By Jane Terepocki

What would be your best piece of advice you wish someone had given you at the start of your career?

It took me a while to realize that organizations do not function through a formal organizational chart but through all the informal relationships. It is the people within the organization and the relationships that make or break the organization. Early on in my career after an interaction with a senior manager I stomped out of the office. My boss at the time gave me some valuable feedback which helped me to understand that the organization operated through informal channels and this made me understand the importance of the function of relationships.

What innovations or accomplishments are you most proud of in your career? And conversely what have been your biggest challenges?

My second career as a teacher at BCIT and seeing how successful the program which I oversaw became, is my greatest accomplishment. I am very proud of my involvement at BCIT. The students were very high quality and there were five applicants for every space.   I started to bring graduate students back into the classroom in a panel format to speak to the students.   I would bring six graduate students from different years. They would talk about what they were currently doing and how they got there. I also started to have coffee or lunch with graduate students once a week, if not more often, and I currently meet with students. Maintaining these relationships has been a wonderful opportunity to stay in touch with these students and also is a fantastic opportunity to mentor.

The biggest challenge for me has been to make change happen in large bureaucracies.   I ended up accidentally in HR. I did an undergraduate in finance and I was older than the rest of the students. I had to start at the bottom in my first job and do “cruddy” work.   I wasn’t really happy about it and one of my professors suggested I do Labour Relations. Working in the public sector, seeing the inertia and wanting to make change happen took me down the path of HR.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities/challenges that have you most inspired about the future of HR?

I see the challenges and opportunities as a double-edged sword. This speaks to the role that HR plays in the organization. I just read in the HR Reporter about the need and importance of the head of HR being at the executive table. This conversation has been going on for 30 years now.

The opportunity is that a senior HR person can help the organization be incredibly successful if they understand the business and have the trust of the senior executive.   The challenge is making sure that they understand the business inside out. I think any employee should work the frontline of the business. Senior HR people need to understand the business. Executive search firms are having a hard time finding senior HR people who have good business acumen.

The challenge becomes having HR people internalize that they need to have a strong understanding of their particular business in general.  I read five business journals and newspapers such as the National Post, the Vancouver Sun and the Harvard Business Review regularly to understand and stay current with business affairs.

I also feel that completing my MBA was very vital to my understanding of how a business operates. HR is a business discipline and without an MBA I would not have been able to teach at BCIT.

How do you keep the “human” in Human Resources?

One of my favorite sayings is “Human Resources is not about love and trust and pixie dust.” You must think with your head and act with your heart. Most people think with their hearts and act with their head. We need to be able to make tough decisions that have people impact and execute these decisions compassionately.

Depending on where the business is in the growth revolution things may not go the way you want. You need to ask yourself “what is the impact on the people, how do we best execute this to be compassionate and caring?” If an organization has to cut back on the labor costs don’t just do it without seeking guidance from the people involved. Often people will be willing to work less and make less money; the organization will survive and people will have work. There is an unwillingness to make the hard decisions. Learn how to make a decision.