10
Loading video...
By Toni Bogale
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
For most of my career, I was the person sitting across the table listening to the story.
I was the HR executive designing people strategy, guiding employees through difficult conversations, advising leaders, and making decisions that affected thousands of people. I spent more than 30 years learning business, HR, and employment law.
Then, in February 2024, I received a diagnosis that changed my understanding of all of it: metastatic breast cancer.
Read More on Leadership Insights
Suddenly, I was the employee sitting across the table.
...
I had to tell an employer that I had received a life-changing diagnosis. Nanci Churchill, one of my closest colleagues and now our COO, called it “the other side of the table.”
The phrase stayed with me because I understood immediately how different the conversation felt when I was the person sharing my own story.
My connection to HR began when I was 16. I watched my grandmother lose her job after she was injured at work. I saw what that loss did to her and our family, and I carried that experience into my career.
It became one of the reasons I cared so deeply about the human side of work.
Over the next three decades, I built the career I once believed would define success. I worked in major organizations and executive HR roles, handling mergers, complex organizational legal issues, global compensation, and thousands of decisions involving people.
Becoming a chief human resources officer (CHRO) and reaching other senior leadership positions mattered to me. Compensation mattered. Financial security mattered. I was climbing toward a definition of success I understood.
Then came 2019.
Helping Other People Keep Moving
I had launched ConsortHR, and we moved into our first office. Twenty-six days later, my husband died unexpectedly at the age of 50.
Employees had left other jobs to join me. Their families depended on their livelihoods. Clients still needed us. I returned to work eight days after my husband died because people were depending on me while I was trying to understand how completely my own life had changed.
That experience taught me about responsibility in a way no executive position could. I learned that leadership can mean carrying your own grief while helping other people keep moving.
After my husband died, I also lost my health insurance. I continued taking corporate CHRO roles while keeping ConsortHR alive because I needed coverage and believed in the company, but I was conflicted about whether I was solving the right problems.
For several years, I carried both responsibilities. Then cancer made it impossible for me to continue as I was. Little did I know it was a blessing in disguise.
Women Supporting Women
Surgery, radiation, recovery, and exhaustion consumed much of 2024. I call it “the year I was sleeping.” I had spent my life being the person who handled things.
Suddenly, I needed other people to handle things for me.
Nanci stepped in. With one phone call, she took over the business, managing our consultants, clients, and daily operations while I focused on treatment.
I believe ConsortHR exists today because she made it possible for me to step away when I needed to.
Her support taught me something deeply personal about women supporting women. Nanci became family to me. I learned that trusting someone enough to carry something you once thought only you could carry is its own form of strength.
Cancer changed my understanding of HR, too.
Empathy Matters
For years, I had sat in executive meetings translating business strategy into people strategy and advising on the human capital implications of business decisions.
I understood the professional responsibilities. Sitting on the other side of the table gave those responsibilities a human weight I had never fully experienced.
An employee can enter an HR conversation carrying a diagnosis, a death in the family, financial pressure, fear, or a crisis no one else at work knows about. Their responsibilities still exist. So does everything happening in their life outside the workplace.
I have always told HR professionals that empathy matters. I understand that lesson differently now. Years of difficult conversations and investigations can make people numb.
I have told my teams that when you lose the ability to put yourself in an employee’s shoes, it may be time to reconsider the work. My diagnosis made that conviction personal.
During treatment, prayer, and conversations with Nanci led me to reconsider the purpose of the next chapter of my career and the direction of ConsortHR.
Grateful for the Perspective
I knew HR. I knew leadership, organizational strategy, and people management. I began asking where those abilities could serve most meaningfully.
The answer became clear through my faith: serving those who serve.
Churches, ministries, and faith-based nonprofits carry enormous responsibility for their employees and communities. Many cannot afford executive HR expertise.
I believe they deserve access to that knowledge and care, and I wanted to help make that possible.
For churches and faith-based organizations, their business is people. There is deep satisfaction in investing my decades of experience, time, energy, and passion into supporting organizations that are built around people.
I still bring everything I learned from three decades in corporate HR to the table. Life simply taught me to see the person sitting across from me differently.
I spent decades learning how to sit on one side of the table. Life eventually placed me on the other side. I am grateful for the perspective, and I hope I never forget the person sitting across from me again.
Toni L. Bogale is the founder of ConsortHR, which provides subscription-based HR and consulting services, including support for churches, ministries and faith-based nonprofits.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines