Keele Taylor

I'm most proud of finally having the courage to leave the W-2 work life. I never saw myself as somebody who would become an entrepreneur - it was never something I wanted to do. But 6 years ago when I started the firm, I didn't think I could do it. I only did it because people kept coming to me wanting advice on how to handle COVID in the workplace because I was the senior HR leader. They kept coming to me for some reason, and I was giving them all this advice, and I realized I gotta charge for this - it got to be so time-consuming that I was starting to get frustrated. This is my intellectual property, and if it's obviously worth something, I'm gonna charge for it. Then things got to be so terrible at my last company that I realized I'm actually bringing in good money and it's absorbing a lot of hours, so I'm not gonna do both anymore. You never think that's what it is - you're just living a life, and when you step back and look at it, I'm just like wow, look at the turn of events. Who would have thought? I don't know that you're creating a story, you're just simply trying to survive life.

The best advice came from Tony Moody, the best leader I've ever had. He would always tell me, 'It's your job to keep me safe.' He knew how to utilize HR properly. I remember he said something that was not quite accurate in a meeting before, and after the meeting I took him aside and said I didn't want to correct him in front of people because I have a lot of respect for him. He said, 'Keeley, no. If you hear me saying something that's not right, I don't care what it is, you stop and you correct me.' A lot of leaders don't know how to utilize HR - they want to put you in the back corner, or up under the desk, or in the drawer and just take you out when they want to hear you. But he understood that HR is there to protect leadership and the organization, and he empowered me to speak up even in front of others. That lesson about using your HR voice and being empowered to protect the workplace has stuck with me throughout my career.

The workplace has been through so many waves - whether it's COVID, the George Floyd era with the race tension, and now AI where they want to replace HR. We've been through all of those waves, and now you're talking about replacing human intelligence in the workplace and human resources. What do you think a computer is gonna do for those people that are still needing that support from this profession? It's a pretty uneasy ride for most business owners because they're not ready for it. A lot of small and medium-sized companies don't have internal HR, so they're navigating it blindly and running into a lot of liability for it too. The book I'm writing covers all of this - how every wave hits the workplace and the challenges we face. I'm hoping to get some speaking engagements so I can really shed some light on the stuff that I see in today's workplaces.

What I enjoy most about my work is that I feel like I get to save somebody from something every single day. Being the point of contact or the go-to neutral party that gets to help even the highest positions or leaders have somebody to talk to or help navigate their situations - because as you know, leadership can be a very isolating place. Getting them to think differently so that they're not abusing their workforce, and the fact that they listen to me and take that advice, that's what I enjoy most. But the downside is I have to constantly tell them that if this is how we want to do things and cause people heartache and not treat them respectfully, I can't be a part of it, because it becomes kind of triggering for me and then I'm not in a healthy spot. Protection, influence, and respect in the workplace are core to everything I do - I came into HR as a goal to protect the workplace and ensure that through policy I can help avoid harassment, discrimination, and bullying.