Dee Taylor-Akins, M.Sc., SPHR, SHRM-SCP

I attribute my success to my parents. I think that my parents taught me so much growing up as a child, teaching me respect of others, teaching me that I have the ability to do anything if I put my mind to it. I also attribute it to being in organizations like Girl Scouts. I was a Girl Scout until I was 18, and I learned so much from being in scouting. I think being in those types of programs helps people throughout their lives. It helps people be able to talk to others and communicate with others and interact with others. Getting your child into those types of programs can be rewarding for them, not just at the time when they're in elementary school or middle school or high school, but that groundwork or that foundation can actually go with them for their entire life. I think it's important to get our kids grounded in association, and also with parents always having an open door for your child to come in and talk to you about anything.

The best career advice that I've received is that sometimes, if it's something that you don't know, don't be ashamed to ask the questions. In my career, I think asking questions has gotten me the information I needed to get things done, and get them done very quickly, so I think always asking questions. Other advice that I have received is don't sweat the small stuff. If you make a mistake, there's always an opportunity to learn from that mistake and teach others around that mistake as well. I think sharing what mistakes you've made with others is helpful. I think it's helpful for you as a person, just knowing that if you make a mistake, you can overcome it. I think being an overcomer is really important, and we all make mistakes. I think that oftentimes people are harder on themselves when they do make mistakes.

If I were to give advice to young women going into the HR field, I would just say that HR is ever-changing, and you do have the ability to move into different portions of HR, different departments within HR, and there's no limitations to what you can do. From an HR perspective, it also opens the door for you to move into other areas, such as operations and other parts of the company. When I worked for Folgers, I was tasked with working in an operational type of environment where it required me to put on an HR hat, but then also required me to put on an operations hat, and actually manage a manufacturing facility for a period of time. HR is a great foundation for you to launch into other parts of the company. For those who are not in HR right now, working in operations and moving from operations to more of a people leader is also a pathway. I encourage them to learn as much as they can, and if they're fresh out of college and trying to figure out how to break into HR, a lot of people break in through recruitment. That's how I broke in. I was a recruiter for a period of time, and then when I got into the recruiter space, I ended up moving into more of the HR specialist employee relations space, and then from there, moving on to organizational development and design, and strategy, and all these other roles, like people culture. I think there's certainly a great pathway in the field. I think that right now, learning AI is important, so being involved in really creating a foundation of learning what AI is, learning how companies will be utilizing it in the future will be very important for maintaining a role within an organization, from an HR perspective, and also from any perspective of any type of area of a company that you might want to work in. You would have to understand what AI is here for and what the future may look like.

The biggest challenges in my field right now is AI, because executives are expecting HR professionals to help move the company along in the path of AI. It's not just a technical problem. Oftentimes, people look at AI and say, okay, the technical teams, the IT groups, they're going to handle this. That's not the case, because in order for an organization to be successful, they're going to have to lean on their HR departments to help facilitate and help manage the change and the transformation of the organization. It's going to be critical for HR people to really understand how to move the company forward, and that's why I'm launching this company, Org Movement, that will be coming out in just a few months. We need to have some help for our folks, some help for our HR professionals to really understand how to position the company and move the company forward to AI adoption and people working in AI and understanding AI. It's not just the simple fact of replacing people, because AI is here, but it's not really here to replace. Although I think some executives are thinking, oh, we don't need people anymore, after I've done my research and have been working in the area as well, I understand that it's a little different. You will still need people in order to function. I think people's roles will change in how they're functioning, but you'll still need people. It's going to be critical for HR partners and executives to help their executive teams understand that. It's going to take them really getting in to see what roles and jobs AI can actually do, versus which ones they really can't do, and then taking that back to their exec team to say, here's where we are, here's where we're going to be in the next 5 to 10 years, so what would the workforce plan look like in 5 to 7 years? And bringing that to that exec team and showing them, okay, this is what you're looking at. This is how many people you're going to need, this is how much AI you're going to need moving forward.

I think for me, treating people with respect is really important. I've had the opportunity to work with the Smucker's company, and I learned so much when I worked with that company. I was able to meet the CEOs of the organization, and they had this value that they had with the company. It was always, look for the good in others. I think as we work in industry, or if we're even just meeting people on the street, we always should have the intent of looking for the good in others immediately. It's not something you just do after you've met someone, but just know that people don't always have bad intent. I think we have to look for the good in others as we meet people, as we move around into working in our daily work, to know that if something happens, it doesn't mean that person meant it to happen. They may have not had a clue that they said something off-key to you, or what have you, so I think looking for the good in others, and it's always good to talk through situations with others as you come in contact with people. The other thing that I learned from that organization is that people are important to companies. I think oftentimes, as we think about making more money and revenue and that type of thing, we often forget about that. People are the driver to great companies, and as long as we treat our people well, companies will do well. So culture has everything to do with whether or not you're successful or not, and I think we should not forget about that.