The Moment That Sparked a Career Pivot

It was another beautiful, sunny day in Auckland. I was doing a little work in my Airbnb before setting out to explore for the day. This had become my routine since deciding on a whim to solo travel through the South Pacific for six weeks. At the time, I was in the throes of a brutal job search that had persisted for more than a year and a half, and I had developed a habit of incessantly checking LinkedIn. Some days, scrolling through LinkedIn feels mindless and uneventful, yet other days it feels too dystopian to process. This day was one of the latter.

As I was scrolling through the influencer BS and AI drivel I felt a familiar outrage-induced heat rising in my body. The world is objectively falling apart in every meaningful possible way, democracy is eroding before our eyes, there is immense human suffering playing out live on our smartphones, and no one is even talking about it on LinkedIn. How is this possible? I was about to dive into drafting a strongly worded post about the state of the world and the very telling silence from the business community when an intrusive thought stopped me in my tracks. “What if my post has a negative impact on my job search?”

And that was the spark I needed to take a leap and make a major career pivot. If my job prospects are potentially damaged because I’m unafraid to stand up for what’s right and call authoritarianism and genocide by their names, this was no space that I should be lending my talents and energy to. I had been daydreaming about a different career on and off for over five years at this point, but never seriously considered making any significant changes. But in that moment, after literally hundreds of interviews and networking discussions without any job offers, after escaping to New Zealand to get a break from the US news cycle, I felt a sense of clarity knowing that corporate America was no longer for me.

How could I continue to fight for the “opportunity” to be selected for a role within organizations that are choosing to remain silent in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of racism and oppression, in the face of eroding human rights for my own community? The values misalignment finally reached a tipping point, and I couldn’t un-feel the way I now felt about my corporate HR career.

If you know anyone in HR, you’re likely aware of how challenging the past six years have been for the profession. We were the first ones called during the pandemic when we were tasked with becoming public health experts overnight. We are the face of DEI efforts (as much as shouldn’t be the case) and blamed for both not doing more and doing too much at the same time. We’re often the only one in the room advocating for the underdog and sharing difficult truths with leaders, all while carrying the weight of everyone else’s bad behavior on our shoulders.

I don’t highlight these things to excuse HR for its own bad actors and bad behavior because there is plenty of that, too. I’m simply trying to highlight that it is a tough, emotionally taxing job and I think it’s a little unfair how much vitriol is thrown at the profession. What I know to be true from my years in HR is that there are a lot of great leaders out there who went into the work for the right reasons, to help build better workplaces. I was initially drawn to HR for more pragmatic reasons like employability and starting salary data, but once I had a few years under my belt and saw the impact HR could have in organizations, I was hooked.  

For all its flaws and all the negativity hurled in its direction, HR, when done well, can feel incredibly meaningful and rewarding. Seeing programs that you’ve built inspire and support employees to reach their full potential, watching employees you’ve helped develop take on their next role, feeling the energy in the room shift when something unlocks for someone you’re coaching. There is something magical about witnessing someone step into their power and become the best version of themselves.

This was genuinely how I felt about HR and corporate America earlier in my career. When friends who had chosen more noble career paths would challenge me, I would proudly tell them that I could make corporate America better from within and that once I was in a top position, I would be able to effect real change. As I reflect on this now, I can see clearly that I needed to believe these things to help myself sleep at night. As a first-generation college student, I co-founded an anti-genocide student group while studying political science. And then a few years later my very first professional HR role was with the largest defense contractor in the world. What happened?

What happened was that Lockheed Martin was the best job offer that I had on hand when I finished grad school. I was in grad school at the peak of the financial collapse of 2008, and it wasn’t exactly a time when candidates could hold out for a dream job. And to someone from humble beginnings like me, it was a dream job in a lot of ways. It offered a great salary to start building a life and paying off my student loans, it provided stability, endless learning opportunities and new experiences, and it was by corporate standards a great place to start building my adult resume.

After Lockheed Martin, I went to PepsiCo, a company I truly loved and still admire today. I honestly can’t say enough positive things about working for PepsiCo and yet, at the same time, their financial performance comes from selling ultra processed and sugary foods and beverages to consumers who are already plagued with health issues. From PepsiCo, I went back into the defense industry to work for L3Harris Technologies, again drawn to the financial offer and career growth opportunities. This is where I really “grew up” in my career so to speak. By the time I left I had been promoted multiple times, had completed an expat assignment in the UK, had been the youngest person on a senior HR leadership team, and reported to the woman who is their CHRO today.

