When Janet Parker had been at IBM for about 10 years, she realized she had a solid career in place—and panicked.
“I had started my career at IBM in sales and was thrilled,” says Parker. “I loved the company and enjoyed the selling environment. Before I knew it, 10 years had gone by and I thought, ‘What if I don’t move now? This could be the only company I ever work for. Now is the time to go.’”

Today, Parker is the group VP of human resources at Time Warner, with an emphasis on sales and marketing, but since her epiphany at IBM, her career has followed a winding and fairly colorful path. She found herself running Pizza Hut locations and then was involved in the early days of Starbucks, before transitioning into communications.

Along the way, Parker has embraced change, both for herself and for the companies for which she has worked. She now serves on the board of directors of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications, and at Time Warner she is helping build a new generation of telecom pros. The company, which has achieved a Human Rights Campaign Equality Index score of 100 percent, has a wide range of diversity initiatives.For instance, it sponsors students in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) internship program and partners with the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers to recruit military veterans.

Diversity Woman spoke with Parker about the unique challenges in the communications industry, and about how her time manning a pizza oven and hanging with baristas helped elevate her HR game.

Diversity Woman: Why were you so averse to staying at IBM?
Janet Parker: In the office where I started, in Rochester, we had a lot of individuals who had been there 20 years plus—this was the only company they’d worked at. Perhaps it would have been different, in the reality I was in at the time, if I had seen more people at various levels of tenure. But I decided I had to get out.

DW: For many people, the mark of a great career is settling in at one place, or do you think that attitude has changed over the years?
JP: Perhaps. My father was in the army, so we traveled all over, and I didn’t have a hometown. Having moved around so much in my life, I find moving to be a really exhilarating experience. I also like finding a new city and exploring.

DW: How did you get from IBM to Pizza Hut? That’s a pretty drastic move.
JP: I had been recruited by an organization that worked closely with PepsiCo, which used to look for a profile of [a prospective employee]—what the person brought in terms of learning or experience. Then Pepsico would teach this person about its product or brand, rather than just looking for someone who came out of the food industry.
So they recruited me for a position at Pizza Hut. They bring you in and say, “Here’s the job you’ll have for a year to a year and a half, and on the way you get hands-on experience.” Because it was Pizza Hut, I learned how to make pizzas, wait on tables, run a restaurant, and did all that over a period of time. Then when a regional position opened up, you might be responsible for 80 or even 200 restaurants.

DW: How did you like it?
JP: I went from going to meetings with business clients at their offices and talking about tech to proofing dough and making a pizza. For a while I could get past that, because I knew what the end situation was, and it was a great way to learn the business. But somewhere along the way, I realized it was not for me!

DW: What did you take away from it?
JP: I could probably run a restaurant! It was excellent training. I learned how to make a quality product, how to service the customers, how to run the operation from the front of the house to the back. And, I learned how you have empathy for your employees.

DW: How was working with the employees?
JP: That was another big gap. At IBM, my colleagues and I had had similar conversations. People there had similar backgrounds and lived the same lifestyles, and economically we were the same.
But in the restaurant business, you’d be working with people for whom English is not their first language and who may be working for minimum wage. So the challenge becomes how you bridge that—to see what is important to your employees and how to make them comfortable with you being their leader. I found it very humbling to be with people who work very hard every day and to see what it means for them to move forward.

DW: How was your Starbucks experience different?
JP: Starbucks somewhat mirrored Pizza Hut, but it is a different industry, with different products, and its focus was so different.

DW: How so?
JP: When I joined, it was not nearly as big as it is now. Howard Schultz was there, and you could just feel his vision. He wanted to create an environment for the consumer and a quality product, and that got reinforced on a regular basis. We did coffee tastings daily, and we knew where the coffee was coming from and what challenges the farmers were facing. They were still growing when I joined, and they were all about establishing the brand.
They also referred to their employees as “partners.” I just thought how they treated their employees was phenomenal. When you walked in the door, the customer and employees were the most important things. They saw that if you created the right value for both, it would create the financial result any company would want—and that’s how you got there. At most companies, there is the financial plan, and you use that plan to figure out how you get there, but Starbucks kind of flipped that.

