My guest today is Julie Turney. She’s an HR for HR coach, public speaker and host of the HR Sound Off podcast that is helping burned-out and frustrated human resource professionals take control of their careers. If that’s not enough HR for you, she’s also the author of a terrific book called “Confessions of an HR Pro: Stories of Defeat & Triumph.”

Julie and I are longtime friends, and I truly enjoyed our conversation in this episode. Julie has been in the HR space for over 16 years, but she decided to pivot her focus two years ago to support HR professionals in their careers.

In this conversation, Julie and I talk about her business coaching HR leaders worldwide, her job as a public speaker, her core beliefs on wellbeing and why she considers HR professionals to be first responders. 

I was excited to talk about all the nerdy HR-related things in this episode. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy my chat with Julie Turney.

Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.

Structural Issues in HR

If we look at HR professionals generally, most are empaths. That is a blessing and a curse when it comes to how the role of HR is structured. HR professionals handle many different tasks in their jobs, which can be stressful and overwhelming.

When it comes to thinking about new structures for HR, Julie says we should divide the roles in different ways instead of restructuring. “For me, I think the term ‘HR’ is, for me, extinct. I think we need to talk more about people’s experience, because that’s what we do,” she says.

HR is creating experiences for the people that they work with. And everything that they do can fall into three categories: administrative, strategic or emotional. Julie believes that there should be a change in how we view the HR space, giving choice to professionals as to which HR component they want to be a part of.

“I also think that HR generalists should not exist, either. I think people should be given the opportunity to make a decision about which part of HR they like and that they should focus on that specifically so that they can do their job really effectively,” she says.

These Are Her Confessions as an HR Pro

In her 16-plus years of experience in HR, Julie learned a lot about both sides of the coin. So her book is intended to help HR professionals understand that there’s more to HR than what they perceive.

Her book covers a range of different topics, each with a story that people can relate to, such as people new to HR or the field’s effects on mental health. “What I love about this book is that each person told their story based on their experience of when they first entered the space or how being in the space impacted their mental health,” Julie says. “Because one thing you’re going to need to recognize for sure is that once you decide to take HR up as a career, it will impact your mental health.”

Another aspect of writing the book that resonated with Julie was her experience with diversity, inclusion and equity as an HR generalist. It was her chance to talk about situations or events that rubbed her the wrong way but, because of race and gender, she didn’t initially feel as though she had a voice that anyone would listen. “Recognizing that not using my voice to call out those things made me complicit — and how that made me feel, how ugly I felt for not saying stuff and calling out those things at that time.”

Giving Recognition to the Unsung HR Heroes

Julie has written her book and created a fantastic platform where she is passionate about coaching HR professionals to understand their careers better. She continues to bring awareness to the plight of people in HR. 

If you think about it, HR professionals, especially since COVID-19 began, have been the invisible first responders for many organizations. Through the uncertainty of the job market and the risks of people losing their jobs, HR worked hard to find solutions, but they weren’t always met with praise. 

Julie remembers going outside to clap and cheer for first responders returning home from their shifts, which sparked her to think about HR. She shares, “What about the HR professionals who have been working tirelessly through this pandemic to either keep people in jobs, find ways to keep them engaged while they’re working from home, sadly have to lose headcount because people couldn’t keep them, have lost their own jobs?”

Along with coaching HR, Julie continues to speak about the mental health effects of working in HR and shine a light on those who did everything they could. “I want to have those conversations for as long as I can,” she says.

[bctt tweet=”‘People should be given the opportunity to make a decision about which part of HR they like and that they should focus on that specifically so that they can do their job really effectively.’ ~ @iamjulieturney. Listen to the latest episode of #PunkRockHR!” username=”lruettimann”]

People in This Episode

Full Transcript

Laurie Ruettimann:

This episode of Punk Rock HR is sponsored by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com.

Hey everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Julie Turney. She helps burned-out and frustrated HR professionals take control of their careers. She’s an HR for HR coach, a public speaker and the host of the HR Sound Off podcast. Now, if that’s not enough HR for you, she’s also an author and wrote a really terrific book called “Confessions of an HR Pro: Stories of Defeat & Triumph.” In today’s conversation, Julie and I talk about her business as a coach for human resources leaders around the world, her job as a public speaker, some of her core messaging around wellbeing, and why she considers human resources professionals to be first responders. 

I love Julie. I love this conversation. And as always, I’m so excited to talk about all nerdy things related to HR, so I’d invite you to sit back and enjoy this chat with Julie Turney. 

Hi, Julie. Welcome to the podcast.

