AU grad bringing the human aspect back to the workplace

2025 Rising Star Award winner Leah Campbell promotes the idea that people, not processes, are key to organizational culture 

For a long time, Leah Campbell (Bachelor of Arts, Sociology Major ’22) didn’t think she wanted or needed to pursue post-secondary education. 

Right out of high school, she got what she felt was a great job doing clerical support with the police service in Brandon, Man., and she saw a career path she could grow into. 

“I was already doing what I thought school was for,” she said. “You go to school to get a career, but I lucked out and jumped right into a career so what did I need school for?” 

Two decades later, Campbell has changed her tune and is setting her sights much higher. With her degree from AU and a certified human resources manager designation under her belt, she’s now working on a master’s degree in business and organizational psychology. 

She’s focused on what she describes as “bringing the human aspect back to work.” She explained this is essentially about understanding that staff are the source of all business in any organization, and the focus should be first on supporting them as humans, rather than focusing first on processes and procedures. 

“The ultimate dream for me is to get my own consulting firm from a leadership and organizational behaviour perspective,” she said. “So that's what I'm building towards.” 

She’s setting a strong foundation for this work in her current role as registrar of the Manitoba Emergency Services College, building on her experiences with both the Brandon Police Service and later with an accounting firm. 

Campbell’s efforts have earned her the 2025 Rising Star Award, which recognizes an AU grad who has demonstrated leadership and significant contributions to their area of expertise early in their career.

Experiencing organizational culture first-hand 

Although Campbell has always understood the value of education from an early age—both her parents were teachers who instilled that value in her—she said she was eager to do something different after finishing high school. 

But that’s not to say she stopped learning. Shortly after graduating she started working with the Brandon Police Service, which was an eye-opening experience. In that role she learned a lot about the impact organizational culture can have on the humans within it, and how that impact is even more pronounced for people working in emergency services roles. 

“I think that’s where my interest in organizational culture probably started, although I didn’t know that’s what it was called at the time,” she said. 

On the one hand, Campbell’s role involved answering phones and handling paperwork, including court filings. This gave her insight into the kinds of challenges and experiences people were having in the community, and she understood first-hand how emotionally taxing it can be for people working in emergency services. 

On the other hand, she also experienced an organizational culture that wasn’t always positive for her. As a civilian member of the team, she felt she was “automatically on the outside,” and the value of her work was not seen to be as valuable as the kind of work the sworn members of the police service were doing. 

“That translated into separation on the team, and it also translated into instances of disrespect,” she said. “When I was trying to voice a concern about something, my experience and expertise was not valued in the same way as someone with a badge.” 

Campbell started asking herself questions about why she wasn’t feeling OK at work, what kind of impact this experience was having on the rest of her life, and how any given organization gets the kind of workplace culture it does. 

Even though she didn’t have the language at the time, this prompted an interest in the human aspect of workplace culture, with the question of how people feel when they’re at work both individually and collectively within a given workplace. 

“There’s so much to unpack here, and it sparked an interest in sociology,” she said. “After 10 years, I though I’ve got to do something more.” 

The ultimate dream for me is to get my own consulting firm from a leadership and organizational behaviour perspective. So that's what I'm building towards.

Leah Campbell, 2025 Rising Star Award winner

Grad sees many benefits of online learning 

Campbell left that position, planning to pursue an education with the goal of becoming a lawyer. She didn’t want to leave her home community, and she also wasn’t confident in her abilities after having been out of school for a decade. 

She appreciated the idea of an open, flexible degree program she could do from home, and enrolled at AU. 

“I liked the openness of it, the flexibility, and the fact that I could do it from home so that I didn't have to go to class every day,” she said. “I could do it in the evenings, and I could do it however I needed to for me.” 

Campbell was a full-time student with two young children when she began the program, but after about a year and a half she felt she needed to bring in an income again. She found a job doing administrative work at a small accounting firm. 

Before long she saw the need for someone in a human resources role, which was something the partners were doing off the sides of their desks, and she made a pitch to them. Using what she was learning in her degree program, she put together a presentation explaining why the position was needed and why she was the right person for it. 

“They decided they would take a chance on me, and that was another huge step for me,” she said. 

Campbell dove into the role with a passion, and after finishing her AU degree she pursued a human resources designation through the University of Manitoba. As she dedicated herself to this new career path, though, she began to realize that a small accounting firm would never be able to offer her the leadership opportunities she now knew she wanted. 

Taking on a leadership role 

Thinking about her future, Campbell realized she didn’t necessarily want a human resources position, but rather to be able to have a leadership role to affect organizational culture in workplaces more directly, with a long-term goal of starting a consulting firm. As a consultant, she could support as many different people in as many different workplaces as possible. 

When the registrar position with the Manitoba Emergency Services College came up, she felt it was a good fit with her emergency services experience and her long-term goals. Now leading a small team that supports training for firefighters, paramedics, and emergency management in the province, she has been able to put what she’s been learning into practice. 

“I'm kind of getting an opportunity to see what impact one person could have on a team or an organization,” she said. 

While in this role Campbell finished her human resources designation, and has now enrolled in an online master of science program. While she felt a master’s degree would help lend authority and gravitas to her perspectives on organizational culture, she has also found her classes to be directly applicable to the work she’s doing. 

For example, in implementing a new student record management tool, she took the time to consult with her team to prioritize their experience in developing the new process. In doing so, she found her team was more receptive to the change and felt empowered to use the tool and work together. 

“Everybody got involved, which was nice,” she said. “I wasn’t dictating what it would be; they were part of the solution.” 

Campbell said this approach gets at the heart of what she means when she talks about bringing the human aspect back to the workplace—which is what she prioritizes in her current role and hopes to teach in the future as a consultant. 

In many workplaces, staff may not be particularly engaged if they’re not treated like humans, and feel instead like they’re simply treated as machines to do their assigned tasks. 

“We’re not machines, we’re humans with feelings and emotions,” she said. “We spend more time with our coworkers and our bosses than we do with our family a lot of time, and we need to be OK at work.”

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