DW: How do you extend those good vibes to cable customers?
JP: At Time Warner, we’re aware of the fact that our subscribers on the residential video side have been declining over several quarters. People are watching what they want in all kinds of places. Our competitors have mostly been the satellite companies, but now people can get this stuff anywhere—like Hulu and Net-flix. It’s very different when your competitors are not right in front of you. So you have to offer both products and a level of service—because people can always go somewhere else.

DW: How do you do that?
JP: You do a couple of things. It’s the training, so every time there is an interaction with the customer, you have to exceed expectations. What I have also seen the company do is look at what’s driving our consumers. There is a focus on multiethnicity, and there is a focus on spending, and age, in terms of which products consumers purchase and whether we are appropriately packaging our products for them.

DW: Whether you’re offering the right kind of pizza, in a way?
JP: Having that operations experience was helpful and valuable as an HR person. When I first got in, I knew the challenges for, say, a new product rollout, including truck deliveries and a lot of small things—things where you knew what was frustrating to the employees and how that might impact your sales. When you understand how an organization makes money, and what some of the drivers are, and how things get done—coming from a firsthand experience—you can say how HR could help the process and the bottom line.

DW: One diversity initiative at Time Warner has focused on veterans. What in particular do vets bring to the communications table?
JP: In industries where process and standards are key, vets bring deep skills. In general, they are decisive and good problem solvers, and they understand how to collaborate in a work setting. Their training is quite rigorous, so it demonstrates a level of perseverance to completing a body of work. Also, the expectations are high, so the work is often completed at a high level.

DW: What books have you read lately that have inspired you in your career?
JP: One is What Got You Here Won’t Get You There [by Marshall Goldsmith]. It has a good perspective on the habits of productive leaders. It reinforces the need to be clear in your intentions and expectations. Communication is so important when managing teams and trying to get work done with, and through, others. DW

Katrina Brown Hunt, based in San Diego, has written for Fortune Small Business and Smart Money.

Get keyword savvy.
You can describe your sterling qualifications in many ways, but your cover letter should be chock-full of the keywords included in the job description—otherwise the software will weed you out before the human can lay eyes on your letter. Before you write, go through the description and highlight important words, such as those used to describe the job’s main responsibilities and the desired skills. Then use them early and often in your letter.

Make a case for yourself.
Too many cover letters read like boilerplate, says career counselor Toni Littlestone of Albany, California—just rehashing recent jobs or reciting a litany of accomplishments. Your letter needs to persuade the hiring manager that you bring the precise mix of skills, experience, and cultural fit to hit the ground running. So include a paragraph that shows you really get what the company needs and that knits together your background with the job’s requirements.

Do lots of research.
This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how often it doesn’t happen. The more you know about the company’s recent history, plans, culture, current challenges, and such, the more specific—and convincing—you can be when you describe how your background meshes with the company’s needs.

• Sit up straight, loosen any piece of clothing around your waist that feels tight, and take five deep breaths. With each inhale, feel your belly move outward. Make each exhale long and slow, concentrating on the sensation of the breath moving out of your body.

• Stand up and stretch. Raise your arms, palms up, slowly out to the side, until they’re alongside your ears. Take hold of your right wrist with your left hand and lean slightly to the left, focusing on the stretch on your right side. Repeat on the other side.

• Once a week, eat lunch in silence, without reading or watching anything. Enjoy the sense of spaciousness.

• Take five minutes for a walk outside, around the block or the office park—anywhere you can move steadily for five minutes. Focus your gaze on some bit of nature, and remind yourself that the world does not begin and end in your office.

Dear Undercover Job Seeker,
You’ll need to be both organized and discreet. Organized, because you will have to do much of your searching during nonwork hours, and discreet because . . . well, you get that, right?
Most people find their jobs through people they know. So when you put the word out to your network, let your contacts know that you’d prefer to keep your search quiet.
Create a spreadsheet or other way of tracking your search, and set aside specific times—whether in the morning, in the evening, or both—to send out e-mails. (Of course, any search-related e-mails you send should come from your personal account, not your work one.) You’re more likely to stay focused on the search if it’s part of your schedule like any other commitment.
If you have to schedule a phone conversation during work hours, make the call from somewhere outside the office: sit in your car in the parking lot if you must, or find a quiet corner of a coffee shop or hotel lobby.
Set up networking lunches. It’s a good way to build search-related activity into your workday without feeling furtive about it.
When you need to take time away from work to interview, you’ll feel more relaxed if you plan to use a half day of personal or vacation time, rather than trying to squeeze the appointment into a long lunch hour or inventing a mysterious doctor’s appointment.
Try not to feel discouraged when it seems as if you have no time to search. Remember that people who are employed have an easier time getting hired than those who are between jobs.

