Episode 1: From Soul Destroying to Soul-Enriching HR
In this episode, you’ll find out who this Trina Sunday woman is and critical moments in my career that have caused me to reimagine how we do HR. Some of those early-year learnings were hardcore. Ick. It’s time to get vulnerable people. Wish me luck.
Rule breaking podcast, I say, challenging our thinking and our current people practises, I say. But how did I get here? And what gives me the appetite to get on my soapbox about our need to fundamentally change our people practices and leadership? The short story a whole career seeing how not to do things bad practices done well and often, and great people spat out as a result. The longer version’s a bit juicier.
I’ve worked in HR fighting fires for over 20 years, but before that, I started my professional life in sales, marketing, public relations and events. I loved everything about contemporary marketing and understanding consumer behaviour and creating events and experiences that brought people together for shared learning. Connection laughs learning, the hat trick of all three, but most of that work was while living in the UK in the late nineties and on return to Perth in Western Australia, I spent more time in PR and CSR, and I learned a lot. Public relations, corporate social responsibility. I learned mostly about deception, misrepresentation and how corporates might pretend to be community-minded. As someone who’s innately driven to make a difference and advocate for fairness, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I’m, um, way too much of a straight shooter to sustain a career in PR. And I’m not saying that everyone who works in public relations is dishonest, but it’s a marketing game, right? The job is to put your best foot forward to help your organisation’s brand. That’s what public relations are about, the relations with the public, so that it’s friendly. But I like to keep it real and say it how it is.
So early in my career, I was told I did that too much. I know now, though, that that’s one of my superpowers. Have you ever met that HR professional who grew up dreaming of a job in human resources? Yeah, me neither. Never met that person. And how many of us got here is so random that it makes for some interesting chat? True story. HR peeps have some great stories, but truth be told, I got into HR because I couldn’t find a marketing job back then. On the west coast of Australia, there were marketing manager roles. There were low-level marketing research or sales positions, but nothing in between. Everything else was on the east coast.
I had international experience but nowhere to apply it. So, after six months of enjoying the sun and beach life in sunny Perth, I figured it was time to pull my finger out. And I saw a temporary HR job that I thought I’d try while I looked for something else. I mean, I did study HR as part of my commerce degree, but marketing and management were always the majors that I gravitated to. And that temporary job in HR saw me transition into nearly every function in the years that followed. I started in payroll audit. Fun times. I worked in safety, workers compensation, recruitment, job evaluation, training learning major projects.
And then in my late twenties, I became the youngest HR manager in the state government at the time. But, wow, the fallout from that appointment was epic. There were two of us who were internal applicants in that process. Me, the young female with a breadth of experience and superpowers connecting with people, and the middle-aged white guy who was a decent human and highly competent at his craft, which was employee relations. I won the job and was instantly, within an hour or two, told by my colleague that he couldn’t stay and possibly work for the likes of me. I could imagine the disappointment because I’d been there, right? I’d been trying to find work, but I had to know what the likes of me meant. So, I asked. And between the blah blah, blah, there was young upstart like you, blah, blah, blah. Especially when, quote, “HR managers have always been men and they need to have solid ER knowledge”, end quote.
Mind blown. Life changing. Fire igniting.
It turned out to be brutal honesty, though. He said what most of the other middle-aged white guys on executive were thinking. So, I thanked him, I wished him well and I still actually really wish him well. He was a good human having a very bad day. He was disappointed and he was speaking with emotion. And, I mean, after all, the retiring HR manager had told him he was a shoo-in for the job, which is an interesting thing to assure someone, given he wasn’t the one making the hiring decision.
I went on to rock the hell out of that opportunity and I met, and mentored some amazing HR professionals who I’m still connected with today. I started careers, I nurtured development, and I believed in people, all the upstarts, not just the women. And I’ve reflected enough on that early career to know that there are things I would do differently. It’s great to look back with hindsight in your mid to late forties and be able to look back and tell your 20-year-old self what you would do in a leadership role like that.
But there were also some really big reality checks about HR in my early career, long before I was managing the function. And to this day, over 20 years, I’ve been working in HR. Now, to this day, there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about an employee. This one guy who suffered a catastrophic, life-changing injury in 1998. He was a young man, a young father, and he had his whole life ahead of him. Instead, he went to work, he saw his colleague killed and him facing a life of disability. I’ve never even met this man face to face. I wasn’t even in the organisation at the time, I started two years after that explosion had happened, but I was his worker’s compensation case manager. And every week I would call him to see how he was, chat about life, see what the kids were up to and see what he needed. And he told me that no one else had ever done that, that no one else had taken the time to care that up until me, that he’d felt forgotten about. And he must have told his colleagues on the front line about this, Trina, in HR, because I would meet people in those early days at that organisation and they’d say to me, oh, so you’re Trina. I hear you’re putting some heart into HR for a change. Thank you. And it seems so simple. And I was like, but doesn’t everybody think this way? And it was an early lesson. I was 21 years old.
