I learned my most useful professional skills as a child.
I had difficult and traumatic childhood. Both my parents were alcoholics and my father was domestically abusive to my mother. But adversity taught me to be strong, independent, fearless and resilient. I don’t think I’d have had those skills if I hadn’t had the childhood I did. I was quite withdrawn and quiet as a child but grew into myself as an adult when I realised that there were actually positives to draw from a childhood like mine.
HR offered me what I’d never had growing up.
I left school at sixteen and did admin jobs before going to college to study business. HR was one of the topics we studied and I quickly saw that beneath all the processes, it was about giving people an environment to thrive in. I’d never had that as a child and I was drawn to creating it for other people. In one of my first HR jobs, I was talking to a woman about her increased absence and she confided that she was in an abusive relationship. She hadn’t told anyone about it before and it was a really powerful moment for me. I gave her the support she needed to make the right decision for herself. It was a privilege to be in a position to that.
There’s a lot of industry talk and not early enough action.
At the moment, there’s a lot of focus on menopause for instance. I’ve been going through it myself for two years and it’s a bitch! I’m open and vocal about my experience. I’ll take a meeting break because of a hot flush if I need it. But a lot of women don’t feel they can be this open. And that’s the problem: whether it’s the menopause, mental health or diversity and inclusion, we as an industry are prone to looking for the next big challenge. So we talk about a challenge, write strategies on it, discuss it – and often move onto the next thing before we’ve really impacted on the original goal. I’d like to see a far more considered approach that uses data and feedback to check if we’ve embedded change and made concrete progress on thorny issues. There’s no good giving all the line managers a webinar on mental health if they roll their eyes the next time someone needs time off for depression.
