Harri Stenning

A Detour Through Corporate Events

Her plan out of university had nothing to do with hiring. She wanted the events world, took a postgraduate diploma to get there, and landed at one of the biggest nightclubs in London, the Ministry of Sound, running corporate events. The job sounded more glamorous than the hours made it feel, and she came away with a clear read on what she did not want from a career.

The pivot came through a friend who was working in recruitment, enjoying it and earning well, and suggested she look into it. She applied for an entry level recruiting role, got it, and, as she puts it, never looked back. "I loved it," she says of that first job, and the affection has held for a decade and a half.

From Delivery to Operations, on Purpose

By the time the offer came, Stenning had spent seven or eight years leading the TA function for OneTrust's international markets on the delivery side. She was, by any measure, established. Her manager offered her the chance to move into TA operations instead: new discipline, new mechanics, a genuine step outside her expertise.

She took it, and she is unambiguous about what it has meant. "I'll forever be grateful for the fact that she saw that potential in me and gave me the opportunity to learn and develop in the operations side, which has been amazing," she says. It is a telling career decision. Plenty of leaders with eight years of delivery credibility would have protected it. She traded comfort for a steeper learning curve, which is exactly the instinct she now argues the whole profession needs.

Learning Mode

Her advice for talent leaders heading further into 2026 comes straight out of the OneTrust experience. Ten years inside a company that grew from three people to thousands, then restructured, teaches you not to get attached to a single way of thinking or doing things. "One of the biggest things I've learned is to really be able to adapt to change and to be able to pivot quickly and easily," she says. AI, in her reading, is shifting daily, and agility is no longer a soft skill: "If we're not able to pivot and be agile as leaders, we're going to get left behind."

The second half of her advice is sharper, and aimed at her peers. Most people who reach TA leadership have years of experience behind them, and that seniority can quietly switch off the learning reflex. She thinks that is the real risk right now. "This is still new and still changing for everyone," she says, which means leaders have to throw themselves into learning the basics rather than delegating curiosity downward. She has spent the past two years doing exactly that, particularly since moving into operations: tracking the new tools, watching how her teams actually use them, mapping where AI creates real time savings and efficiencies rather than theoretical ones. Her team has already signed an AI sourcing tool.

The reasoning is practical rather than fashionable. Without doing that work yourself, she argues, you cannot implement anything successfully through your teams, and you certainly cannot lead from the front. That phrase, lead from the front, is a fair summary of the last ten years: employee number three who kept learning fast enough to stay useful at every size the company became.