A family business, a school, or a financial institution will not express care, trust, accountability, or human connection in exactly the same way.
Where have you seen resistance to the idea that business should be more human, and how do you respond to it?
The strongest resistance I encountered came from older, patriarchal, male-dominated environments where performance, control, and authority were treated as the core drivers of success.
In those cultures, humanity was often perceived as weakness, and emotional detachment as professionalism.
What I challenge is that assumption itself.
Fear can drive short-term performance, but it rarely creates trust, loyalty, creativity, or sustainable engagement.
Organisations shaping the future will either invest in their people’s humanity or slowly extract it.
Here is your text with grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and flow corrected while preserving your voice and meaning:
How do you distinguish between leadership as performance and leadership as presence?
Leadership as performance is often about maintaining an image: having the answers, controlling perception, projecting authority, and constantly proving competence.
Leadership as presence is the ability to remain grounded, aware, and genuinely connected to people and reality, especially under pressure.
One is driven by how a leader is perceived. The other by how a leader makes people feel, think, grow, and engage around them.
What would you consider evidence that “Vitamin L” is working inside an organisation?
For me, the strongest evidence that Vitamin L is working is when people say “we” instead of “they.”
When employees carry the story, defend the culture, grow through the company, and feel proud of what they are building together, something much deeper than engagement is happening. There is emotional connection, belonging, and human attachment.
You can feel it immediately in the way people speak: the warmth, the loyalty, the pride in their eyes when they talk about the people they work with or the journey they have shared together.
That cannot be manufactured through slogans or branding campaigns.
The example of the Bromberg brothers reflects exactly this spirit. You do not just see a business relationship; you feel years of trust, mutual respect, shared growth, and genuine human connection behind it—when people are not only delivering for a company, but becoming part of something that has also shaped them as human beings.
What risks come with putting concepts like care and humanity at the centre of leadership discourse?
Words like love, care, humanity, or empathy still make many people uncomfortable in business environments. Some will mock them immediately because they associate them with weakness, lack of rigour, or naïveté. Others will dismiss them as “soft,” idealistic, or incompatible with high-performance cultures.
Many leaders were shaped in environments where survival depended on emotional control, toughness, competition, and authority. Vulnerability was ridiculed.
That discomfort is precisely what makes the conversation important. Because behind the resistance, there is often exhaustion, disconnection, loneliness, or a leadership model people themselves no longer fully believe in, but have learned to reproduce.
What would you like the next generation of leaders to inherit from this way of thinking?
That they do not have to inherit someone else’s definition of success.
That they do not have to lose themselves to succeed.
That ambition and humanity are not incompatible.
That authority does not require humiliation.
That performance does not need to come at the expense of mental health, identity, or dignity.
I would also like them to inherit the permission to lead differently, without automatically being perceived as weak for doing so.
And perhaps most importantly, I hope they inherit a more conscious understanding of responsibility: that leadership is not only about driving results, but about shaping human environments that leave people stronger, more grounded, and more alive.
Is there a time when your actions went unseen, yet you still chose to do what felt right?
Oh yes. And I never needed my actions to be seen. I always chose to lead with my heart and the profound conviction that I was contributing to something bigger through my decisions and actions—even when they were hard, even when they opposed popular opinion.
Just the conviction and inner knowing that it was right.
What do you hope people feel differently after experiencing “Vitamin L” in a professional context?
I hope people leave with the reminder that, beyond titles, hierarchies, industries, or generations, we are all human beings ultimately pointing in the same direction.
We all share the same fundamental needs: to be seen, cared for, and valued, but also to grow, contribute, and evolve.
And to feel that what we do—and who we are—matters.
“Infused with Vitamin L” simply brings that humanity back into the room. And once people truly experience it, something shifts: the walls soften, conversations become more real, and performance becomes more meaningful and engaged.
Website: https://vitaminl.net/