She started her career packing inventory in her father's Atlanta shops. Today she runs people operations for one of the largest private companies in America.
Walk into the corner office on Peachtree Dunwoody Road and you do not meet a famous CEO. You meet the person who decides how the famous CEO's company actually feels to work at. Karen Bennett is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Cox Enterprises, the privately held Atlanta conglomerate that quietly owns large pieces of American automotive retail (Cox Automotive), American broadband (Cox Communications), local newspapers, indoor farms, recycling plants, and a lot more besides. She has held the parent-company role since January 2023.
Her job description, if you write it out, sounds like four jobs stapled together: people solutions, corporate affairs, inclusion and diversity, HR technology services, benefits, compensation, talent acquisition, and the brand, marketing and creative departments. The grown-up word for that is "scope." The honest word for it is "everything that decides whether 50,000 paychecks correspond to 50,000 humans who want to come back on Monday."
Bennett does not arrive at this role from a glossy management consulting track. She arrives from a small-business Atlanta childhood. The middle of five children, the oldest daughter, her father ran a string of small businesses. Everyone in the family pitched in. The idea that work is something you do for other people, in a place with their name on it, with their bills attached, was set early. It shows in how she talks about leadership now.
"Being around people is what I do for a job, and I'm very passionate about it," she has said, "but it's also what I do in my life." Read that twice. Most executives draw a line between the office and the dinner table. Bennett insists there isn't one, and the people who report to her seem to believe her.
In an era when senior HR leaders rotate through companies every two to three years, Bennett's resume is unusual for its length of stays. Fourteen years at Turner. Years at Cox Media Group. Years at Cox Communications. Now Cox Enterprises. She is, by Atlanta media-industry standards, a lifer - and the institutional memory shows.
Being a leader is not just leading the work. It's leading people to want to do the work.- Karen Bennett
Most Chief People Officers run HR. Bennett's portfolio runs wider than that. Inside Cox Enterprises, she owns the people stack and a meaningful slice of the brand stack - an unusual configuration that tells you something about how Cox thinks about employees and customers as one continuous experience.
If you read enough interviews with Karen Bennett, a single sentence keeps showing up in slightly different shapes. The shortest version: train empathetic leaders. The longer version, in her own words:
"I try to show up as that leader, but more importantly, train and develop others to be empathetic leaders who will always do the right thing, and who will always treat people with respect."
The strategic case for empathy gets dismissed in some boardrooms as soft. In a 50,000-person workforce spread across journalism, broadband, indoor agriculture, and a national used-car marketplace, the soft thing is also the operational thing. Burnout costs money. Disrespect costs lawyers. Empathy, the way Bennett uses the word, is closer to a manufacturing standard than a slogan.
Her own framing puts the responsibility on the executive, not the employee. The CPO's job is not to teach 50,000 people to "be resilient." It is to make sure their managers don't grind them down in the first place.
"Being a leader is not just leading the work, it's leading people to want to do the work."
The training program inside her remit is built around two non-negotiables: empathy and respect. Everything else is technique.
Bennett does not separate her professional curiosity about people from her personal one. The Cox job is, by her own admission, also her hobby.
Most senior executives serve on a board or two. Bennett serves on at least five, and they cluster around the same idea - people, especially people who were not handed an easy start. The pattern is not accidental. A leader who grew up the oldest daughter in a household of five, learning the family business from the inside, recognizes the value of the institutions that help other kids do the same.
The civil and human rights work, in particular, sits unusually close to her day job. Cox is headquartered in Atlanta, the city where the Center sits within walking distance of the King Center and the Civil Rights Movement's living memory. Bennett's company is, by virtue of geography, in dialogue with that history every day. Her board seat keeps that dialogue formal.
Her father ran a string of small businesses in Atlanta. Bennett, the oldest daughter of five, grew up inside the rhythm of small-business work - inventory, payroll, customers - long before HR had a name in her vocabulary.
14 years at Turner Broadcasting is not a normal stay for a senior HR leader. It is closer to how long people stay in academic posts. Whatever she values in an employer, she values it enough to commit.
BBA in 1985. EMBA in 2011. The years in between were busy ones. Going back to the same campus a quarter-century later is its own quiet statement about the value of finishing what you started.
Owning brand, marketing and creative inside an HR portfolio is rare. Inside Cox, it suggests an organization that treats the employee story and the customer story as one continuous narrative.
Bennett's career is an Atlanta career. Her undergrad was 70 miles up the road in Athens. Her boards meet in the same metro. The "I never had to leave" path, played at the executive level.
"Being around people is what I do for a job, and it's also what I do in my life." Most leaders worry about work-life balance. Bennett has, by her own description, declined the dichotomy.
To understand why Karen Bennett's job matters, you have to understand the company she works for - and most people don't, because Cox Enterprises is privately owned by the Cox family and rarely advertises itself as a whole. The pieces are familiar even when the parent is not. Cox Communications is the broadband utility you may pay every month. Cox Automotive owns Manheim, Kelley Blue Book, Autotrader, and Dealer.com. The portfolio also includes Cox Farms / BrightFarms-style sustainable agriculture, advanced plastics recycling through Cox Conserves, and historic newspaper holdings.
Annual revenue sits around $23 billion. Headcount is in the neighborhood of 50,000. The chairman's family has been at it since 1898. Bennett's role as Chief People Officer of the parent company puts her in charge of the cultural glue that holds those very different operating businesses together. She does not run any of the subsidiaries. She decides how it feels to work inside any of them.
Long stays. Real institutional memory. Bennett's career proves you can climb without job-hopping.
UGA twice. Terry College of Business twice. A loyalty most resumes can't match.
She doesn't just talk about empathy. She trains managers in it as a non-negotiable.
Five seats. All Atlanta-adjacent. All pointed at lifting other people up.
Oldest daughter of five. The role of orchestrator-of-people started at the dinner table.
Her portfolio includes corporate brand and creative - rare for a CPO and telling about Cox.
Being around people is what I do for a job, and I'm very passionate about it. But it's also what I do in my life.- Karen Bennett, on the work-life line she refuses to draw