With deep personal, professional and educational ties to Arizona, LaCoya Shelton, M.A., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, HCS, has a proven commitment to the community. For decades, LaCoya has dedicated her talents to creating workplaces where organization and employee goals work in concert and thrive. She has been described as “her own geoseismic event” and “a force for good”, as she proudly gained traction in many environments where progress was difficult to come by. LaCoya’s leadership in the field of Human Resources, her ability to see simplicity in complex surroundings, and her creative contributions have transformed organizations.
Throughout LaCoya’s almost twenty-year career, colleagues have described her as a pleasure to work with, a trusted advisor who manages to undertake demanding projects with a sense of fun; and someone who displays a rare combination of capability, wit, creativity and enthusiasm. Her energy and passion are contagious.
A self-proclaimed servant leader, LaCoya Shelton consistently demonstrates a sincere desire to do what is in the best interest of the organization and its employees. “I have nurtured dramatic and transformative changes to organizational cultures, providing memorable leadership in a wide variety of areas such as talent acquisition, succession planning, knowledge and performance management, workforce resolutions and analytics, leadership growth, employee learning and policy development,” she said recently.
LaCoya Shelton began her educational journey at local community colleges moving on to earn multiple degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Phoenix. Over the past two decades, her personal commitment to the delivery of public services and educational opportunities to the citizens of Arizona led her to serve in impactful HR leadership roles with many large, complex State agencies, boards and commissions; and as the Vice Chancellor for Human Resources for Maricopa Colleges, the nation’s largest community colleges system. Prior to this, she led a successful HR career in the private sector. For those visiting this website looking to learn more about LaCoya Shelton, below are just a few of her accomplishments and other career-related accolades.
An astute-listener with an enormous reservoir of ingenuity and knowledge, LaCoya Shelton was instrumental in leading the charge for employers to recognize their most valuable asset – the dedicated employees who make meaningful and unique contributions each and every day. Shelton helped the State’s Medicaid agency advance its position in the employment marketplace by enhancing flexible work arrangements, which led to award winning recognition for workplace excellence. During her tenure with the State, she helped bring greater flexibility, expediency and effectiveness in hiring, purposeful onboarding new employees for success, and introduced competitive pay practices empowering employees to have considerable influence over their compensation as it relates to their individual and team contributions.
Recognizing the vital significance of education toward economic viability of our society and HR’s role in providing the operational infrastructure upon which student success is supported and enabled, LaCoya Shelton led the community colleges system through a very challenging movement into relevancy and contemporary best HR practice. She successfully drove the monumental task of streamlining myriad complex, conflicting and outdated practices that hindered the organization’s ability to rapidly respond to the needs of its workforce and the stakeholders served. LaCoya introduced automation to core processes and ushered in a new era of modernized HR practices including an entirely redesigned classification and compensation system creating clear line-of-sight career progression for employees while strengthening the ability of the system to identify and grow talent from within.
While these are just a few examples from LaCoya Shelton’s executive-level leadership, it is this type of on-the-job experience along with LaCoya’s positive and encouraging demeanor that has turned Shelton into a much sought-after public speaker. Her mentoring skills have been recognized by the Phoenix Business Journal as part of its “Women in Business” spotlight and she was the League of Innovation’s “Leadership Award” recipient in 2017. LaCoya has been featured as a guest speaker and industry expert at myriad events and was most recently a featured speaker at the 2018 HR Executive Leadership Conference. Shelton continues to mentor up-and-coming professionals and additionally donates her time on several Boards.
LaCoya Shelton’s desire to continue revolutionizing human resources by bringing about positive change to HR systems and practices on a global scale led her to make the exciting and courageous transition to launching Revolutionary HR Consulting in September 2018.
With two decades of HR executive leadership and practitioner experience, LaCoya Shelton is a seasoned public speaker and professional who has overseen large scale, complex employee relations and equal employment opportunity (EEO) matters in public sector, healthcare, transportation and education environments. She has served as organizational representative in appeals, grievances, labor union negotiations and legal proceedings where she has worked closely with Chief and General counsels, partners and associates. In September 2018, LaCoya became a suggested expert witness resource from sitting President of the Arizona Employment Lawyers Association (AzELA) to its members.
If you are an attorney or law firm seeking an experienced, engaging HR expert witness with an impressive resume, Contact LaCoya.
Helping to reach business audiences worldwide, Revolutionary HR Consulting’s podcast, Join the Revolution! is available on streaming services including iTunes, Google Play and Spotify. The podcast series discusses how HR systems align with business strategies. Each month, CEO LaCoya Shelton, highlights real world business and leadership opportunities and challenges. The series makes the connection between existing as well as emerging business strategies and the HR system given the HR system is the intersection between business strategy and the human beings who are responsible for its success. Recognizing that this connection is not always clear in a day-to-day, practical sense, the Revolutionary HR Consulting podcast Join the Revolution! aims to change that through conversations with revolutionary people including thought leaders, CEOs and others whose brilliance, combined with Revolutionary HR Consulting’s decades of experience and expertise, brings clarity, insightfulness and optimism to the most common and complex leadership and business challenges.
In a special hour-long episode recorded during the 2019 Human Resources Executive Summit and Retreat (HRESR), LaCoya Shelton speaks with the iconic Dr. Ken Blanchard, grandfather of situational leadership, servant leadership and author of the One-Minute-Manager and a host of other bestselling books. Also sharing their insights during this episode are President and CEO of Goodwill of Central and Northern Arizona, Tim O’Neal; Founder and CEO at Shanahan Capital Ventures and former CEO of Avella Specialty Pharmacy, Rebecca Shanahan; and HRESR Founder and CEO Laura Ingegneri.
Click below to request being a guest on the Join the Revolution! podcast.
