Shana Stovall

I attribute my success to a drive that came from being told my whole life who I was supposed to be as a woman, and particularly a Black woman. In a strange way, my success is kind of my rebellion against what I was told I was supposed to be. I'm a first-generation college student, and I always knew that at the end of the day, it was going to be Shana and God - that's where it was going to be my whole life. God was going to tell me where I need to go, and it was going to be Shana doing these things. I always knew I needed to go and be out of the situations that I grew up in, the stuff that was out of my control, so I could control what I could control. When I ran out of college money and my family had no idea how to help, I went to the Army and got college money. Then in the Army, when people tried to minimize me as just a woman in the Army, I pushed harder than ever - I scored highest in all the PT tests, every class I went to. No one's going to tell Shana who Shana is, but I'm going to let you know who Shana is. That drive to prove myself and control my own destiny has been the foundation of everything I've achieved.

My biggest piece of advice is don't get lost on the fact that our first word in HR is human. We are humans, and I love technology, I love all the new things that are coming out, I love streamlining systems and making processes more efficient. I use AI every day in one way or another. But at the end of the day, especially when it comes to HR, there always has to be a human touch somewhere. It's the best and the worst of what our folks bring to the table. We know when people are affected in their home and their personal life, they bring it to work, and it's my job, or my team's job, or an HR professional's job, to remember that there's a whole person that comes to work every day that brings wonderful things, bad things, great things, sad things, whatever, to the table, and sometimes they need that extra person to kind of support them through that. That's the most important part of this career - making sure that you keep the human in everything that you do.

My biggest value is loyalty. Loyalty's kind of a mixed bag, because sometimes folks think if you're loyal to something, you put up with everything, but that's not what it is. If you can go to the foundation of, look, I do this because I care, because I love this, I want to see it through, I want to stick with it through the good times and the bad, and you really are loyal to something, then I think all the other values and everything else that you do just kind of fall into place. Ambition is also huge for me - jumping into things, being ambitious. I'm an achiever, so achievement is a huge value and goal for me, just making sure that we see things through, we get things done, we get results. Those would probably be my top three values - loyalty, ambition, and achievement.