Sadé Muhammad is a cultural strategist and ecosystem builder working at the intersection of media, leadership, and partnerships.
She is the CEO and Co-Founder of ZEVEN, a platform that designs high-trust ecosystems where influence, capital, and narrative align to drive long-term strategic growth. Her work helps brands, institutions, and talent navigate moments of expansion, repositioning, and cultural relevance.
Before founding ZEVEN, Sadé spent more than 15 years in legacy media, most recently as Chief Marketing & Impact Officer at TIME, where she developed and scaled leadership platforms including TIME Impact House and The Closers — convening executives, policymakers, creatives, and philanthropists around systems-level collaboration.
Her work centers on a core belief: that culture is infrastructure, and that the organizations positioned to lead the next era will be those that invest meaningfully in the ecosystems they help shape.
Sadé frequently speaks on the intersection of culture, influence, and institutional growth, with appearances at Google, Wharton, Harvard, Adweek, and Cannes Lions.
Sadé joined The WIE Suite for a masterclass on one of the most underestimated forces in a leader's career: narrative, and what happens when you learn to use it deliberately.
Sadé opened with a reframe that set the tone for everything that followed. Every person in the room was already exceptional at their work. That, she argued, was never the issue. The issue is that at a certain point in a career, the rules change entirely, and no one tells you.
"You do not get rewarded for what you do. You get rewarded for how you're understood."
Doing good work earns a seat at the table. Narrative determines which tables you are invited to. The leaders who feel frustrated, overlooked, or misunderstood are almost never facing a performance problem. They are facing a perception problem, and those two things require completely different solutions. Performance says do more, work harder, be more visible. Perception says step back and ask: have I actually defined what I do, in my own words, on my own terms?
The most clarifying distinction Sadé offered was this: narrative is not what you say about yourself. It is what people understand about you when you are not in the room. That gap between the two is where most careers stall.
She introduced a four-pillar framework built around perception, meaning, belief, and presence, each one mapping to a question from the self-assessment she opened with. Most leaders, she observed, communicate from the level of execution: here is what I did, here are the results. Fewer communicate from the level of positioning: here is the problem I am built to solve, here is the pattern underneath all of my work. The shift from the first to the second is where narrative begins.
"Performance is pretty much invisible without positioning. You stop describing the tasks and start articulating your perspective, the problems you are built to solve. That is the pattern underneath your work."
One of the most freeing ideas in Sadé's framework is that a compelling career narrative does not require an uninterrupted upward trajectory. It requires coherence. Pivots, detours, unexpected departures, and difficult chapters are not liabilities to explain away. They are material to work with.
"If you can create the through line, you will notice people start going, oh, cool, makes sense, how can I help, as opposed to walking away uncertain."
She offered a three-part structure for building that coherence: past proof, which establishes the historical pattern; present-day application, where that pattern is most visible right now; and future direction, where the pattern is clearly headed next. When those three elements are in place, a leader controls the story. They choose what to include and what to leave out, not based on what feels mandatory to disclose, but based on what is genuinely relevant to where they are going.
Her prompt to the room: finish this sentence. Every role I have ever had was actually about blank. The answers that came back, transformation, building community, bringing order to chaos, creating something that did not exist before, revealed through lines that had always been there, waiting to be named.
The third pillar of Sadé's framework, belief, is about trust that travels. It is what people believe about you and say about you in rooms you are not in, and it is built long before any particular opportunity or ask arises.
"The most important question is not who do I know. It is who would advocate for me accurately."
Accurate advocacy is specific. It is not simply she was great to work with. It is a precise articulation of the problem you solve and the level at which you operate. Sadé shared a turning point early in her career when she realized her manager, despite genuinely believing in her work, did not have the political capital within the organization to move things forward on her behalf. That realization shifted how she built relationships entirely: laterally, above, and outside the company, always leading with what value she could bring rather than what she needed.
The practical exercise she left the room with: identify who would advocate for you accurately right now, determine what specifically they would say, and then assess whether that matches what you actually want to be known for. If there is a gap, that is where the work is.
The final pillar, presence, is where Sadé pushed the room furthest. Visibility, she argued, is necessary but not sufficient. Showing up to conversations others have built is a starting point. The leaders who shape their fields do something different: they convene the conversations that are not happening yet.
"Presence is not how you show up in the room. It is the rooms that you build."
She was careful to make this feel accessible rather than daunting. Building a room does not require launching a platform or producing a conference. It can start with two people, a question that is not being asked in your field, and the willingness to be the person who asks it. The point is intentionality: designing the ecosystem you want to be known within, rather than waiting to be admitted to one someone else has built.
Her closing question to the group: is there a conversation in your field that is not happening, that you are uniquely positioned to convene? The answers that surfaced, around AI's human infrastructure, non-traditional career tracks for women, and the perimenopause market, suggested there was no shortage of rooms waiting to be built.
When narrative is working, Sadé closed, it reduces friction across the board. People introduce you correctly without being coached. Opportunities align faster because the right people know to look for you. You stop over-explaining. And you are invited into rooms at the level you are actually operating, not the level of your last title.
"This is not about becoming someone else. It is about becoming more precise about who you already are."
