Human capital expert Rebecca Contreras has worked one-on-one with some of the most legendary leaders in Texas history, including Ann Richards, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and George W. Bush. She even accompanied Bush to the White House, serving as the administration’s Special Assistant for Personnel. There, among other duties, she managed the executive recruiting process for over 1,200 board and commission positions in the federal government.
A teenage Rebecca Contreras would never have believed that this could be her reality. Born to a single mother in the projects of El Paso, Contreras suffered trauma and abandonment in early childhood. In her teen years, she began to follow the same cycles that had persisted in her family: drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and running with a very dangerous crowd.
Then, after the birth of her daughter, everything changed.
Against incredible odds and with the help of the people around her, Contreras ended up as the receptionist to Ann Richards, beginning a climb that would later see her placing talent at the highest echelons of the country. Today, she’s back in Texas, leading a human capital consulting company that she has grown to over 100 employees. She details her harrowing but inspiring story in her new book, Lost Girl, but also shares it with us here in shorter form, along with insights about recruiting, talent development, and the CEO’s imperative to always pay it forward.
Can you tell us about your upbringing?
I’m a Bordertown girl from El Paso, one of four children. None of us knew our fathers. My and my twin brother’s father was White, my older brother’s father was Mexican, and my little sister’s father was Black. We used to joke with Mom that we just needed an Asian to complete the diversity spectrum!
We grew up in Section 8 housing, back in the days when you could just walk across to Juárez. My mother was a good person at heart, but she struggled with addiction, mental illness, and trauma. It created a real explosion of dysfunction in our family.
I never knew my father, but he was from Eastern Europe and owned a nightclub my mom used to dance at in Juárez. One day, when I was five, told us she was going to the grocery store and never came back. We were left with my six-month-old sister in the crib. That took our trauma to a whole other level. I didn’t understand as a young girl what I had done to cause my mother to leave.
My grandmother took us in after that and prevented us from being split up into foster homes. She was my hero. Then, after two years, my mom came back. She’d been living on the streets, strung out on her drug of choice: heroin. When she left, she was 300 pounds but now she was around 90 pounds.
She was trying to get her life together, and she moved us to East Austin when I was nine. That ripped us away from the only stable home we had known. And even though Mom wasn’t using anymore, she was still mentally challenged with bipolar and had depression—and here she has four kids who didn’t really know her anymore.
It ended up being a recipe for disaster. I grew up very angry and started using drugs myself at age 13. I would sneak out of the house and got involved with the wrong crowd. This was East Austin back in the day when it was the hood. Being mixed race, I didn’t mix well with Whites or Hispanics. And Austin wasn’t the inclusive place it is today.
At 17, I got pregnant. My life took on the trajectory of a statistic—the Latina high school dropout. My mother was gone a lot on missionary work with my grandfather in Costa Rica, so there was basically no parental oversight.
Once I got pregnant, I said “To hell with this. This is not going to be my life.” I left my daughter with my mother, moved out, and spun out of control. I was involved with a dangerous guy, my baby daddy, one of the biggest drug dealers in Austin at that time. I was his tool to use and abuse. At one point he almost killed me. He ended up getting busted by the FBI and thrown into jail. It was my saving grace. With him out of the picture, I was able to get my life back on track.
My mom really wanted me to get back in school and take ownership of my issues. She knew she had failed me as a mother and didn’t want me making the same mistakes. She was in relentless pursuit of trying to get her daughter on track. At 19, I went to church with her and moved back in. I asked for help with my addictions, left everything behind, and put myself around people who believed in me. Having people like that is why I do what I do today with inner-city kids.
What was the first step toward working in state government? I imagine that’s not easy for someone with that kind of background to break into.
One day, somebody told me about the Job Training Partnership Act, which was designed to help single moms get off welfare. If you got your GED and stayed clean, you got placed as a temp in the office of an elected state official. So I did the program and ended up as the receptionist to Ann Richards, who was State Treasurer at the time. That was the first time I’d seen a woman in power. I began to think, “Wow, I wonder if this is possible for me.”
Ann was a fireball. What you saw with her in public life, you got with her in private life. The woman had tremendous grit. She was bigger than life, but she always took the time to get to know you as a person. Every time she would walk in, she’d say, “How you doing, hun?” in her Texas drawl. She wanted to know about my life, and what I was doing. She really stood for women’s empowerment in a way that I hadn’t seen before.
She got elected governor in 1990 and in comes Kay Bailey Hutchison as the new treasurer, another badass woman. Nobody would mess with Kay. She was sweet as pie, but if she felt you were going to one-up her, she’d let you have it. I really learned my leadership style from these two powerful women.
Kay also hired really smart women. It was her HR director, Donna, who saw my potential. She became my first dedicated mentor and sent me back to the LBJ School of Public Affairs and all sorts of classes. Donna said, “You need to learn how to communicate. You need to learn how to write.” I couldn’t even put two words together. I look back at my welfare-to-work application and every other word is misspelled.
So I started learning writing and editing. I started writing memos and policy documents. Over time I was promoted all the way up to HR management under Kay Bailey.
And then you went up even further, working for Governor Bush. How did that happen?
In 1995, I get a call from Donna. She says, “Guess where I am? I’m working for the new governor.” With her help, I got a deputy manager role at the Texas capitol, working for George W. I ended up being his HR director. Then, when Governor Bush ran for president, he personally asked me to join the team. It was an incredible opportunity for me and my family. We moved to DC and I served on his transition team, handling personnel. I led the boards and commissions portfolio, helping place presidential members on boards like the Kennedy Center, the Holocaust Museum, at that time Fannie Mae and Fred Mac.
