Tina Frausto has spent decades walking into complexity and walking out with results. A transformation leader with experience at companies like Equifax and Verizon Wireless, she's built her career at the intersection of technology and business — shaped around a willingness to take on the challenges others quietly sidestep.
"I tend to like to get into the types of initiatives that are very complex, very challenging, and cross-functional in nature," she says. "I have both a technology and a business background, which I think lends itself very nicely to those types of initiatives. I kind of understand both sides of the fence." Beyond the corporate world, Tina is also a mentor, a nonprofit co-founder, a member of the advisory board for Georgia State University's Women's Leadership program, and a volunteer with PATH Builders. She shows up wherever complexity needs a leader.
Leadership, Not a Label
There's a phrase Tina uses that says a lot about how she thinks. When asked to define a "transformational leader" — the kind of title that shows up all over LinkedIn — she doesn't embrace it. She reframes it.
"Encourage, inspire, and motivate employees to perform in ways that create meaningful change?" she says, quoting the standard definition. "I think that's what any leader is — and should do." Then comes the line that says it all: "I wouldn't call it a transformational leader. I call that leadership."
For Tina, "transformation leader" has a more specific meaning: someone who leads transformations — large-scale initiatives that change how employees do their work or how customers receive products and services. And in a world where AI and market forces are speeding things up, she believes the ability to lead transformations is no longer a specialty. It's a baseline. "There's an element of being able to lead a transformation that's required for any leadership position in a company."
I wouldn't call it a transformational leader. I call that leadership — that's what any leader is and should do.
The Generalist Advantage
Tina describes herself as a generalist — not as a limitation, but as a deliberate choice. Where a specialist goes deep in one domain, she's built breadth across many: technology, customer operations, marketing, finance, and program leadership. That range is what's allowed her to be effective in situations she's never encountered before.
When she was tapped to lead Equifax's Business Services Center — a global call center she had never managed — she didn't have a playbook for that specific domain. What she had was the ability to form the right relationships, build a road map, and execute against it using the expertise of the people around her. "It's a matter of forming those relationships, having that influence, and then being able to create and execute against a strategic road map." The result was a center that went from overstaffed and underperforming to effective — in a role she'd never held before.
She's candid that the generalist path isn't for everyone. "There are people that are specialists who are absolutely phenomenal at what they do — thank goodness we have them. It's what keeps the heartbeat of the company going in a lot of cases." The real question, she says, is whether you love moving across disciplines and driving change, or whether you love going deep. Both matter.
Being more of a generalist gave me the advantage of being able to be picked up and put in any situation that needed change.
From the Gym Floor to the Boardroom
What a lot of people don't know about Tina is that her work extends well beyond the corporate world. She and her husband Diego co-founded a nonprofit focused on connecting underrepresented youth in the Atlanta area with STEM education — using basketball as the way in.
The thinking was practical: traditional STEM outreach wasn't reaching these kids. Basketball was. "We actually started at a gym and put a STEM lab right in the middle of it," she says. "You can't reach a lot of these kids through the normal means. But you can get to them through basketball."
The nonprofit turned out to be a lesson in how much corporate experience doesn't transfer. Fundraising, which the team assumed would be straightforward, was their biggest obstacle. Companies shut the door when they heard "basketball," assuming it was a sports program. "We really, really underestimated how challenging it would be to change that narrative," she says.
The lesson traveled back to her corporate work: you can't communicate from your own enthusiasm. You have to speak to people from where they are. Whether you're asking a company to fund a nonprofit or asking an organization to adopt a new system, the principle holds.
You have to come at it from their lens — think about what does it mean to them, what's the "so what" to them, and not just from your perspective.
The Atlas Project: Zero Attrition, Years of Family
If Tina has a proudest professional moment, it's a program called Atlas — a full lead-to-cash business transformation at Equifax that spanned more than 20 countries. The project standardized processes and deployed a technology stack across every geography the company operated in. By any measure, it was one of the most complex enterprise transformations possible.
The team launched their first site in 18 months — at a time when consultants said the industry average was seven years. Nobody left voluntarily, even through years of schedules that kept people away from their families for weeks at a stretch. "We were in the basement, we were there for years. Nobody left the project. Nobody left the programs. And we had fun. We are still family." A group from that core team still gets together in Atlanta — just to see each other.
