Sebastien Girard serves as Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at Centura
Health.
Supporting a team of 21,000 outstanding caregivers, Seb is on a mission to serve, elevate and care for every community, every patient and every associate. Seb is an accomplished human resources leader with talents and practical skills in workforce planning, talent acquisition and management, HR technologies, and market disruption.
A native of Montreal, Canada, Seb joined Centura from Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he served as the Senior Vice President responsible for workforce engagement and workforce operations. He previously served as the Chief Workforce Officer at Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, Texas. He spent nearly fifteen years with Randstad, a Dutch-based global human resources consulting firm, in executive and operations roles in both the United States and Canada.
Seb has a Master of Business Administration degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He completed Randstad’s prestigious international Senior Executive Program and the Human Capital Institute’s strategic workforce planning development program. He also serves as an advisory board member with three independent HR companies innovating in nurse staffing, professional nurse development, and health care workforce managed solutions.
In addition to his deep professional experience, Seb passionately supports giving back to the community and has engaged in international humanitarian projects to recruit and attract some of the world’s best engineers to support those living in India with mobility obstacles.
More from Seb…
We all wish we could go back in time and tell our younger selves something that would help us in the future. Seb shares what he wishes he knew more about when entering into his career.
“Everybody talks about IQ and EQ. I think we’re missing the boat. I think what we need to talk about is SQ, which is social intelligence. I’ll give you two quotes and I’d like to explain that because it’s something that I grasp later in my career, that if had grasped earlier, it would have just made me even more successful.
So the first quote come from Chrissy Hofbeck she’s a she’s an exec actuary for one of the… she was one of the top execs from one of the big insurance company, but she was also a Survivor, the show, you know, with Jeff Probst. She was a Survivor participant. She was a runner up and she wrote a book called Winning Condition. And her quote is, ‘It is not who you know, it is who knows you.’ That’s a big difference.
Then the second quote would be from our current chief people and culture officer, Dr. Jim Dunn, that said to me once, ‘You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. Those are often not the one that’s going to be succeeding. You need to be the person that’s going to understand all the network. Understand how the relationship are going. And you’re going to find a way to get visibility to those people and have them pay attention to you.’
So again, it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. And if you think about it, social intelligence is often winning over everything else.”
