Tricia Wells

I wish someone told me... Our latest Arcoro leadership series post shares the career and personal advice I gave my adult kids as they started their post-college careers. The quick version: * Be an optimist, not a cynic. * I’ve never been around a successful person who didn’t outwork the people around them. * People don’t respect, and won’t follow, pessimistic whiners and perpetual victims. * What compounds over time is staying in learning mode. * Don’t go it alone. Isolation makes everything harder, and lonelier. Link to full version in the comments below. Jack Gray, Ellie Gray, Sam Gray

Last week was amazing! Between spending time with the Payroll Advisory Council and attending Payroll Forward the the Chime Workplace HQ in NYC. 🗽 I’m heading home even more energized about where our profession is going and the role payroll leaders have in shaping that future. Payroll is so much more than processing a paycheck. We sit at the intersection of People, Finance, Technology, Compliance, and Operations. We manage one of an organization’s largest expenses, work with incredibly valuable workforce data, influence the employee experience, and have a unique view into what is happening across the entire business. That perspective gives payroll leaders an incredible opportunity to be strategic business partners. For me, moving payroll forward means continuing to modernize how we work, embracing innovation and AI, using our data to help drive business decisions, developing the next generation of payroll leaders, and making sure payroll has a voice in the conversations that impact our people and our organizations. That is also why serving on the Payroll Advisory Council has been so meaningful to me. Having the opportunity to collaborate with other payroll leaders, challenge the way we’ve always done things, and discuss where our profession is headed reinforces something I believe deeply that Payroll deserves a seat at the executive table. I’m leaving NYC with new ideas, new connections, and even more excitement about helping elevate payroll from an operational function to a strategic business partner. The future of payroll is pretty exciting, and I’m proud to be part of moving it forward. #PayrollForward #PayrollLeadership #StrategicPayroll #FutureOfPayroll #PayrollProfessionals #Payroll

Great teams don't happen by chance. They're built by the people who find the right talent. Every hire a Talent Acquisition (TA) Team brings on helps drive an organization's growth. To the TA Team at Veritas Veterinary Partners (most, but not all featured below!), thank you. Your persistence, sharp instincts and dedication to finding the right people truly make a difference here. Here's to the team that builds our teams! Happy #GlobalTalentAcquisitionDay. #WhyChooseVeritas #VeritasVetPartners #VetMed #VetMedCareers

This HR Director was told twice she was not ready for the VP seat. Both times the company hired from outside. Both times it did not work. By the time I met her, she had stopped putting her hand up. She had been there eleven years. She built the performance process from nothing, carried two acquisitions, and coached half the leadership team through the hardest year the company ever had. On paper she looked like an HR Director. That was the entire problem. Her title never moved, so nobody ever read her scope. A client of ours was searching for a VP of People. Growth stage, first real HR leader at the executive table, an enormous amount to build. We put her forward. The CEO's first reaction was that she had never carried a VP title. So we asked him a different question. Who at your company has ever integrated an acquisition? Nobody had. She is two years in now. She built their entire people function, and the CEO tells us she is the most important hire he has made. Here is the lesson I keep relearning. A title is a record of what one company was willing to give someone. It is not a record of what that person can do. When you screen on titles, you are reading somebody else's decision, and calling it your own judgment. Raise your hand(s) if you've had this happen to you or seen it first hand. 🤚

Good HR often looks like nothing happened. That’s one of the strange things about working in HR. Some of your best work is measured by what didn’t happen. The critical role got filled because succession had been planned. The grievance didn’t happen because the manager dealt with the conflict early. The restructure worked because capability, roles and resourcing had been thought through properly. The regretted resignation didn’t happen because somebody noticed the signals and took action. The poor hire didn’t happen because somebody challenged the brief. The culture didn’t fracture because somebody was willing to address the behaviour early. None of this makes for a particularly dramatic story. There’s no crisis to resolve. No heroic intervention. Often, very few people even know what happened behind the scenes. But that’s the point. The absence of a crisis can itself be evidence of good organisational judgement. And I think that’s one reason the value of good HR can be difficult to quantify. We tend to measure what happened. Cases. Turnover. Absence. Time to hire. Engagement scores. It’s much harder to measure the poor decision that wasn’t made, the risk that never materialised, the talent we didn’t lose or the conflict that never escalated. Sometimes the best outcome really is that nothing happened. What’s an HR win nobody else ever knew about? (Or perhaps a better question is: what’s one you’re actually allowed to tell us about? 😉)

I've heard that word - soft - attached to HR profession my whole career. Cakes, feelings, the function that's nice to have in the room...etc. etc... Eight years into leading HR at CIC (across the US, Europe and Asia) and many years before in my own companies... here's what it taught me: this is one of the most exposed seats in any company - big or small. You carry things you can't unpack with anyone. You're the first call when it goes wrong. You have to hold the line for people while staying credible to a business that has to make hard calls anyway. That takes backbone. Not softness - though warmth and backbone aren't opposites. The two usually show up together. ;-) I wrote down what's actually carried me through it. Not theory - practice. This part one article is the internal work about three things I keep coming back to: → Stay humble, but question the status quo — respectfully → Stay curious → Work on today's issues today, because tomorrow depends on it... Part two article is coming soon... Full piece below 👇 Enjoy the read! #HR #HRLeadership #PeopleLeadership #Resilience

At the end of the day, I will officially be retired from Cryoport and the accounting profession. On to my next chapter. The popular saying goes, “Life is a Journey, not a Destination,” and I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. However, I feel that one’s work and career are not the journey, but rather a means of getting to your destination during your journey. As a person much wiser than me once told me, you shouldn’t retire from, rather you should retire to. To your ultimate destination, to something that is meaningful to you, to something that defines you. Knowing your destination is not something that many people really think about. Early in our careers, we think of building wealth, getting the best toys, having a family, etc., but as George Bernard Shaw once said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” The young are missing the lifetime of knowledge and learning that helps us discover what is truly meaningful, and for most, a lifetime of learning and experience is needed to know your objective. About 15 years ago, I discovered my destination, although I didn’t fully realize it at the time. Spending 10 days in downtown Sydney, Australia exposed me to, in my opinion, a truly wonderful concept - Pie Face. It took me 10 years to realize this signified my destination, when I connected this trip to one of my favorite quotes - “Eating is a basic survival instinct for all. To me, there is no greater joy in the world than to be able to satisfy this basic instinct in a way that brings pleasure to the eater.” (Anonymous) My journey of the past 38 years in the tax industry has been interesting, stressful, tiresome, heartbreaking, fun and enlightening, but all of those experiences have defined the person that I am today. There are too many mentors, friends, advocates and/or adversaries over the years to thank for providing those experiences. But through it all, my family has been my rock, helping to guide me through my professional career. So thank you Lisa, Julianna, Thomas and Arthur -   I wouldn’t be here now without any of you. So, now it is time for me to embrace my destination. I am opening a specialty bakery called The Butcher’s Pie, where I can bring pleasure to eaters through the joy of meat pies, cookies and other baked treats. I will provide updates for milestones and when I will have my grand opening, hopefully early October. It has been a fantastic journey so far, but now it is time to chase a dream.