Tina credits the result not to the plan, but to the culture around it. The CFO who championed the project made two key calls: he pulled the team fully out of their day-to-day roles, and he asked for the best people available — not the ones easy to spare. "I want the top people, because we're going to live with this for the next 20 years."
We had zero voluntary attrition. We were in the basement for years — nobody left the project, nobody left the programs. And we had fun. We are still family.
The Science of Keeping It Together
How do you keep a multi-year, multi-country transformation from grinding people down? For Tina, it starts with reading the room and ends with everyone feeling safe to speak up.
"It is 100% my job to be a situational leader and a situational communicator," she says, "because you do have all those different personalities coming in. You have different subcultures. It's my job to figure out how to mesh that together." During Atlas, when the room got too tense, she didn't push through — she paused. When some contractors from South America started playing guitar on a break, she let it happen. "Then some of my other folks got up and started dancing the tango. We were laughing. We were getting to know each other. Sometimes it's just reading the room and providing an environment where it's OK to do that."
She also believes in what she calls "intense moments of fellowship" — space for real, sometimes difficult conversations. "It is never a personal exchange, ever. It's always about the business decision or the process." Once a decision is made, everyone moves forward together. Nobody goes back out to relitigate through side conversations. "If they didn't say it in here, they can't go out and stir up a bunch of rocks." That discipline, she says, is what keeps teams functional under pressure.
The Buffer Nobody Talks About
There's a leadership responsibility Tina says almost never shows up in a job description — and that she thinks matters as much as anything else a leader does.
"Your job is the buffer," she says. "It's never in the job description — but your job is the buffer." Every organization pushes pressure down from the top. A leader's job is to absorb it, filter it, and deliver only what the team needs to execute — in the way they can actually receive it. "It's knowing when to press the accelerator and when to press the clutch."
Connected to that is something simpler: actually listening. "How many times have you heard someone ask, 'How are you today?' and then keep walking? Because it's a habit. Just something to say." The gap between a good leader and a great one, in her view, is whether you're genuinely asking — and whether you hear the answer. When leaders get caught up in the stress of a transformation and lose track of the people inside it, that's when things start to break.
Your job is the buffer. It's never in the job description — but your job is the buffer.
Think Skills, Not Titles
When Tina mentors younger professionals — and she mentors a lot of them — a few things keep coming up. The biggest one: stop chasing titles. Chase skills instead.
"Don't expect to define your next role by title," she says. "Think about what skills you need to acquire to get to the job you aspire to have." She's stepped back in her own career at least twice to gain experience that later moved her forward. She doesn't look back on those moves as setbacks.
"You're not stepping back. You're moving forward and acquiring additional skill sets that you need for whatever career aspiration you want to obtain." She's also quick to add a note of practicality. "We love to tell young people: find your dream job, find what you love doing. But we forget to tell them: make sure it can pay the bills." Her version of the advice: know what energizes you, and build toward that — with your eyes open about what it pays.
You're not stepping back. You're moving forward and acquiring additional skill sets that you need for whatever career aspiration you want to obtain.
A Sabbatical Well Spent
A few years ago, Tina did something she'd never really done in her life: she took a real break. After decades of moving directly from one role to the next — leaving Verizon on a Friday and starting at Equifax on a Monday, same pattern at every transition — she finally stopped. For someone who'd been working since age 16 and carried two jobs through college, it took some getting used to.
"The ability to take a minute to reenergize, to refresh, to spend a little extra time with friends and family — the mental health aspect of it was phenomenal," she says. That time gave her space to step back, reconnect, and think clearly about what she actually wanted next.
She came out of it with a clear sense of direction: a role where she can drive transformation — as a business execution leader, a frontline operations leader, or a chief of staff. Whatever the title, the mission is the same as it's always been.
What runs through all of it — the corporate transformations, the nonprofit, the mentoring, the sabbatical — is the same belief: real change doesn't come from processes or technology or strategy decks. It comes from people who show up consistently, pay attention, and keep asking how the people around them are actually doing. That's the through line in everything Tina does. And if you've ever been on her team, you already know it.