Here are a few of Archuleta’s favorites.

Shared Values. Everyone writes down what he or she thinks are the team’s three most important values. Participants divide into groups and try to agree on the top three, then discuss them with the entire team to identify patterns and come up with a unified set of values. Ask if these values reflect how the group really behaves; what can lead it to lose sight of these values; what the team can or should do if this happens; and how these values move the team toward its goals.

Name Game. Participants write down something about what their name means to them and how it reflects who they are. Then each person reads what he or she has written. This helps individuals share how they see themselves and connect on a personal level.

Group Résumé. Creating a group résumé is a way for team members to get to know and appreciate what everyone else has to offer. Participants divide into small groups. On a flip chart, each group creates a résumé that includes such categories as education, total years of professional experience, positions held, skills, accomplishments, languages, hobbies, and talents. Each unit presents its résumé to the entire group. Everyone discusses how the organization can make better use of all this expertise.

A group called the WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) Project is pushing to change this by teaching young women to negotiate better. Research has shown that women entering the workforce are far more likely to simply accept the first salary offered to them and less likely to negotiate aggressively throughout their careers. Men, on the other hand, tend to hold out for higher starting salaries. The unequal beginning helps explain the lifelong disparities.

While WAGE—which is putting on workshops at hundreds of colleges this spring—is focusing on young women, its founders are quick to advise every woman to get more savvy about negotiating pay.

A FEW TIPS
• Don’t say yes to any figure immediately.
• Don’t be the first to name a number—ask, “What range did you have in mind?”
• Do research on pay scales so that when it’s time for you to counter the initial offer, you have a credible figure in mind.

Today, Nielsen tracks two sets of ratings: the top prime-time shows and the top time-shifted ones. In prime time, we’re most likely to tune in to football and reality-based fare like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. The shows we record to watch later tend to be edgy dramas like Mad Men,
Breaking Bad, and Justified.

* Recorded and watched later

DW: Where does your passion for this work come from?
Karyn Twaronite: I came up through the client ranks. I saw people of color [and] or women who were underutilized.
And running talent management for our largest division, and then across the United States and Canada, I had the opportunity to look at gaps that women and people of color had, as relates to sponsorship. That’s a critical tool that we need to be disciplined about, to make sure it’s there equitably in the workplace.

DW: What do you mean by sponsorship? Is it the same as mentorship?
KT: Mentorship is when someone talks to you, giving advice and counsel and suggestions. Sponsorship has to do with how somebody talks about you when you’re not in the room. It’s when someone advocates for your advancement, your promotion, your hiring—putting his or her own skin in the game to advocate for you. Research shows that white men are 50 percent more likely to be sponsored than women. People of color are two-thirds less likely to be sponsored than white men.

DW: How do you make sure that equitable sponsorship happens?
KT: Seventy percent is the responsibility of the protégé. The protégé needs to consistently perform for the sponsor, so the sponsor has a reason to advocate. We educate protégés on how to be a meaningful protégé. We try to have programs that allow for our women and people of color to have the appropriate work experience that would tee them up to have sponsorship. And we educate sponsors on how to be a good sponsor. It’s important that people know how to sponsor, are aware of whom they are sponsoring, and are not just sponsoring people who look like them.

DW: Sometimes people aren’t inclusive because of biases they aren’t even aware of. How can you build awareness of unconscious bias and help people get beyond it?
KT: We’ve been doing work on unconscious bias training for about seven years. We want all the people who work here to understand that unconscious biases exist. We all have them. We work with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard. We teach people to be aware of what their biases might be and how to check them at the door at appropriate times. We think it’s so important that we started doing unconscious bias training for partners. We are trying to make sure the environment is as inclusive as possible.

DW: What has been your biggest “aha moment” since starting to work on diversity?
KT: We have produced so many programs intended to help our women. Those are important, but the aha moment for me was to realize that we don’t need programs only for fixing the women, but also for fixing the environment. We need programs to help enable success, but it’s equally important that we educate our culture to be inclusive.