Women To Watch Awards 2026 honors Trena Hawkins

Trena Hawkins is a human resources transformation leader and certified coach with more than 22 years of experience building the people infrastructure that allows organizations to scale. Her career spans media, technology, and consumer goods, with roles at NBCUniversal, Amazon, Peloton, Juul Labs, and most recently FanDuel Sports Network.

Trena builds the people architecture that lets organizations scale. She has been brought in at inflection points — rapid growth, acquisition, restructuring — to bring order to how companies define roles, pay, promote, and develop talent, and to give executive teams a defensible foundation for those decisions. She has stood up HR functions where none existed, modernized them where they had outgrown their design, and led enterprise technology transitions that changed how the business ran. Her work is grounded in a conviction that structure is not bureaucracy but clarity: when people can see how advancement works, they stop guessing and start growing.

She is the founder of Trena THE Growth Coach™, where she partners with individuals and organizations on leadership development, professional and personal development. She is the author of I Got Laid Off, Now What?, built around her proprietary L.A.I.D.-O.F.F.™ Framework, which helps professionals move through job loss with clarity instead of shame.

Trena holds the SHRM-SCP credential and is a Certified Transformational Coach. She earned her BA from The Catholic University of America and her MA from Bowie State University, and will complete her Ed.D. in Leadership and Innovation at Purdue Global in November 2026. She is a member of SHRM and NAAAHR.

When Trena is not championing workplace transformation or coaching, she enjoys spending time with her husband Landus, son Kwame' and her many siblings.