Elizabeth LaChapelle

I attribute my success to being comfortable with ambiguity and staying curious about learning from other teams and directors. It's really easy to look at things from your own point of view, but I've found it's important to learn more about other perspectives. For example, when I had to create an onboarding program from scratch during COVID, I thought I understood what was needed, but it turned out there was a lot about IT network provisioning that I just didn't understand, and it really impacted the entire experience. I ended up getting really comfortable talking to people, understanding different systems, and learning so much about IT infrastructure and how to partner with them to make sure that when managers are hiring, they do what's necessary to help ensure smooth onboarding. Staying curious and learning about different things helps keep everything fresh.

The best piece of advice my manager told me is actually a quote from Parks and Rec: it's better to whole-ass one thing than to half-ass multiple things. It's about focusing on one thing at a time and really perfecting it and getting it down, versus getting distracted and wanting to take on a bunch of different things. Really being able to focus on that priority has been crucial for me.

I would say just be very open to learning and understand that nobody has a manual, nobody knows all the answers. You just have to try to make the best decisions you can with the information that you have. Rather than dwelling on mistakes, just learn from them and try not to repeat them. I'd also say that imposter syndrome is super common, but you have to work past it. You absolutely deserve a seat at the table.

I think there's a lot of speculation about how AI is going to impact HR, and I think it's important for people to acknowledge that there are ways to use AI efficiently to help, but there are also a lot of ways that it can detract from being an HR professional. It can filter out too many candidates during the interview process and make decisions that could potentially lead to liability and risk. So it's important for AI to be used as a tool, but very softly, versus just blindly falling into that. I think that's something the next generation of HR is really going to have to grapple with.

I consider myself a very highly ethical person in terms of being truthful and honest, both in my personal life and my professional life. I believe in being upfront, even if things are uncomfortable, but doing so in a way that shows compassion and kindness. I think there's a challenge in HR because sometimes you can't talk about things because they're confidential, but I think it's important to try to be an effective communicator so that when things do happen and you have to break news or do something difficult, you have a foundation of trust to build from and work through.