
Karen Barnett, Chief People Officer, British Business Bank, is building an HR function with purpose for a business that grew up during Covid. Here she talks to HR Grapevine about her career and how a love of sport has fed into her ethos of positivity and empowerment over choice and why she is as comfortable being a grafter of the day-to-day as she is of the strategic work.
‘I didn’t enjoy school much,’ says Karen Barnett who is immediately warm and open in laying bare the challenges she has faced as well as extolling her successes, of which there are many. “I did love sport, however and excelled at that,” she adds that as an only child her parents were incredibly supportive and while she worked hard to obtain her GCSEs, she knew academia wasn’t for her, choosing to pursue a BTEC in Business and Sports studies for sixth form. This early dipping of her toes into the realities of business life ignited her interest in how money is made. “It’s the best move I could ever have made,” she says.
Barnett’s BTEC ran alongside her growing sporting talent, and she began to juggle her studies with county level athletics and volleyball. I laugh when she tells me she is just of average height not a six footer that can ‘tip’ the ball into the net. “I’m a digger,” she says explaining her role on the pitch - a nod perhaps to how she finds the gap and fills them. Success on the sports field mirrored hard-won accomplishments at college and Barnett smiles when she says sixth form was a ‘turning point’ in her life, but the passage of time meant she was by now 18 and she turned her thoughts to what lay ahead.