Angela Gatta has been an aspiring HR professional since her undergraduate studies, leading with empathy and championing a human-centric work environment. She has taken calculated risks and pushed herself to grow through each new chapter of her career. Angela is the Head of People at Enspira, a 2023 Inc. 5000 fastest growing honoree and HR consultancy firm helping businesses across all industries and sizes identify talent, people and culture solutions that meet their unique needs. A division of Enspira’s consulting business focuses solely on the needs of startups at all stages of evolution.
Angela grew up in the Boston area, knowing from an early age that she wanted to influence and impact people through her work. As the oldest of four children and daughter of an entrepreneur, leadership came early. Many dinner table conversations centered around how people can influence the successes and challenges of a growing business.
When Angela’s mom took a job at Boston College, becoming an Eagle became the first real goal in her life. Naturally, she accomplished it. Both of her sisters went to BC too. Angela even met her husband on freshman move-in day, and they’ve been together pretty much ever since.
As part of her Human Development major, she needed to take an HR Management class and an Organizational Behavior class. She learned that leadership, culture & policies can motivate and unite people, and influence successful results. After an internship in HR during her junior year, she was hooked.
Upon graduating from BC, Angela headed to New York City to work as an HR Administrator at Rothschild, a global financial services firm. This role further validated her interest in HR. But after two years, she missed Boston and made her way back up north to anchor her career and life here.
Once back in Boston, she accepted a temporary HR position with Biogen as an HR Project Manager, supporting the sale and closure of a major manufacturing facility. Next, she accepted a full-time HR Analyst position at Pembroke, a real estate advisor that acquires, develops, and manages properties and places across the globe. While she enjoyed her experiences working for larger companies that offered stability and well-established structure, she began thinking about the next phase of her career, wanting to really challenge herself.
As this itch began, a unique opportunity presented itself. A friend and former colleague of Angela’s, Kurt Landon, reached out and asked her to join him in starting an HR consulting business – now Enspira.
Reflecting on this initial conversation with Kurt, she admits to being very skeptical. As a self-proclaimed “type-A” and risk-averse individual, Angela has a natural bias towards order, predictability and stability. Considering an offer with fewer hours, lower pay, no benefits and no formalized business plan was scary, especially in a year when she was planning to get married, buy a home and start her family.
Those that knew Angela well thought she was crazy and questioned her judgment, except for her husband. He recognized the invaluable learning opportunity at her fingertips and really pushed her to embrace risk. With her husband’s encouragement and unconditional support, she left her full-time job and took the leap. It was time to go for a ride!
Looking back four years later, Angela shares that “the past four years have been absolutely transformative, both personally and professionally.” She’s watched Enspira grow as a business from the ground up, embracing every peak and valley along the way, all while challenging and strengthening her own HR skillset. “I deeply believe in myself, my peers and the amazing work we do for our clients.” She shares that the cornerstone of the culture at Enspira is creating “A+” HR solutions for their clients while believing in one another as HR professionals. Angela thinks you need both of those things to build a successful company.
During her time at Enspira, she’s gone through two major chapters. The first chapter involved focusing on client delivery. Angela has worked on and led countless client engagements, translating business strategy into a people strategy.
The second chapter is shaped by her now Head of People role. Angela returned from her second parental leave with a deeper sense of drive and commitment to her career. She ultimately decided to apply for Enspira’s first-ever Head of People position. Despite feeling as though she was an “underdog” candidate, Angela was beyond thrilled to be accepted for the position. She is currently operating in a dual role, where she spends about 50% of her time on client delivery, and the other 50% of her time on internal Enspira HR delivery. The duality of this role fuels her development, as she continues to leverage skills from her client work to support her internal HR work, and vice-versa.
Angela has had to shoulder a number of responsibilities as Head of People. One of the toughest was navigating the organization through a reduction in force. She learned that when you’re working on something that’s personally difficult, like laying off people that you genuinely care about, the best thing you can do in those moments is to just do your job to the best of your ability. “Showing up as strong as you can in your role will only help the people impacted by your work.”
As Angela continues to grow her skills in the Head of People role, she believes that DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging) are critical to that success. Prioritizing DEIB and having a workforce that is representative of different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives leads to many positive business outcomes. Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. DEIB should be a top priority and not an afterthought.
A Human-Centric Work Environment
A key standard Angela always strives to uphold is to operate with kindness and empathy. She believes that leading with kindness and empathy is key to building strong, trusting relationships at all levels of an organization. It is also key to creating a human-centric work environment. It’s not enough to only focus on business results. You must also focus on the people making the magic happen.
As Angela begins to sharpen her own leadership style, she is constantly thinking about the most impactful ways to create a human-centric work environment. Angela believes that it’s important to create a culture with policies and operating norms that enable people to “fill their cup” first and show up to work as their best, most authentic and fulfilled selves. It’s the right thing to do from a human perspective, and it will also positively impact business results.
Ways that Angela has shaped a human-centric work environment at Enspira include serving as Enspira’s first-ever Head of People, creating and enhancing the company’s parental leave policy, planning a company offsite, creating a mechanism for ongoing feedback and annual reflection conversations, creating company values and competencies, taking the important time to get to know employees personally and reminding them that it’s okay to take time off of work to care for themselves or a loved one.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Always Bet On Yourself – “Research shows that, when compared to men, women are less likely to advocate for themselves or apply for a job if they are concerned that they do not meet the qualifications. As the mother of a little girl, I am determined to challenge this throughout my career. A key learning from applying for the Head of People position is to always bet on yourself. Throw your hat in the ring and put yourself up for things that are challenging and push you outside of your comfort zone. You will never regret it.”
How > What – “How you operate is just as important, if not more important, than what you’re actually doing. If you achieve or overachieve your objectives, but you’re stepping on others along the way, people will remember this. It will impact your relationships and ultimately limit your overall success and capabilities.”
Pull People Up – “As you are accelerating in your own career, always look around your shoulder to see how you can elevate the people around and below you.”
Eventually, Angela would love to be a Chief People Officer – ideally at a growing company. She loves “building the plane while flying it”. The strong sense of camaraderie when you’re building something together is why she loves the startup environment.
If you want to learn more about Angela you can find her busy scaling Enspira, chasing her two young toddlers around, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Angela. We’re excited to see all the teams you help influence internally and externally on your journey in HR over the coming years!