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Making The Case
The Women's Networking Event at Air Cargo Event 2026 — sponsored by Delta Cargo went centerstage on Monday, as it has for a decade plus at this event featuring a tell it like it is panel of outstanding ladies.
For 2026 it was a live at five panel built around a deceptively simple theme:
Team Building.
Sandy Gregory of Gregory Logistics Consulting, LLC moderated the discussion between Sarah Sanderson, Delta Cargo; Amanda Barlow, The Rock-it Group; Lisa Perez, Avalon Risk and Maxine Sebastiani, WebCargo by Freightos.
Setting the stage, Sandy invited the audience into the discussion opening with a Slido poll, asking whether the assemblage consider themselves empathetic leaders?
The overwhelming majority, in case you are keeping score, of this jam-packed room said "yes," which set up the panel's sharpest point:
"Research suggests that about half of leaders (business and otherwise) overestimate how empathetic they actually are."
The gap between a leader's intentions and an employee's experience became the thread that ran through nearly every voice that was raised, delivering an enlightened experience for everybody in the room.
The conversation covered managing remote teams, cross-training for resilience, multi-generational communication styles (including a genuinely entertaining exchange about whether a thumbs-up emoji is passive-aggressive), and how to attract younger talent into an industry that most people don't know exists until someone's father or boss pulls them into it.
But to the credit of this stellar group the panel hit hardest when it got personal.
Sandy Gregory and Lisa Perez both spoke openly about the sacrifices of building careers as single mothers — Sandy got emotional recounting early-morning drives to drop her daughter with family before business trips.
Lisa Perez described how her Mom retired early so she could watch her son.
Both ladies opened up and shared how their now-adult children have come back to thank them for making those choices, and the room felt it.
What made the session work and literally knocked the socks off the conferees, was the mix on the panel itself.
Sanderson brought the perspective of someone who joined Delta five weeks before the pandemic and watched the company avoid a single layoff by rallying together.
Amanda described herself as an introvert who once swore she'd never do another presentation and talked about building trust through metrics and humanization on remote teams.
Lisa emphasized clarity over control. Maxine, the youngest voice on the panel, offered the view from inside a tech company where communication norms are shifting in real time.
Maxine drew a laugh from the audience when she revealed her "thoughts of getting old" now as she approaches the ripe old age of 30.
The takeaway message from all four:
"Build teams by trusting people, knowing them as humans, and getting out of their way — and if you think you're already empathetic enough, you're probably not."
Scott Case
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