Ray Tavares’ career has largely been spent in one industry — financial services — not all that uncommon for Gen Xers. About 20 years ago, he pivoted into the HR tech domain, and has witnessed every conceivable transformation along the way. His kids jokingly accuse him of “HR-ing” them with fatherly advice.

That’s because of his passion for helping others succeed. In his senior level role at Truist, the Charlotte-based bank formed by the merger of SunTrust and BB&T, Tavares sees himself largely as a coach who helps fellow leaders navigate organizational blind spots.

In this episode of “Unusual Attitudes,” he explains why he loves work, but isn’t a workaholic.

Growing up a “Star Trek” fan, Ajay Patel marveled at boldly going where no one had gone before. It was only natural he would study astrophysics at university, but instead of building rockets and studying celestial bodies, his career pivoted to HR where he builds talent pipelines.

The figure-it-out mindset of an engineer came in handy when he arrived at Straumann Group in 2020 as vice president of talent acquisition. Though the Swiss dental equipment maker is more than 70 years old, the environment and culture felt decidedly like a startup. TA was a blank slate, with little in the way of established processes.

In this episode of “Unusual Attitudes,” Patel traces the excitement he felt building a function from scratch to keep pace with a rapidly growing enterprise.

When Ed LaPerche first entered tech sales in the 1990s he witnessed the industry gradually evolve from old school mainframe computing to the client-server network model all the way through to cloud computing. Today, it’s all about artificial intelligence and agentic AI.

Transformation for a sales professional means never being satisfied with the status quo. Seeking out opportunities to learn and grow are important ways to keep tabs on the next big trends. Because one of the distinctive traits about the technology industry is that its pace of change is much more rapid than other sectors.

In this episode of “Unusual Attitudes,” LaPerche talks about the time he took three companies public, including Salesforce and Workday. Watching them grow from small startups to tech giants has been a rewarding part of his journey.