On April 10, Janet Zelenka, MBA ’82, spoke to a room of Executive MBA students, alumni and faculty and staff at NIU Naperville as part of our Executive in Residence, a series that provides a rare, behind-the-scenes look at leadership. She discussed her varied career path that eventually led her to Stericycle Inc., where she served as chief financial officer (CFO) and chief information officer (CIO) before retiring.
In a conversation with Associate Dean Sarah Marsh, Zelenka shared how her early teaching career at NIU served as a foundation for her career.
Zelenka joked that her career-planning skills were not her strong suit, relaying the story of when she got a job offer from Ameritech at a college job fair where she was an instructor. “I thought, ‘I will do this for a while, and then I will go back and teach.’ I think that was in 1984. I never went back, but I did use my teaching skills throughout my career.”
She began her corporate career as a data scientist for Ameritech, but she also learned “other fun things” like strategic planning, budgeting and customer service. This diverse career path helped Zelenka get ahead in the long term.
“Some advice I like to give is to move around in your career before you move up in your career,” she said. “When I was moving laterally, I remember someone told me that I had just taken my career to die. But it was the combination of skills that helped me to be marketable.”
In the 1990s, Zelenka got her first job in finance at Ameritech, eventually becoming CFO of the IT division. There, she led a 100+ team for the $1.3 billion IT organization and managed a $300 million outsourcing agreement for numerous data centers and led the team that negotiated all major software agreements.
“With every new job, I somehow lacked the ability to suffer from imposter syndrome. I always thought, ‘If it doesn’t work out, I can always go back and teach.’ I didn’t care that much about being promoted. I didn’t care about the title. Ironically, my interest in learning was what helped me get promoted.”
From there, Zelenka moved into leading internal audit at Essendant, where she climbed the ladder for 15 years to become CIO and then CFO.
“I operated outside the bounds of my function. I sought out change because I thought it was fun,” Zelenka said. “I always had a process approach, not a function approach. I think that’s because of how I was trained to think at NIU.”
Zelenka discussed how being a leader during periods of change required empathy.
“Turn-arounds and transformations are all about change, and you don’t get change without people,” she said. “But with change also comes grief, and so you have to build time for grief into the change process.”
She also reflected on the fact that often change comes with ethical dilemmas. One of Zelenka’s unwavering priorities throughout her career was ethical leadership and “doing what was right.”
“Be a good corporate citizen and take care of your people. Communicate and be kind whenever you can be,” she said.
She recalled a time when she went against company protocol, removing 100 people from the call center phones and heading to the basement when the storm that spawned the infamous Plainfield, Illinois, tornado was approaching close to the town of their facility in 1990.
“I looked out the window, and I could see the storm was headed for us even though there were no warnings,” she said. I remember someone said, ‘If you take 100 people off the line, you may not have your job when you come back. But I thought, you’re not looking out the window. And what would my mom say if I made them stay on the line and they got hurt? What would the headlines say?”
In the end, the deadly tornado missed the company’s office, but Zelenka’s bosses understood her decision.
Zelenka advised students to have the same outlook about ethical decisions that she always had: “When it comes to a job, I’m not violating any law for a boss,” she said. “I may need this job at this moment, but I don’t need it that bad.”
In 2019, Zelenka moved to Stericycle where she was CFO and eventually added the CIO title as well. The company had several major problems at the time she began.
“When I moved to Stericycle, I had to decide which problem I wanted to deal with first,” she said. She went on to revamp investor relations, resetting guidance, building trust with analysts and investors through transparent and clear external reporting and introducing technology to streamline the quarterly reporting and earnings process. She also led the divestiture of numerous under-performing businesses across the globe, resulting in improved income and cash flow on a strong core business. Under her leadership, Stericycle successfully reduced and restructured debt from $2.7 billion to $1.4 billion. In November 2024, the company successfully closed on the sale of Stericycle to WM (Waste Management) for $7.2 billion, a 39% premium over the stock price.
Today, Zelenka is retired and sits on several boards. For one of the companies, she has taken on the role of AI expert and reads one to two hours daily on AI and other financial and technical topics. She often considers how humans are using AI to serve our world.
“Why don’t we act as a society that prioritizes taking care of each other and being ethical, alongside technology?” she said. “There are always going to be a few people who want to game or corrupt the system, but most do the right thing, and we can all fight the good fight.
Learn more about our Executive in Residence program.
