CHRIS BARBIN

After seven years at Peoplesoft, Heidi left the HR tech giant at its height to co-found her own HR consultancy, Knowledge Infusion, with no consulting experience whatsoever and sold it to Appirio in 2012. In this Q&A, she describes how representation in the workplace is essential to cultivating innovation and why every leader should embrace their unique strengths early in their career.

After a brief hiatus to focus on a few other endeavors, we're back with the latest installment of our Lieutenants Series. Hiral spent more than 14 years at one of the largest IT services firms on the planet where he led a $3B portfolio but wasn’t afraid to write himself into an active role on a customer contract or take career inspiration from a gym poster.

In our newest Lieutenant’s Q&A we interview John Cowan, who is currently the VP of finance at the technology company Tile. We discuss his professional curiosity, why it’s important to make mistakes and learn from them, and how his "healthy sense of paranoia" and growth mindset has served him over the years.

Cat is the SVP of global education at ServiceNow and has had an incredible career in learning, leadership development and organizational change. She's redefined what training and learning programs look like in the enterprise.

Zoë Harte is the Chief People Officer at Upwork. In this Q&A she talks about how Upwork manages its own hybrid and remote workforce, her role guiding talent innovation at the company, how HR can be a guidepost for culture, and why speaking the truth is so important.

Paula-Jo (PJ) Oleksak, the chief business officer at Slice, talks about her transition from finance to operations, how she builds successful teams by keeping things simple, and the need to empower people while allowing them to be full humans, especially in today’s world.

This Q&A with Jennifer Taylor, VP of ThousandEyes’ Global People Team, talks about what it's like to lead the HR function through the perfect storm of a global pandemic, a social justice movement and a fast-paced acquisition, and why balance is more important than ever (but not always easy).

I had the privilege to work with Yamini Rangan, Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot, during our early days of Appirio, where she held multiple roles including a year stint as my head of development and Chief of Staff.