Melissa Ninegar

Community is at the top of the list. I often tell students and early-career professionals: " Your network is your net worth." You need people outside your workplace who can be a sounding board, a source of ideas and inspiration, a safe space for the conversations you can't always have internally, and a connection to someone who has walked the path before you. These relationships are rarely one-directional. The people who mentor you one year, you may be mentoring a few years later.

Boundaries have also been a quiet game-changer for me. Early in my career, I poured everything into whatever company I was at, to the point where I couldn't separate myself from it. That sets you up for a hard landing when things don't go as planned, and they never go exactly as planned. Healthy boundaries mean you have a life outside of work that actually enriches you, you show up better because of it, and you can better navigate the inevitable change with clarity and care.

The third thing is values alignment, and this has become more important to me the further I've grown in my career. As an executive people leader, so much of what you build is informed by the organization's values, whether those are the words on the wall or the actual lived culture. When your values are better aligned with the organization you support, those values go on to inform strategy and infrastructure with more clarity, more impact, and honestly, more joy. Because these values are close to your own heart. I always encourage People and Culture professionals, especially to understand their own values, mission, and purpose deeply before they take a role, because they are directly connected to your success, happiness, and legacy.

A very wise mentor of mine shared this advice with me at a pivotal moment in my career, when I was ready to give up on HR and the corporate world altogether. Oliver Lee Mincey persuaded me to better understand my strengths. Understanding my own strengths and pursuing what I was strongest at (not just what I loved) would lead me to the right environment, the most meaningful work, and a generally more lucrative career path. An analogy is, I loved to garden, but I can't keep a lemon tree alive to save my life. The bigger takeaway at the time for me was the recognition that I was in a toxic environment that didn't play to my strengths.

For young women specifically, I would add one thing: get comfortable with compensation.

Women historically don't talk about money the way men do. It's treated as taboo, and that silence is costly. Not just in salary negotiations, but in understanding business numbers, reading a P&L, and knowing how to articulate your value in the language that organizations actually respond to. That gap, more than almost anything else, is what holds women back from the growth and leadership they have earned.

So my advice is this: leverage your community, and leverage every resource available to you now that didn't exist a generation ago. Podcasts, AI, TikTok, professional networks. There is more accessible, high-quality information about compensation, negotiation, and business acumen than ever before. Use it unapologetically.

And do not shy away from the compensation conversation. What you earn directly shapes what you are able to build, whether that is a family, a passion, a financial foundation, safety, or all of the above. Understanding your worth and being willing to say it out loud is not aggressive or presumptuous. It is one of the most important professional skills you can develop, and it compounds over time.