Then & Now: Reid leaves a mark in legal, HR career

Adaptability. That’s Canetta Reid’s greatest career achievement. A licensed attorney and senior professional in human resources (SPHR), she’s had to adapt to “different cultures, different leadership styles, different-sized companies and different industries,” she said.

“You have to be willing to grow and develop and never be afraid of continuing to learn. I think as a young lawyer I was very headstrong and wanting to do things my way. I think I’ve grown in that regard.”

After earning her undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1990 and her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1993, Reid returned to her hometown of Houston to work for a law firm. Wanting to work on issues with a direct, daily impact on people’s lives, she accepted a new challenge, working for Walmart in employment law. She established the employment compliance team, one of the company’s first compliance functions.

In 2005 she was named to the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class.

“Walmart and Bentonville, that experience in Northwest Arkansas was pivotal to my growth from a career standpoint,” she said, calling her work at Walmart “a foundation for the work that I continue to do.” It was also foundational for her family. Reid got married and started a family in Bentonville.

Throughout Reid’s career she’s tried “to leave a mark or make a place better than I found it,” by “improving a process, changing a perspective, helping grow a company’s culture, or helping them improve their engagement score,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be something huge. I’m not Steve Jobs. It may not be something that’s going to set the world on fire, but leaving a mark is important to me.”

After Walmart, Reid’s work in global ethics and litigation, arbitration, and compliance in Houston at ConocoPhillips broadened her experience. In her subsequent role at Whirlpool Corp. in Michigan, she had dual roles in human resources and as labor and employment counsel. She was tasked with finding ways to “reorient the employee relations function, making it more proactive as opposed to reactive.”

Moving to Meijer as vice president of human resources, Reid was responsible for 5,000 employees and led both the company’s labor and employee relations. She practiced labor and employment law, gaining new experience working with the company’s union workforce.

In 2017, at Canada-based tomato company Mastronardi Produce, she was chief of human resources and managed labor and employment law. The company was “very immature from a human resources standpoint,” so she established pay structure and leadership development training for compliance and for positive employee relations.

“Those made the company better,” she said. “It was a huge learning curve for me because I’d never worked with an agricultural workforce and didn’t know Canadian employment law.”

In 2020 Reid founded Zeni HR Solutions and moved back to Houston in 2021.

Diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2022, Reid reevaluated her life and “stepped back from things that weren’t serving me well.” She recognized “what’s most important, and of course that’s family, friends, and being able to do work I’m proud of and that inspires me, and to work with people I enjoy.”

Since her successful treatment, Reid is doing both human resources and legal consulting for Axiom and Epiq. Realizing “I have fewer years ahead of me than I do behind me,” Reid “wants to make the most of it. I’m not trying to set the world on fire but just trying to be better each day and be a positive example.”

Reid enjoys using her expertise and experience to “help people develop processes, policies, and to evaluate things and provide recommendations,” but she’s learned that “at the end of the day, if they decide they don’t want to move forward on the execution piece of it, that’s OK.”

Reid and her husband of 26 years, also an HR professional, have three children. She loves jigsaw puzzles and audiobooks and is an avid fan of stand-up comedy.

“That’s always been part of my DNA,” she said. “I like to laugh. The only thing is it’s got to be funny because not all comedy is funny.”