Suzette Salandy, MBA

What inspires me every day is that connectivity to people. This field aligns so well with who I am as a person. I feel like this is the field that best serves me for who I am. I'm inspired every day about making a change, making a shift. If somebody feels way better because of something I said or how I coached, I've done something good. I'm inspired about being a source that people can trust, being a source that people feel they're in a safe place. I'm inspired to be that leader who, at the end of the day, contributed to the betterment of someone's thinking, someone's learning, someone's ability to say that I was a true advocate for them. I love to advocate for women, I love to advocate for people who, with noble intent, want to do something amazing. What truly makes me happy is when a leader says they've taken my coaching advice, or when someone I've mentored says they thought about what I said and applied it, or thanks me for helping them understand an approach. At the end of the day, I really want to be a source of wisdom. Wisdom is not just about the educational aspect of life, but it's experience. The way I often coach and share is I use my own experience, because people really can appreciate you when you've walked a bit in their shoes. It's hard to give people advice about hard times or difficulties when you've not experienced it, but when you can share a moment where you've had a situation, people can say, okay, you've been there, you've had a wilderness season or a bad management situation. When you can reference those life experiences, people really can appreciate and value what you have to say from a wisdom perspective. I've done the MBA route and organizational certifications, and those are helpful because we need to know what's happening in the industries and what's trending, but the School of Hard Knocks is a good school to learn from as well.

The best career advice I ever received was from one of my mentors who told me to celebrate the wins and to think of what you would call the failures as the learning. She said to make them your aha moments as you go through life and refer to your aha moments. Whether it's the wins or the losses, there is always a gift of learning in every experience. I've learned to take my journey of my career and to celebrate the wins, and to take the failures as my learning experiences, and to really appreciate the aha moments. Because when you think about it, when certain things happen, you kind of look back and say, now I see why this happened. Oh, now this makes sense, and that's that aha moment of, okay, I get it now. This is why this was the way it was when I was in my 20s or my 30s. My mentor also said to me, which I could so appreciate, that HR isn't always about lining up all of the details. She said, sometimes you gotta trust your gut. What did your gut tell you? When you're looking at something as it relates to harassment or doing an investigation and somebody's talking to you, she asked, what does your gut tell you about this situation? After you assimilate all the facts and you go in, what does your gut tell you? She said, trust your gut. And I've learned to do that a lot. I gotta tell you, intuition never fails. It never fails. Trust your gut.

My advice to young women entering this industry is to take the pressure off of having all the answers, actively seek out mentors, stay open to continuous learning, and embrace perspectives from people across different generations to grow both personally and professionally.

One of the biggest challenges—and opportunities—in the field right now is improving how organizations manage and support people, especially through stronger manager effectiveness, since leadership quality directly impacts retention and engagement. At the same time, there is a growing need to modernize performance management systems and prioritize employee wellness, including more inclusive support for life-stage needs, while ensuring culture and strategy remain aligned.

I love traveling. I have a great desire to work with folks in the Middle East, so I've traveled a lot to the Middle East and done a lot of work with women's leadership meetings and hosted panels in the Middle East. I'm loving the global coming together of women. I spent a lot of time bringing business owners and leaders to the Middle East. I've done it about twice, going to Dubai and hosting a conference. It's a lot of work, but it brought me such joy to have a panel of different business leaders sitting and talking about global impact. We had people in the sustainability space, people in the AI space, all these different leaders coming together. I actually called the conference, surprise surprise, Wisdom and Wealth, because the more knowledge you have, the more wisdom you have, but also it's a form of wealth. It was a great learning for me. A lot of times people don't know much about the Middle East, and when they travel, sometimes people have a perception, but once they travel, they realize, oh my god, this is not what I thought it was. I hear a lot of people have those moments of, oh wow, I thought the Middle East was more restricted, that women are not supposed to dress a certain way, and while there is a certain conservative way, people's perception is often misguided. When they travel, they understand. Some of the most savviest businesswomen I've met are women in the Middle East. Though they wear a hijab, they are kicking butt and taking names as far as doing some really amazing things in the global space.