Lindsay N. Phelps

I would definitely say it's a mix of hard work, faith, and support. I think all three of those things are essential to ensuring continuity, so whenever I fall or I break down, it's great to have supportive friends or family around, or even a faith background that can help you to push through those difficult times. These three elements work together to keep me going, especially during the challenging moments in my career.

The best career advice I ever received was from one of my previous bosses during a town hall meeting. He said that nothing is ever impossible. There's no such thing as impossible. You just have to find another outlook, another perspective, and another way to make things happen. This advice has really stuck with me throughout my career and shaped how I approach challenges. It aligns with my belief that no matter what you're in, you can figure it out, which is how I was raised to think.

My advice is always don't give up. I've found that it's been increasingly more difficult for people to enter human resources as the field becomes more saturated. I encourage them to, number one, not give up, and number two, do their due diligence and do their homework. If you want people to take you seriously as an expert, you need to know your stuff, you need to know what you're talking about, you need to know what the value is that you can bring to an organization, and how that can bring catalysts or change to that organization. Understanding what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are, and where you have opportunities to grow is also probably a key contributor to that as well. I have so many of these conversations through coffee chats, and this is what I always tell them.

I would say the biggest challenges in HR is that it's going to vary from organization to organization. No two organizations run the same, no two organizations are built the same, and no two organizations have the same leader. So the biggest challenge in HR is figuring out how to work with your teams - that's going to be your senior leadership, your managers, and supervisors across the board - and then learning how to lead well, learning how to lead effectively. The reason I say that is because no two organizations are the same, so the same challenges that you have in your old workplace, you may not have those same challenges in your new workplace. You may have come from a great culture or a terrible culture, and then the culture's going to be completely different. It's really learning how to adapt and then how to lead effectively.

I would definitely say integrity, collaboration, and ingenuity. I think all three of those encompass some of the key skills or key mindsets that you need when working in HR, and they also embody who I am as a person as well. It's extremely important to have integrity in the work that you do, making sure things are correct and up-to-date in this field, but it's also a value that I hold dear. When I'm talking to people, I try to build trust with them, I try to engage them in building the same kind of trust and being honest and moving forward in a way that we can all benefit from. I'm famous across my team for saying there's no I in team, because collaboration is really essential to everything we do.