Her Story
About Jackie
As Director of Talent Management for REI, I lead a team responsible for creating meaningful employee experiences across our organization of about 16,000 employees. My typical day involves directing and influencing where our programs are going, whether we're launching new initiatives or optimizing existing ones for the enterprise. This can look like anything from designing how employees go through our performance process, to how they get recognized, to how they think about their career growth. We help leaders really think about the talent on their team and how they can develop that talent. A significant part of my work involves ensuring we reach our incredibly diverse workforce, which includes folks in stores, distribution centers, headquarters, remote employees, and our sales and customer service teams who are on the phones all day. We really have to think about all of those different personas. We're constantly having meetings about communications, understanding where employees are currently and where we want them to be, looking at gaps, and thinking about change management principles to help employees become aware of and engage with our programs. From an optimization perspective, we're always gathering feedback from employees and asking what else we can do to improve their experience.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Jackie
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say definitely collaboration. I'm a strong collaborator, and that's where a lot of the feedback that I get comes from the relationships that I've built. For me, collaboration is really important because it brings that diversity of thought. It doesn't always have to come from me - I don't probably have the best ideas, and so I'm really leaning on stakeholders, my partners, my team members, my direct reports to bring a lot of those ideas. We have discussions about what is actually going to be the best idea for the business. I think pretty much my entire career has been about making sure that idea generation and collaboration happens, so that when we are ready to finally launch something or make changes to a program, everyone feels like they've been brought along, they understand what we're doing, and they're ready to support it.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
It's not just about putting your head down and doing the work, it's also about communicating your impact. I think a lot of the times, as a person of color and a very proud Latina, I have always been told by my parents - and I think this is a situation for most first-generation individuals - that you put your head down, work hard, don't say anything, just do your work. I did that the first probably 15 years of my career, and then realized it wasn't getting me anywhere. So I had to learn how to communicate the things that I was doing, because it's not an easy thing for folks that are first generation or have parents who didn't grow up in a corporate environment. That is still something that I'm developing and continue to work hard on, making sure that I'm lifting up and saying, do people understand what me and my team are working on? Am I communicating that impact in a way that is sharing to broader stakeholders? I think that's really important when you're growing your career, because when people are in a room talking about you and you're not in that room, they better know what you've been working on, or at least understand what your potential is to do that work in order to speak to it.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
In terms of human resources, I see a lot of young professionals trying to get into HR, and with AI, HR is changing pretty quickly. What I would say is that you need to do as much as you can. Even if you can only do a small portion of an HR job or learn a specific specialty within HR, just get your hands into anything that's possible. Learn as much as you can, talk to people as much as you can, and learn the profession of HR. Because even with AI, I think there's always opportunities for that human judgment to come into play that will be really valuable in the future. AI can definitely automate a lot of tasks, but it's not going to take away from really thinking about the end user - for us, it's the employee. What does the employee need? How do we make sure we're hearing their feedback and taking that into account? The more that people can expose themselves to that, I think it's really important. The second thing I would say is that managing your energy is so critical in your career. These are hard lessons I've had to learn because I have always been an overachiever, I've worked hard, I've pushed myself. Managing your energy has come down to really thinking about not just your physical energy, but your mental and emotional energy, and also your spiritual energy, whatever that might be for you. For me, it's a lot of meditation and faith-based spirituality. It's really important, especially as I've grown older and had a family and kids, because energy has been more challenging. If you're not watchful of it or paying attention, it will catch up to you and you will exhaust yourself. So it's really important to be thinking about how can I put my oxygen mask on first before I take care of my kids, before I take care of my job, before I take care of my team. There's just so much that, especially as women, we have to be thinking about. For me, I put myself sometimes towards the bottom of the list in terms of priorities, and I've had to learn that I can't do that.
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