And it’s amazing how powerful it can be when you haven’t met someone in person, how strong the bonds and the relationships are that you can build with them. Um, and I’ve led with heart through my whole career. But the reality is I’m also an empath who is terrible at setting boundaries. And so, the emotional toll of absorbing others’ pain is a heaviness and a burden that most who have never worked in HR and dealt with some big stuff will never understand. If you haven’t done it, you’ll never get it. As the most senior HR manager, I’ve been the point person for some critical incidents that, to be honest, have scarred me. They’re stories that I’ll lean into on a future podcast when I can create the safe space to do so for listeners, but also for myself.
Trauma is not identified and considered enough in HR or in organisations generally
Trauma, it’s not identified and considered enough in our roles in HR or in organisations generally, and that’s something I’ll probably dive into another time. But often our employees and our frontline leaders, they see the policies, they see the procedures and the transactions because that’s how they interact with us the most. But those moments when we hold space, when we hold space for the injured, the redundant, the aggrieved the disappointed, they’re never seen. They’re private moments wrapped up in the confidentiality of our work and they’re rarely rewarded or even recognised.
We can make or break people in those moments, and I fundamentally believe that they’re moments that matter.
I had to terminate one of my own team members once for poor performance. They’re awful, horrible conversations to have. But that colleague is still in touch and tells me he has never felt so much dignity and support in what otherwise could have been a confidence and career-destroying moment. I gave a damn. He wasn’t a bad person. He was just in the wrong job. So, we weren’t getting the outcomes that we needed. So, I helped him figure out what his superpowers were and what was going to light him up. And I went to the effort of calling some people and making some introductions and checking in to see how he went did I have to? No. Did other managers do it? Rarely. But should they? Hell, yes. It’s our obligation, especially when it’s the organisation that put them in the wrong job in the first place. Don’t make employees responsible for our bad recruitment decisions. We must do better.
We’ve got to keep that real. I could do a whole podcast on bosses gaslighting their employees. I will do a whole podcast on gaslighting. I’m looking at you two recruiters.
But I then went on to do a whole range of things over the following decade, with exposure to major HR projects, system implementations and international recruitment, immersion in strategic workforce planning and operating models, engagement, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is changed quite a lot in the last ten years yet feels like it hasn’t moved at all. But I went on to specialise in organisational development because I wanted to make organisations better, not just drive an HR agenda. and to be honest, I wanted to make the world better.
People told me I was naive and to stay in my lane. You’re just HR.
People told me I was naive and to stay in my lane. You’re just HR. And I was being too much again. But I then realised it was for them, not for others who had an appetite for making positive change happen, not for insightful organisations who understand that your people drive profit and performance for them. It’s a no-brainer.
I immersed myself in all things culture and behaviour change, toxic leadership, learning it, not practising it, and pondering why we didn’t think about employee behaviour in the same way that we did consumer behaviour. How poorly we considered employer branding and its utter disconnect with corporate branding. And while we gave no damn about employee experiences, yet went to great lengths to understand consumer personas, different product needs and ensuring positive customer experiences.
What was with HR’s big bang approach and the one-size-fits-all; and protracted transformation projects where they were often redundant and failed to address real business problems by the time we got to implementation? The reality is we often embark on projects and solutions without taking the time to clarify what the real problem is anyway are we wasting our time? In my marketing life, that was design thinking 101.
Then I found myself in an organisation where there was a major reform to the way that we did business, and I was helping to lead leadership and culture change. What an amazing opportunity to influence. Yay. But the reality was executive didn’t really care. They were doing it because they had to, not because they wanted to. It was all fake. I’d gone full circle and found myself in some weird PR–HR dichotomy that didn’t make sense. And, um, it was soul destroying. The culture was toxic, my senior leaders were uninspiring and my team in HR were in a world of rework as leaders were jostling for position and self-protection because we were nearing closer to a major restructure and downsizing. And only those in the purple circle knew it was coming. It was yuck. And I needed some food for my soul.
So, I’d been volunteering in Cambodia for a few years and every time I visited it reignited my faith in humanity. So, I started looking at opportunities to do pro bono consulting to support, not for profits in the kingdom of wonder. I needed a circuit breaker. But that search for pro bono consulting turned into an international move when I relocated to Cambodia ten years ago in 2014. Bit dramatic, but wow, was it effective.
I flipped my work and life on its head and things have never been the same.
I flipped my work and life on its head and things have never been the same. Tune into my next episode to hear all about my experiences in Cambodia and how it’s reshaped. The way I look at people, life and the HR function.
Turns out we can have happy and healthy jobs and lives.
Imagine that.