When I left L3Harris, I was looking for a different type of experience. I had always worked for massive organizations, and I wanted to try something a little smaller, which is how I wound up at Prologis in San Francisco. Unless you work in commercial real estate, you’ve likely never heard of Prologis. They are the largest publicly traded industrial real estate investment trust (REIT) and the products you buy and use everyday flow through their global properties.  This was the first time I was reporting directly to the CHRO and supporting the C-suite leadership team, which was an eye-opening and formative experience.

Prologis is by all accounts, a great company, and they treated me very well. I was able to lead teams through significant M&A activity, helped build new business lines, traveled internationally, and I was finally making enough money to make a serious dent in my student loans. I was in a high visibility, high impact vice president role and felt immense pride in having personally made it from first-generation college grad to executive HR leader in a Fortune 500 organization. This was truly the apex of my career and there are so many positive things to reflect on from this period of my life. So why was I feeling an internal tug telling me that something wasn’t right?

Now that I had occupied senior leadership roles in two different organizations, I was starting to gain a clearer understanding of how things really worked in the corporate world. Supporting a C-suite leadership team really is a wild HR experience. Up until this point in my career, I had naively assumed leaders who made it to the C-suite were the best of the best, and I was now learning otherwise. A few of the leaders I was now working with exhibited some of the worst leadership traits and questionable ethical standards that I had ever been exposed to. There were, of course, strong leaders among this mix as well but I found myself continuously shocked by the behavior that was not only tolerated but seemingly encouraged and modeled from the top down.

These weren’t things that most in the organization would ever see. The organization had extremely high engagement scores, low employee attrition, and limitless opportunities for expansion. From the outside, it seemed like an ideal place to work. And by a lot of standards, it was. However, I was starting to feel quite conflicted about my time in this organization.

This experience is also where I started to wonder if the same types of HR leaders I highlighted earlier in this post – those who went into this work for the right reasons – inevitably wind up turning into unrecognizable versions of themselves in the pursuit of the top seat at the table. After all, if the CHRO in an organization can’t stand up for what’s right and model ethical behavior, how can anyone else be expected to do the same?

What I take away from this experience is not that C-suite leaders are inherently bad people but rather that the unrelenting demands of investors in a barely regulated capitalistic system fundamentally changes people. Leaders are forced to make calculated tradeoffs and sacrifices to get into these roles. These changes may start off subtly, but they accumulate and compound over the years and many may not even recognize how much they have changed by the time they reach the C-suite.

The point of this article isn’t to disparage organizations and people who were good to me. And I am also not trying to paint a picture of my own moral superiority. Rather, I am trying to share an honest account of my experience in corporate America – the good and the bad – following my own personal quest for meaning and purpose. How millennial of me, right?

There are things I will certainly miss from my corporate HR career: the opportunities to have an impact, the international travel and ability to experience new cultures, many of the people and achievements that I’ll always be proud of, and the opportunity to make great money.

But I know that I am also walking away from experiences that I’ve never been able to reconcile; things that I legitimately still have the occasional nightmare about. Things like being told by my own manager that it would be a “career limiting move” if I didn’t bring my laptop on a mere three-day long weekend trip. Like the time I was expected to demote a 20+ year leader who had never received feedback the same day her mother died of cancer. Or the time I was told to call a new hire to see if she was able to start a week earlier than previously agreed so that HR could hit its quarterly diversity metrics (because, yes, we absolutely used to have numeric quotas tied to our own performance goals). Or worse yet, when I was told to ignore blatant and documented bullying and sexual harassment because the accused men brought in millions of dollars. It seems almost fitting that my last corporate HR role ended in me having to report my own boss for making racist and discriminatory comments in front of other HR team members.

I’m not perfect myself. I’ve made plenty of mistakes throughout my career and I have done things that I am not proud of and that don’t reflect the way I want to show up in this world. I also must admit that I may not have ever had the courage to take a leap into a new career path had it not been for the challenges of the current job market. I am grateful for every experience that has led me to where I am today. I am looking forward with clarity and purpose (and some nerves if I’m being honest) and feeling energized for what is to come in this second act of my career.