By Denise Merle
Senior Vice President and Chief Administration Officer
Early in my career with Weyerhaeuser, I was working as an accountant for one of our businesses. The team was hiring for a director of accounting, and I remember hearing that one of my peers had gotten the job. The position hadn’t been posted, so I never had a chance to apply or even express interest in it. I went to my boss and asked if I had been considered for that role, and if there was something I could have done differently, because I would have been really excited for the opportunity. He was surprised and said, “Oh, you’re pregnant, so we just assumed you wouldn’t want to take on a role like that.”
I’ve been here 38 years now, and that conversation has always stuck with me. I don’t look back with anger or regret. I liked and respected my leader at the time, but I’ll never forget the feeling of being overlooked — of being shut out from an opportunity — based on a flawed assumption about what I wanted or was capable of doing.
My lesson from that experience continues to guide my career at Weyerhaeuser. It helped define my passion for effective HR leadership, and how important it is to try to see and think outside of your own experiences. That’s not always a natural or comfortable process. Our brains are hardwired to sort and simplify the world, and whether we want to or not, we often end up making assumptions about the people around us. We make assumptions about career interests and opportunities; about the kind of talent we should recruit, and the candidates we overlook; about regional beliefs and political ideologies; about different nationalities and religions; about skin color and sexual orientation, and so much more.
These assumptions can have far-reaching impacts on people’s lives and careers, and we have to work together — and be willing to learn and grow together — to make sure Weyerhaeuser consistently supports and encourages diverse backgrounds and voices. We are an international company of many beliefs and value systems, and we can’t simply tolerate our differences. We must embrace them as fundamental to who we are and how we thrive as a business.
The first step in ensuring a positive work environment for everyone is to communicate openly and often about these issues. That’s a big reason I wanted to start this blog, and why I’m excited about the work of our new Inclusion Council. I plan to use this space to explore some of these topics and hopefully engage all of us in conversations about what it means to build a truly inclusive culture at Weyerhaeuser. If we keep challenging ourselves and each other, we’ll be richer as human beings, more effective as colleagues, and more successful as a company.
Thank you for reading.