Julie Turney:

Hi, Laurie. Thank you for having me. It’s so good to be here.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, it’s my pleasure. We’re longtime friends. You’re a first-time guest on Punk Rock HR. Why don’t you do us the honor and tell us who you are and what you’re all about.

Julie Turney:

Sure. Thank you. My name is Julie Turney. I live on the beautiful island of Barbados. I have been in the HR profession for over 16 years. Two years ago, I took a career pivot, kind of, where I now support HR professionals, and I help them to get clearer on their careers, the vision that they have for their careers, but I also help them to deal with burnout and stress in their career.

Laurie Ruettimann:

And Julie, you are also an author. Tell us a little bit about your book.

Julie Turney:

My book is called “Confessions of an HR Pro: Stories of Defeat & Triumph.” And I wrote this book with 10 amazing HR professionals who all shared their stories about what life in HR is like for them and their defeats, their triumphs and their lessons learned. The book I wish I had when I first got into HR, but it’s the book I’m glad that I have now.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I, for one, am glad you wrote this book. It’s an important book in our whole entire library of HR topics. And we’ll get to the book in a second. I’m curious, you mentioned that you took a career pivot. Tell us about the earlier part of your career. How did you get into human resources?

Julie Turney:

I got into human resources as a result of a bad experience that I had as an employee. I was terminated from a job very early in my working career while I was in the last semester of my first pregnancy, with no performance discussions or anything. And that really bothered me, but I was not aware of labor laws. I didn’t know what my rights were. I was 21. I wasn’t thinking about anything like that, but I just knew that the way that it was done did not sit well with me. And it made me think about, if this is how leaders really treat people, we really need to do better. And I always thought, well, if I ever get into a leadership position, I would never want to do this to someone else. That started my journey into leadership, which then led me to a job that I had.

One of the most favorite jobs I ever had in my life was working at our local university with five of the most amazing women in leadership. And one of those ladies sat me down one day and said to me, “Julie, you’re really good with talking to people, finding out what their problems are.” Because we were working with adults, it was adult learning. And she said, “You’re really good with the students. Have you ever thought about getting into human resources?” And at the time I just knew it was a course that we taught, but I didn’t think of it as a career for myself. Then I started to explore and explore. And the more that I explored, the more I liked what I was seeing. And about a year later, after that experience and leaving that job, I found myself in a role that led me to my first human resources course, which led to my first HR job.

Laurie Ruettimann:

You had this amazing pivot where you went to work inside of HR and enjoyed it with those five women. Why’d you step away from it?

Julie Turney:

Because I’m a huge empath, number one. And I realized when I started to get into leadership roles that I was on my own, and it was exhausting. And I remember going through my second bout of burnout, where I felt like I wouldn’t make it through it. And I just told myself, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to hurt from other people’s hurt,” but I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that. And that led me to, “I got to find something else to do.”

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah. Yeah. I feel that. It’s interesting now at this point in your career, you’ve turned away from core HR and you’re now coaching. For me, one of the things I found during COVID is that my burnout was exacerbated through coaching. I would coach individuals and work with them and do a lot of listening, and I love it. I’m good at it, I think, and really enjoy it, and especially working with HR professionals. But the weight of their world was weighing on my soul. I wonder how you’ve made the pivot from HR to coaching HR and how you make sure as an empath, you don’t burn out again.

Julie Turney:

The last thing that I learned from being in corporate HR was you can’t do this without a therapist. You can’t do this without the community. You can’t do this without a coach. And so when I made the pivot to become an HR for HR coach, I have all of those things. So just as you said, the weight of what HR professionals are talking and telling you on a daily basis — I have, and I’m sure you’ve experienced it too, Laurie, where they’re crying and you feel that. It’s like feeling it with employees all over again, but it’s heavier because they’re bringing the trauma they have to you, and it’s super-heavy. And I find that going to therapy sometimes after that helps me a lot, or calling my coach or someone in my community that I can call on and just go, “look, I need to talk to you about something that happened to me today. Do you have five minutes?”

Laurie Ruettimann:

Yeah, that’s good advice. I find that human resources professionals in general are empaths. They do feel, and it’s both a blessing and a curse of the way the job is designed. I wonder if we could talk about that for a second because the job of a core human resources professional is really a be-all, end-all of a lot of different jobs, right? There’s some administration, some strategy. Is the job structured the right way in the first place?

