About Me
I grew up in a small southern town that engrained a whole lot of southern hospitality in me. I believe that's where my real love of helping people came from, but I'll digress a little...After high school, I headed to the big city of Atlanta to attend Georgia State University. I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do but it certainly wasn't HR - who would voluntarily be in the most hated department in the company?! But then I took a course in organizational behavior. Game changer! I knew I had found my calling to help leaders create better experiences for employees and ultimately build better, stronger organizations. 

I had the honor and privilege to work for Congressman John Lewis during his 2008 re-election campaign, where I created the first-ever volunteer training program to formally train people who wanted to help out on the campaign trail. This wasn't really a thing - but the nice guys in charge let me build a handbook and train some volunteers, and it ended up working out really well. We had the highest volunteer engagement numbers, and all these feet on the ground knowing exactly how to build support garnered the Congressman a win of 77% in the district - the highest ever. 

Congressman Lewis and his wife Lillian were hugely inspring to me, so much so that after college I applied to join the Peace Corps. The application process for the Peace Corps is really, really, really long so in the meantime I got a job as an HR & Accounting Specialist at The Glenn Hotel, where I had my first real exposure to traditional HR. I onboarded people, did employee investigations, maintained employee records, and had other basic transactional HR responsibilities. I also maintained the ledgers but I would prefer to never do that again so we won't talk about that! I really liked the HR work and like the Glenn, but when I FINALLY got accepted to the Peace Corps, I couldn't turn that down, so I headed to Thailand. 

In Thailand, I lived in a rural province about two hours northeast of Bangkok in the village of Nong Saeng. I worked as an Organizational Development partner for the local government office. The Peace Corps had been requested in Thailand to help facilitate quite a large-scale change: the decentralization of the federal government. Local governments had never existed, and communities were never empowered to create programs that benefitted them specifically and locally. We were there to help them figure all that out. I did many things during my time in the Peace Corps to help with this that I'd love to tell you about - let's chat!!

After the Peace Corps, I came home to an American economy with 10% unemployment and found it pretty difficult to get a job, especially in HR where I only had a little less than a year of experience at that point. So I got an opportunity to work as an operations manager for a small start up plastics manufacturer, where I learned A LOT. This was the first time I managed a team, and I loved it. I loved helping others succeed. I became well versed in Lean and Six Sigma. I learned about manufacturing and robotics. I learned first hand how to run a business, and the pages from my textbooks came to life where I got to make my knowledge contextual. There was no HR at this location, so I eventually started handling most of the HR-related issues as well. I liked the challenge of the job, but working on the floor of a manufacturing environment was not the best fit for me, so after my daughter was born I took the opportunity to stay home with her and pursue my MBA degree from Brenau University. 

I was proactively recruited to come to WIKA and work in the HR department with my primary responsibilities in employee relations and learning & development. Very quickly, I became responsible for a team with a large scope in HR - organizational development, learning & development, change management, employee relations, HR legal compliance (including immigration), performance management, our talent management system, and HR modernization projects. I led these functions for five primary sites in the US, and provided support for two additional sites plus locations in Canada and Central & South America. I started working on my Juris Master in Employment Law at Emory University in 2016 and plan to finish this highly beneficial program.