Authored by Jacob Ambrose Willson, Senior Editor, Criticaleye

Following a growth-laden five years as CEO of IRIS Software Group, Elona Mortimer-Zhika is now enjoying a burgeoning non-executive career. In this interview with Criticaleye’s Jacob Ambrose Willson, she explains how she is supporting the next generation of leaders.

Elona Mortimer-Zhika was born in Albania during a dictatorship that was marked by extreme isolationism and repression, which makes her ascent to the highest levels of corporate leadership even more remarkable.
 

As a child, consuming books at a rate of knots and a fervour for maths – stoked by her father, an economist – made the world seem bigger, until she was awarded a scholarship to an international college in Wales at the age of 16. Elona is certain that this experience created the foundation for the leader she would one day become.
 

“There were children there from over 100 different countries, and they knew a lot more than I did,” she tells Criticaleye. “Most importantly, they came with different ideas, different paths and a cognitive diversity that I wasn't used to, considering that Albania was such a closed-off country. I had never even met anybody that wasn’t Albanian before, let alone different races, religions and people with different perspectives.
 

“It taught me the importance of never being the smartest person in the room, because the only way you can grow is if you surround yourself with amazing people, and the true power of diversity when it comes to cognitive thinking … [is to  look] at the same problem from a different perspective. Because then you get better decision-making, more innovation and productive friction, which is what every team needs, and the power of constructive collaboration over quick consensus.”
 

Following in her father’s footsteps, Elona soon jumped into a career in chartered accounting, excelling at the likes of Arthur Andersen and Deloitte before transitioning into finance and leadership roles in the UK software business Acision (which later became Mavenir). The largest chunk of her executive career was spent driving fabulous growth at IRIS Software Group. Having initially been appointed CFO in 2016, Elona had a short spell as COO before ascending to the CEO position in 2019.

 

Driving Massive Growth
 

During five-and-a-half years in the top job, the business grew threefold via a mix of strong organic growth and dozens of acquisitions, expanded into the lucrative US software market and ultimately completed a US$4 billion exit for the private equity investor Hg Capital, one of the largest PE deals in the whole of Europe over 2023.
 

While this outcome was testament to the quality of the growth trajectory IRIS had been on during Elona’s leadership, she believes that the exit would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the people and culture that had been cultivated over the years leading up to it.
 

“The part that I am most proud of was our culture,” she says. “There were 700 people at IRIS when I joined, and 4,000 by the time I left. We were a great place to work in every country we were at for five years running. We were a great place to work for women, for wellness, for development. Forty-nine percent of our employees were women. 
 

“I've got to say that our culture was the biggest enabler and weapon that we used … [to drive] our success and [it was the main way] … that we achieved our growth, our innovation and our international expansion.”

Leaving the business in late 2024, a year after the sale in 2023, felt like a natural conclusion to an eight-year journey for Elona: “On a professional level, I felt that I had achieved some key milestones that I was really proud of, and the centre of gravity for the business was moving to the US. Success meant that the US was the biggest market, and that's where growth was going to be. So the leadership had to be based in the US.
 

“I was so proud of what the team and I achieved together. I felt that ‘my baby’ had graduated and it was going through the next chapter of its life, and a new leader would be the best fit to take it through that cycle.”
 

Her decision was also shaped by a desire to spend more time with her children in the UK as they entered their formative years, alongside an ambition to pursue a Board career and charity work in order to “give back, particularly to the underprivileged and underrepresented, because that is my own life journey and story”.
 

A Purposeful Portfolio Career
 

Within a few months of leaving IRIS, she had successfully built a portfolio of non-executive roles at several PE-backed companies based across Europe with many shared traits; organic and acquisition-fuelled growth; market leadership in their own verticals; and proprietary data that will prove vital in the era of AI.
 

Elona views her role as a Chair and non-executive on several PE Boards as a natural bridge between the investors and leadership teams, given her experiences in both camps. “Often what you find is that the investors expect the company to do things much faster than management are able to execute given the natural constraints of running a business.”
 

For her, it’s about tempering expectations from the PE house and helping management to move faster so that there is a meeting in the middle. “I try to share some of my experiences and share where I went wrong, because a lot of times we learn more about things that we get wrong than things we get right. The power I have is that I've been in their [management’s] shoes. I know how hard it is, but I can also give them some practical tips around how they could shortcut some of the decision making.”
 

Reflecting on the transition to non-executive work, Elona says: “I don't sit on any Boards where I don't understand what the value is that I'm bringing. My criteria is quite simple: great people and businesses I can genuinely make an impact on and continue to grow. It's been really exciting. I have the flexibility to see my family more, as well as give back, which I really wanted to do from a philanthropic perspective. It's a new chapter and a great chapter so far.”
 

A lifetime learner by her own admission, Elona has already taken a lot from her new portfolio career, but the number one lesson she has learned is that being successful in business is 100 percent contingent on people. 
 

“Everybody is dealing with a slightly different flavour of the same problem. When it comes down to it, the right people and the right mindset are always the answer to everything. Have we got the best people around us? Have we got the cognitive diversity in the room so they can teach us something new? Because that's the only way we will progress. Have we built a culture of thirst for learning and curiosity within our businesses so that no matter what happens around us, we can move at pace and continue to adopt at the same rate of change? Have we trained our teams to fail fast and start again?
 

“For many years, I thought failure was the opposite of success, and it's not. It's part of success. In today's AI world, it’s vital to be building that high-performing culture where we remain curious, where new ideas are worked on, not taken through long approval committee processes, where it is safe to fail as long as we fail fast, learn from it and become better as we try again. These are the discussions that I have at every Board meeting, regardless of what the problem is.”
 

This philosophy sits at the centre of Elona’s own extraordinary journey and success, and is something she is imparting on the next generation of leaders through her Board and charity work.