For this CHRO, ascending to the top of her profession meant heading for the exit

Karan Ferrell-Rhodes has two passions: People and business.

She’s always had a curiosity about what makes people tick, and had a knack for business, passed down from her father, who ran several small businesses throughout his life.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that in March 2013, she founded Shockingly Different Leadership, an Atlanta-based consultancy that specializes in HR, talent development, and organizational effectiveness. Ferrell-Rhodes serves as the firm’s CHRO and leads a team of roughly 30 employees and 350 consultants, who work with roughly 15 to 20 US- and globally-based clients at a time.

But running her own consultancy wasn’t always Ferrell-Rhodes’ endgame. She shared with HR Brew how her experience in corporate America led her to break out.

Journey to HR. When Ferrell-Rhodes entered the University of Georgia in 1987, she had enough credits from high school to be classified as a junior. This presented some unexpected challenges.

“Usually you get to try things out when you’re a freshman and sophomore, but because I had that many credits, the pressure was on a little bit to narrow [my career] down and get really serious,” Ferrell-Rhodes said. “I had to do it earlier than most.”

She fell in love with psychology after taking an introductory class and decided to pursue it as her major. After graduating in 1990, though, she felt pulled toward business, and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Florida State University in 1993. It was during this time that she realized she could combine her two interests through a career in HR.

“When I went to get my MBA, then I learned about all the different specialties, and HR and leadership were there, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that, that’s [my] thing right there,” she told HR Brew.

In 1993, she landed her first HR job as a consultant at the Small Business Administration (SBA), where she helped small businesses design their people strategies.

“I’m very thankful to have had that opportunity. I was able to go in and quickly see the full gambit of what’s involved in the HR umbrella…Your recruiting, your employee relations, your strategic planning,” she said.

More years in HR. After a few years at the SBA, Ferrell-Rhodes joined insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida as an internal HR consultant, before adding regional HR manager at Comcast Cable and senior HR director at Microsoft to her résumé. In these roles she said she became known as “that girl,” who was always volunteering or being asked to join projects and initiatives.

“Those experiences that I got tapped on for, I loved them, but I leveraged them for all I could in learning and used that as a pathway for the next opportunity,” she said. “Almost every company that you’re in, any boss worth their weight in gold will ask you, ‘What do you envision to be your next step or where would you like to go from here?’”

Whenever Ferrell-Rhodes was presented with this question, she says she’d respond: “I’m not quite sure my next role has been created yet, but these are the elements of new opportunities that really excite me.” And, because of this, she said she was continuously afforded new opportunities. One of the most pivotal opportunities in her career came about during her time at Microsoft, where, she said, employees were allowed to create their own career paths.

“If you could prove that you could be successful in a new opportunity, even if it wasn’t in your current job function, the culture was very open to giving you a try,” Ferrell-Rhodes said. “I got my pick of what I wanted to do. Everything from the leadership development to pure HR to the venture capital side of Microsoft.”

Ferrell-Rhodes oversaw leadership development and helped the top 3% of the company leaders, or roughly 4,200 employees, develop skills and experience needed for succession planning at Microsoft. Her seven years there ended up being the last stop in her corporate journey before opening Shockingly Different Leadership in March 2013.

“I thought, ‘Wow, let me share some of this knowledge that we have outside of these four walls,’ and it started as a solopreneur,” she said.

Growing her business. Ferrell-Rhodes spent the first two years of her business as a one-woman show, consulting on leadership development, and learning a lot about herself.

“My particular gifts, I’ve realized over the years, are in the areas of ideation and strategic thinking…I’m really good about thinking and coming up with a world of possibilities,” she said. “[And] quickly narrowing those down to probably your top two or three.”

By 2015, her client list was growing, and she realized she needed help. She decided to hire a few employees to help with administration and build a team of HR consultants she could tap for assistance. In the beginning, most of her business came from referrals from peers who were familiar with her work in the industry, she said.

Today, Ferrell-Rhodes says a lot of her business comes from clients who first seek guidance from giants like McKinsey and Company or Boston Consulting Group. She said they’ll often hire big firms to help them brainstorm ideas, and then hire Shockingly Different Leadership to bring those ideas to life. She said her firm’s informal tagline is: “We’re the implementation team of what the McKinseys of the world offer.”

Ferrell-Rhodes feels like she’s on “the right path,” even though it hasn’t always been easy. “When you come from corporate, you have a whole infrastructure that is at your beck and call that can help you do things,” she said. “But when you’re founding your own firm, the buck stops with you.”

While she believes her business has room for growth, her philosophy, at least for the moment, is slow and steady.

“I personally, as a founder of the firm, don’t have a desire to become as big as a McKinsey,” she said, adding, “I really want my employees to stay happy and our consultants to stay happy…and that takes a lot of focus and energy. So, if we can scale and keep those foundational things in place, then yeah, I’m totally game, but I don’t want to grow for the sake of growth and then have our work quality suffer.”