Samantha (Welch) Gordano, PHR, SHRM-SCP, EdD

Being very, very stubborn, it's partially because my librarian's heart, the fact that I'm curious when I find something I don't know, and I'm curious about, I go research it, because that's what I gotta do. Also, just the ability to kind of pivot as needed and handle chaos, and just keep going, not let it stop me. You know what? It's... you can't say, oh no, that can't happen, alright? It's already happening, so you have to move forward. I am stubborn and determined, and I'm gonna learn as I go where... when I need to, and just... make it happen. You just can't give up.

Systems serve people, and having to remember that systems serve people, and it's not the other way around. We're not there to make the system succeed. The system is supposed to be there to make us succeed, to make everybody succeed, otherwise it's broken. You can't wait for that opportunity to lead, you have to really take it on yourself to put yourself out there and say, no, I want to be making a difference. This is something I care about, we're gonna do it. And if we see a problem in the system, we're not just going to complain, we're going to proactively be part of the solution for that.

Always be learning, don't shun new technologies, try to learn it and integrate it, because it doesn't help to resist it but remember that it's their humanity and their emotional intelligence that really makes a difference in the quality of service they're providing and how much they're going to impact people's lives. It's about building an inclusive table. You have the seat at the table, it needs to be next, that only comes from the human being active in there, getting involved and making sure that it's happening. So adapt the technologies, learn the technologies, but do not lose your humanity.

AI is absolutely the biggest challenge and opportunity on both sides. It should be the biggest opportunity in the world - we have a historic opportunity to actually be insanely inclusive and bridge that gap, especially for me in disability and people's ability to operate at peak potential. There's so much potential there, but what we see is people just kind of slapping it on there and going without knowing how it functions, knowing what it's going to do, and not thinking about those impacts. If you don't put the work into it, you don't customize it, you're gonna be dealing with different levels of bias, things are not going to be functioning properly. People are going to trust this without having insight into it, because if you didn't give it the information it needs, it doesn't know - it only knows what you tell it. I see so many of these software firms, all the tech bros are just throwing it out there without thought to what those actual impacts are, which is why I am so actively involved in the testing and training to try to make better quality and make sure that those questions are raised. We need that in every field right now.

Inclusion is really huge. Ensuring that inclusion isn't just a buzzword they're throwing out there, that it's the lived reality in the organization, and I consider that personally as well. I have a service mindset that, again, comes from the background and from what I saw in my doctoral thesis, just from our entire profession as librarians, we get our satisfaction from helping people and making people's lives better. That is always going to matter to me, and that's probably the hardest thing I've found when I'm working in private sector. I want to make sure that I'm helping people, that's why I want to work with the employees and make their lives better, because then I'm helping. I'm not just after a profit, you know? I'm never going to be that person who's just looking for money. I get all my value from being useful and being helpful and making things better.