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Pop quiz: Can teaching help you develop the skills needed to run HR at a Fortune 500 company? Answer: Absolutely.
At least, that’s Mariana Garavaglia’s experience. She spent five years teaching English to Spanish-speaking students in Garland, Texas, before leaving the profession to get her master’s degree in business administration from Dartmouth College.
While in her graduate program, Garavaglia said she learned about the relationship between employee success and business success, and this motivated her to pursue a career in HR. After graduating, she spent more than a decade in Amazon’s HR department and then became Peloton’s CPO in 2019, and her current position as DoorDash’s CPO in 2022.
She shared with HR Brew the common ground that she believes teachers and HR pros share.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you start teaching?
I grew up in Argentina speaking Spanish, and we moved to the US when I was in late elementary school, starting middle school…I still clearly remember the difficulty of trying to assimilate…It’s a very jarring experience that left a pretty impactful mark on me. So, as I finished my undergraduate studies and I found the opportunity to teach bilingual education for kids that were similarly going through some of these big life transitions…It just felt like a very natural fit for me.
Why did you make the switch from teaching to HR?
The [school] administration asked whether I’d be interested in going back to [school to] get my master’s in educational administration…I realized that educational administration was probably not where I wanted to spend the next several decades, but I did think going back to school was a good idea…A lot of the things that I really enjoyed about education…the ability to inspire, the ability to empower others to reach their full potential…I felt like I really get a tremendous amount of energy on that, and what function outside of teaching allows you to do that? The more I learned about the HR function, the more excited I became about it, so I went back and got my MBA and then moved into HR.
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Are there similarities between teaching and HR?
There are a lot of parallels in the field of education and in the field of HR. If you really think about, it at the core, it’s trying to get the most human potential out of the team that you’re working with…A teacher cultivates the ability to inspire and empower others to reach their full potential…and the goal of the HR function is to do the same thing for the human capital within your organization…Being a teacher cultivates empathy, patience, and this ability to inspire in a way that really carries quite nicely to the field of human capital and HR.
Have any of the lessons you learned while teaching influenced your HR career?
We’re curious, as a species. We want to learn…We want to know that people understand our problems and our needs. So, a teacher really understands the importance of a lot of these things of individualized attention, of continuous learning, of fostering a collaborative environment where people feel like they can achieve their full potential. These are all foundational elements of putting in place a really strong HR organization, as well.
If someone would’ve told you, as a teacher, that you would someday be a CPO, what would you have said to them?
I would have said, “Wow, I definitely would not have planned for my career to go that way.” However, I think one of the things that has remained true in that whole time is that a lot of lessons from teaching actually translate really, really well into the business world. And two of those things in particular are the importance of adaptability and differentiation. I consider those to be one of the strongest attributes I had as a teacher. I tried to understand that each student learns differently and has unique needs. And I tried to understand that you have to adapt your methods, and your materials, and your approaches to reach people where they are…It goes back to this idea that a lot of our core motivations, on what intrinsically motivated people, remains the same even if it manifests differently throughout the course of your life.