My husband also served in the first term of the Bush administration. I’ve had four official state bosses, two Democrats, two Republicans. I’m an apolitical person. My real passion is for the people business. I’m fascinated by how, to be successful, a leader has to have the right people around them.
What was it like working for George W. Bush?
He has this tremendous tenacity and resolve. He would go after what he believed in no matter what anybody thought. He invested in me personally, too. He had sent me to the governor’s executive development program. Each step along the way it was the right people, in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things, sort of like Jim Collins says about the bus.
The other leader I worked for was President Bush’s best friend, Clay Johnson. Clay was an MIT and Yale grad. Literally one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met. He always took time to care about where I was in my career. As he’s leading the presidential transition with Dick Cheney in DC, I’m emailing him about my particular career—and he would respond within two hours!
He’d take time to talk to me no matter how busy he was in the West Wing. I struggled a lot with my identity and insecurity because I don’t have a traditional college degree, and it was hard for me to learn at the policy level. Clay would stop and ask what I needed, then help me acquire the knowledge I needed to do my job.
I was once in the Oval Office for one of my first weekly meetings with Bush as president. I was terrified to go in. Clay said to me, “The president is just a man. He puts his pants on just like you do. Go in there and just talk to him about what you think needs to happen.”
Eventually, you decided to come back to Texas. How did that happen?
My husband and I decided to come back to Texas in January 2005. We started a nonprofit, Launchpad, to impact kids in inner cities, and I cut my teeth in consulting. In 2011, I decided to start my business, AvantGarde, and reinvent myself again as an entrepreneur. I call it the reinvention of Rebecca times four.
What does AvantGarde do?
We offer human capital and workforce solutions to the government. We have about 15 clients in the public sector who we help develop human capital strategy. We can we provide boots on the ground to do staffing plans, and we do the more strategic side too. Right now people are looking at how they get the same level of engagement from a remote workforce that they did when everyone was in the office. We’re doing a lot around that and around retention.
Have you developed a personal philosophy around recruiting? What is a signal to you that someone will be right for a role or good for a role?
I interview for heart. You can interview for technical skill and education, but I do more behavioral interviewing with scenarios. I want to know: How are they going to treat employees? How are they going to manage? Interviewing for heart is very different from checking boxes on a resume. You can train for skills; you can’t train for heart.
Do you think that that strategy is informed by your past, because you want to give people a chance?
Oh, absolutely. Everything about who I am is shaped by my past, including my role as CEO. But I don’t allow that path to define my future. Everything I do—my private life, my book tour, my company—it’s all centered around doing right by people and helping those who may not be as fortunate as others.
What do you think is the top mistake organizations make in the area of human capital?
Losing the pulse on their people, especially in the middle of massive changes. You can spend millions on a new fancy Oracle system but if your people don’t believe in it, it’s not going to work. As an employer, you need to get into people’s world and understand who they are. The people are what makes you or breaks you. I see a lot of organizations miss the people side.
Have you seen any differences in how private versus public sector organizations approach human capital?
I see the private sector investing in human capital a lot more aggressively. For example, you’ve got many companies giving their employees a lot of flexibility in their workdays. They don’t force the employee to be sitting in a chair at the computer all day. Maybe they’re working out of their house. Maybe they have a six-hour day instead of an eight-hour day because guess what? They can get it all done in six hours.
Government can be a little more antiquated. I’ve convinced most of my government clients to allow the workforce to remain remote, with the exception of one. They’re huge but very old-school, and they’re going to end up losing their workforce, including our employees, by forcing the traditional model, even though they’ve been performing at optimum level for two years without being in the office.
We’ve seen a sea change around diversity and inclusion in recent years. Are your clients actively looking to increase their efforts in that area?
Absolutely. But this has been a passion of mine for 25 years. The team I led at the White House broke records for the number of women and minorities appointed to serve under President Bush. I’ll tell you a funny story. About a year after Bush had been in office, I was in the Oval Office with President Bush and one of my colleagues who had brought in a list of candidates for a very hard-to-fill position. His list was all white men. The president looked at him and said, “You mean to tell me in this great United States of America, you can’t find one woman or minority to put on the list?”
Yet even today, companies will still say, “My board isn’t diverse because I can’t find enough women or minorities.” That’s hogwash. There’s so much talent out there in America. As the CEO, you have to put a stake in the ground and say, “I am not going to fill that position until the candidates represent America.”
Do you think women leaders still face challenges that male leaders do not?
We have made tremendous strides. There’s work to be done, but as a woman, as a Latina, I’m proud to have had the opportunities I have. I trailblazed it though. It didn’t come easy. Women do have to bulldoze their way in and say, “I am going to have a seat at the table.” Fortunately, over the last five years I’ve seen a lot of interest in ensuring that when women are represented, they’re not just there as a token.
I agree with Beyoncé—we do run the world. I always tell women to start with leadership in a small sphere of influence, like their local community, their church, their business. Lead with grit and grace and bring so much value that they have no choice but to say, “I want her at the table with me.”
What’s your vision for the next several years of AG?
I’d like to be a $30 million business, so I’m focused on growing the business and hiring the right people to deliver. We’ve got a lot of human capital work to do under the current administration over the next two to three years. I never dreamed I would be an entrepreneur, so the fact that we’re here is a miracle.
Anything else you want to add?
Success only matters if you turn around and give back to where you came from. I’m mentoring a couple of single moms right now, and we’re getting ready to launch a scholarship program to send 10 kids to school. There’s a long line of people still living in poverty, still living with trauma, still trying to make their lives better. As CEOs and leaders here in Texas, in one of the greatest place on the planet, it’s important for us to be successful, but also to remember our fellow man and pay it forward. If we don’t give back, shame on us.
To learn more about Rebecca visit rebeccacontreas.com