Julie Turney:

I don’t know how else you would structure it. For me, I think the term “HR” is, for me, extinct. I think we need to talk more about people experience, because that’s what we do. We’re creating experiences for people, so we’re either people experience professionals or people operations professionals. And when it comes to what we do, I think there are certain buckets where what we do sits. It’s either administrative or strategic or it’s emotional. And so I think that for the HR space, we either need to divvy this up a little bit more. So just as I think that human resources, for me, the word should be gone, I also think that HR generalists should not exist, either. I think people should be given the opportunity to make a decision about which part of HR they like and that they should focus on that specifically so that they can do their job really effectively. That’s what I think.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I’m interested in this distinction you make between operations and experience because I think it’s a good one, and I think it’s right, but if you get the operations wrong, you impact the experience. And if you get too arrogant about experience, then you may forget about operations. I feel like there’s just this weird tension that could happen. And so in a lot of organizations, I go, you know what? We’re going to throw this into one department, and we’ll just figure it out. And there the generalist or the business partner is born, who almost runs interference — is like a project manager. And I get that. But every HR business partner I know, went through what you went through, or is going through what you went through, which is extreme burnout or exhaustion. 

I just wonder when we start to ask more of our leadership team to do HR. I remember hearing the CEO should be head of sales and it’s like, why would the CEO be head of sales before being head of human resources? I don’t know. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Julie Turney:

In terms of being the head of human resources, I feel like I had a conversation sometime back that’s recalling in my head with someone who said that CEOs should be the head of HR because they have to understand the business, but they also have to understand the people. And a CEO can’t exist without either of those things. When you think about putting someone in that leadership space, you need someone who not only understands and relates to the business, but also understands and relates to the people. And I think the converse is true of HR. I think that the best CEOs would be HR people, the people who know the business and the people.

Laurie Ruettimann:

I love that. I also love that you wrote a book understanding both sides of the coin, the business side and the HR side, to try to give people a path forward, to understand both HR and business. Tell us a little bit more about your book and maybe one story in there that really resonates with you.

Julie Turney:

Ooh, just one? They all resonate. OK.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Let’s start with one.

Julie Turney:

When I wrote this book, it was to help HR professionals understand that there’s more to HR than they really think. My book covers and targets certain areas of HR, whether you’re in leadership in HR, you’re in admin in HR, you’re dealing with benefits or compensation, or you’re dealing with engagement, recruitment. There’s a story in there for everyone. What I love about this book is that each person told their story based on their experience of when they first entered the space or how being in the space impacted their mental health. Because one thing you’re going to need to recognize for sure is that once you decide to take HR up as a career, it will impact your mental health. Now we all have mental health, but what we all don’t have is poor mental health. And if you do this career right, you will end up at some point in time where it does impact your mental health in a poor way. And so being able to have that conversation has been really important for me, and that’s why I wrote that.

The one thing in this book that really resonates with me is when I tell the story about my DEI experience in the workplace. As a generalist — not as an actual DEI expert or strategist sitting in the organization, but as a generalist who’s been asked to take on DEI — I’m talking about the times where things have happened, where leaders have said things that make you feel a type of way, but because of who I am in my color, in my gender, has made me feel like I didn’t have a voice. And recognizing that not using my voice to call out those things made me complicit, and how that made me feel, how ugly I felt for not saying stuff and calling out those things at that time. The lesson that I learned from that is that, no matter what, I need to be able to use my voice and call all out those things because I represent the people. And I shouldn’t feel as though using my voice has anything to do with my color or my gender, but just that I’m using my voice as a human being.

Laurie Ruettimann:

What I love about the work that you do is that it’s not just focused on Caribbean human resources or Western human resources, but you have global clients. Do you feel as if the stories in your book resonate with the global audience?

Julie Turney:

I absolutely do. And I think that’s part of the reason why I decided not to write this book on my own, but to use other HR professionals from all over the world to give that insight and make it more relatable, so definitely I couldn’t have done it on my own.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I also wonder what’s next for you. You’ve written this book. You’ve put together really a great platform, where you’re coaching human resources leaders. For me, Julie, I see the next inevitable step beyond your podcast is in real-life speaking. And I know you’re very active in DisruptHR, so tell us a little bit more about where you’re going and some of the passion you have around speaking and communicating.

Julie Turney:

Yeah. I do have a great passion for speaking on various topics, but my passion for bringing awareness to the plight of HR professionals is something that I’m super vocal about. And in the next couple weeks, I’m actually about to give my first TED talk at the Medical University in Austria, where I’ll be sharing the same topic about the invisible first responders in your organization. We talked about first responders during COVID and how we really appreciated them. And remember on April 3, we all went outside and clapped for them. And in my mind, I was thinking, this is great, but what about the HR professionals who have been working tirelessly through this pandemic to either keep people in jobs, find ways to keep them engaged while they’re working from home, sadly have to lose headcount because people couldn’t keep them, have lost their own jobs. What about those people? 

