Ruby Dhaliwal

I attribute my success to having leaders that have believed in me and believed in my potential. I also think it's about having the courage to declare that you don't know something - for instance, if I'm in a meeting with something very technical, I declare that I don't know all these things, but I really want to learn. I'm not shy to say that, and I think when you declare it out loud, it really does make an impact on others that you are truly interested and why you're there. I say the same thing to my team - don't be shy to say you may not know this, but you're here to learn. This openness has really helped me in moving from a very traditional learning space to a more business-focused product, technology, and client space. I also never shy away from taking risks, and I always encourage my team not to shy away from that either, because if you don't take the risks, you don't really know what will work. If you don't take the risk, you're always going to do what you're doing and you're never going to grow. I've always taken the risk in my career - I'm like, look, I'm gonna do this, let's figure it out, it'll work. If it doesn't, that's fine, we'll learn from it, but we gotta do it. That's really helped me grow in my career.

The best career advice I've ever received was from my leader when I first started work in the learning space back in Asia Pacific when I was living and working in Singapore. I worked within the HR function because the learning and development center of excellence was in the HR function. She said to me, always remember that learning is the most strategic part of HR. She goes, always remember that. And that has stuck with me from the time that she said it, because I never want to see learning pigeonholed in what it can do. Learning truly should align to the company goals, because learning should evolve as people evolve, as the company evolves. I've always thought of it in that way, and that's something that really stuck with me.

I would say just don't let imposter syndrome stop you from being who you can be. I think there's always going to be an element of imposter syndrome in what we're doing, but don't let that noise really stop you. For a long time, that stopped me, and I didn't trust in my own capability. We are there to bring something meaningful to the table, and we need to trust in what we're bringing. For a long time, I did not trust in that, but I got to a point where - excuse my French - I know my shit. Nobody gotta tell me how I do my shit. I know my shit. I know how to do this. I would encourage women to believe in their capabilities and what they can do with those capabilities, because that imposter syndrome is very noisy. It takes time to rise above it, and it niggles at me as well. It's always going to be there, it's a niggling thought, but I can't let that really interfere with what I can do. Now we've just been acquired by GE Healthcare, and I'm now at another reinvention journey on how can I be meaningful to this huge company. I'm gonna have a bit of that imposter syndrome, but you know what? I know what I can do. I know what I'm capable of, and I've got to trust in that.

I think the opportunity is around the speed in which everything is changing, especially in the digital space. I never shy away from that - I try to move with it and keep my ear to the ground, knowing where my company is heading, knowing what's expected of us as an organization, especially when it comes to our client outcomes, and ensuring that all the work that my team does is mapped directly to that. The speed is also a challenge because you need to keep up with it, especially with the pace of AI right now. There's so much noise about AI, but it's not really about being afraid of AI - it's really about how we can leverage AI to optimize what we do, especially in the learning space. AI is not going to replace us, I say that to my team all the time. What we do is so human-focused, it cannot. But we can use these tools to elevate our work and accelerate our work so we can get to the market quicker with what we need our team members to know.

In my work, trust is a big thing. I'm a big person on I trust first. Also, always elevating and empowering others is something I feel strongly about. If I'm in the learning space and I talk a lot about development, I should be living that in myself, in the work that I do with my own team. Giving them a platform - if I can use where I am in my position to elevate someone else and give them a platform, I will do that. The collaboration component is also important to me, and this is just kind of the way that I've navigated my career. I've worked in many different countries with many different cultures and business cultures, and how much this open collaboration and understanding is really important as well to build relationships. In my personal life, I love to just spend time with my family. I have a 7-year-old son, we do a lot of things together, and my husband - we travel a lot, just a lot of family things. I just want to savor every moment I can with my son while he's young because the years go really fast, and I don't want to be in a blink and I'll miss it type of thing.