Becoming a Leader People Trust with Jen Paxton
In a leadership role, you need to get people to open up to you. Dig in. - Jen Paxton
Meet Jen Paxton
With a master’s degree in Opera, Jen Paxton didn't think she would have a career in Talent Acquisition, however, she fell in love with helping candidates find the right role.
She started her career at a recruiting firm placing technical professionals, then after a few years moved in-house. She has grown teams at later stage startups like Fiksu and LevelUp and built Recruiting and PeopleOps strategies from scratch at small startups like Logentries and TrueMotion.
Jen is currently at Privy, an eCommerce Marketing platform that helps small and growing brands get from $0 to $1 million in online sales, as their VP of People+Talent. She focuses on building a company that employees and candidates love.
On this episode Stacey & Jen talk about...
- What Jen wanted to be when she grew up (2:30)
- Jen's move from opera singer to people & talent (6:30)
- Formalities Jen had to shed when making her career change (11:34)
- Perfection as a disservice to self (14:34)
- Making the shift from leading self to leading others and maintaining good company culture (19:13)
- The clash of data and people ( 22:30)
- Psychological safety, emotional well-being and building trust in a “get down to business” workplace (24:30)
- How do you measure trust and maintain it in a pandemic/virtual world? (31:37)
- Dealing with employee loneliness, burnout, boundaries, Zoom exhaustion and other struggles in a pandemic world. (35:30)
- How Jen is managing her own well-being (40:50)
- The biggest formality Jen had to shed to get to where she is now (43:10)