And so the talk that I’m going to give is going to shed some light on the mental health impact that the pandemic has had on our organization’s first responders. And I want to have those conversations for as long as I can.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, I know one thing that’s been important to you is to really bring in self-care into your own career, not just because of COVID, but because of your own burnout, your own experiences with poor mental health and mental health outcomes. Tell me a little bit about your self-care practice right now.

Julie Turney:

My self-care practice starts with mindfulness and gratitude every morning. I absolutely swear by the Calm app, and I do those exercises practically every morning, 10 minutes of mindfulness. And I just remember to stay grounded, breathing throughout the day, because lots of anxious moments throughout the day. But I also work four days a week now instead of five days a week. I take Fridays off, and I use every Friday to discover something new about Barbados, because as small as this island is, there’s a lot of places I don’t know. And there are a lot of things I don’t know about the island that I live on. I take time to discover something new every Friday. And I love music, so I’m always creating playlists for one reason or the other. And I use those to keep me going through the day. And I love my HR community, and I’m always talking to someone in the community during the week. And that helps me a lot, as well. That’s pretty much part of my self-care besides the spa and going to get my hair done.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, sure. I mean, we’re human. Come on. That’s not self-care, that’s required. I love that you love the Calm app, because I’ve been both a user of Calm and Headspace, who are our former sponsors of Punk Rock HR. And I wonder if there’s a reason why you love the Calm app. How did you discover it? A lot of people think, oh, I’m not into meditation, or I don’t want to listen to something on my phone. What do you like about that for you?

Julie Turney:

Oh, there’s so many things I love about the Calm app. Not just the 10-minute mindfulness exercises. I like the master classes, as well. I love, I should say, the sleep stories. When I first started using the Calm app was during my burnout, that’s when I first discovered the Calm app. What I would do is, at night, I would listen to the sleep stories. And one of the sleep stories that I listen to constantly over and over again, is the one by Tabitha Brown. And I just love that story. And that really helps me to get to sleep. But I also love that they have nap stories.

I really didn’t understand the importance of napping until I did a little research on why in Europe, some countries have siestas and I was like, “Hmm, this is really interesting.” And the nap stories helped me a lot, as well. But there are a lot of other experiences in there where you are listening to famous people sharing their stories and their experiences of how they prepare themselves to do the work that they do. And one of the experiences that I really love that is shared on there is from LeBron James, how he prepares himself on the court and off the court for life.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Can you tell me how LeBron James prepares for his experiences on the court and off?

Julie Turney:

On court, off court, he gets focused through exercise and he also takes time to meditate. He, too, uses the Calm app. And I thought that was really cool, but just the time that he takes to actually listen to his body and focus on preparing himself mentally, absolutely awesome.

Laurie Ruettimann:

That’s great. That’s really great. Well, Julie, as we start to wrap up the conversation, I want to know what you want human resources to be thinking about in 2022 and beyond. What’s top of mind for you, and what should be top of mind for the community?

Julie Turney:

Top of mind for HR right now, coming from me, is take care of yourself. You cannot fill from an empty cup. I’m sure everyone has heard that over and over again. As HR professionals, we’re constantly giving advice to people, but we’re not taking that advice for ourself. And so the quote that I want you to think of that I’m going to say right now is, “Practice what you preach or change your speech.”

Laurie Ruettimann:

Well, Julie, I am inspired because I think I need to change my speech. I’m not always practicing what I preach. Well, if people want to learn more about you, find your book, listen to your podcast, do all the good things in your world, where do they go?

Julie Turney:

LinkedIn. That’s where I live. LinkedIn. You’ll find me there all day, every day. I never close my LinkedIn tab. It’s always open, so if you message me, I will see it. I’ll hear it. I’ll respond. My website is HRatHeart.co.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Amazing. We will make sure to have both of those links, all the good stuff in the show notes. And Julie, I’m just so pleased that you’re doing your TEDx talk. You’ve got a lot of good things happening in 2022. Congratulations on your book, and thanks again for being a guest.

Julie Turney:

Thank you, Laurie, for having me. I appreciate it.

Laurie Ruettimann:

Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock HR. We are proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands, creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com. Punk Rock HR is produced and edited by Rep Cap with special help from Michael Thibodeaux and Devon McGrath. For more information, show notes, links, and resources, head on over to PunkRockHR.com. Now that’s all for today and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.

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