At 56, D’Andrea Virgil knew she could return to corporate America.
After decades in human resources, including senior leadership roles with major corporations, she had the experience to pursue another executive position. But after two hip replacements in less than a year forced her to slow down, Virgil found herself asking a different question.
Did she actually want to?
“I started really thinking about what is it that I really like?” Virgil said. “I am 56, and who do I want to be? What do I want to do?”
The answer ultimately led her away from the traditional corporate path and toward the part of human resources that many people would happily spend their careers avoiding: conflict.
Virgil is the founder and CEO of EDifeye Consulting LLC, a Houston-based mediation, conflict resolution, and human resources consulting company that helps businesses and individuals navigate workplace disputes, employee relations, investigations, and difficult conversations.
While others may run from conflict, Virgil is fascinated by it.
“The part of the job that excites me is the part that most HR generalists hate,” she said. “That’s the employee relations piece. The piece where conflict is prevalent. And in that, that is where I shined.”
Finding purpose in conflict
Virgil believes conflict itself isn’t necessarily the problem.
It is inevitable in workplaces, families, and everyday relationships. The real question, she said, is what people do once it arrives.
“Conflict is a normal part of our lives,” Virgil said. “But the key is how you act, who you are in that conflict. Because who you are day-to-day versus who you are in the midst of conflict can be very different.”
Through EDifeye, Virgil works with small businesses and larger organizations on mediation, workplace investigations, employee relations, HR compliance, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness.
She has found a particular need among small-business owners who have grown companies without developing a formal human resources infrastructure.
Her goal is often to help people identify where a conflict began, understand what each side actually needs, and find common ground before a workplace disagreement escalates.
“You don’t need an attorney to work out your problems,” Virgil said. “Much of the issues that happen in corporate America or in the world are because we have conflict.”
For Virgil, resolving those conflicts doesn’t necessarily mean determining a winner and a loser.
“I want to deduce how we got here,” she said. “What are the key components that you’re focusing on? What are you focusing on? And where can we overlap those?”
Finding that overlap, she said, can move people toward a solution in which neither side feels as though it has surrendered everything.
Decades of experience
Virgil’s expertise was built over nearly three decades in human resources.
Her career began in 1997 at Pennzoil-Quaker State, where she worked as a diversity coordinator for one of her former college professors after earning her master’s degree from what was then Houston Baptist University.
She later moved to California’s San Francisco Bay Area, where her career included work with Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab before she joined Chevron.
Virgil spent 17 years at Chevron, eventually returning to Houston and holding senior human resources leadership roles. Her responsibilities included employee relations, HR compliance, workplace investigations, and policy.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, she also helped lead a globally dispersed employee relations team through a new service delivery model as employees navigated remote work, uncertainty, and enormous workplace change.
Virgil left Chevron in 2023 for an opportunity with a Brazilian company. The position wasn’t the right fit, she said, and she eventually decided to begin building her own consulting practice.
Then life interrupted the plan. Virgil underwent two hip replacements in less than a year. For someone accustomed to working and leading, recovery forced her to stop.
But the interruption also gave her something she hadn’t realized she needed: time.
“I’m thankful that I had the financial ability to be able to be sick and to heal and to develop,” Virgil said. “It gave me time to spend time with my sons, but it gave me time to reflect and to really reflect on what parts of my life did I really love and what parts did I not.”
She realized she could find another senior HR position. The harder question was whether it would fulfill her.
“Would I be excited? Would I be happy about getting up to go do that?” she recalled asking herself.
Her answer became EDifeye.
“That is where I felt like I was giving and receiving the most,” Virgil said of employee relations and conflict resolution. “And so that’s what I decided to do with the rest of my career.”
Finding your ‘rare bird’
Virgil’s transition comes as many experienced professional women contemplate what comes after a successful corporate career.
For Black women in particular, the question can carry additional weight after years spent navigating workplaces where they may have been among relatively few women or people of color in leadership.
Virgil describes finding that next chapter through what she calls the “rare bird.”
Her rare bird is the hummingbird.
“Each hummingbird is beautiful in its own right,” she said. “Every one of them is unique. Their coloring, the patterns on them, how they sound, they’re all unique.”
The question she encourages other women to ask themselves is simple: What kind of rare bird are you?
For Virgil, the answer wasn’t some undiscovered talent waiting to magically appear at 56. It was something she had been doing for years.
“I’m thankful that I had the financial ability to be able to be sick and to heal and to develop. It gave me time to spend time with my sons, but it gave me time to reflect and to really reflect on what parts of my life did I really love and what parts did I not.”
D’Andrea Virgil
She simply had to identify the part of her long career that energized her most.
“For me, I’m a rare bird who loves employee relations,” she said. “I love helping people who are in conflict. Most people run from conflict.”
That philosophy now extends beyond Virgil’s conflict-resolution work. She also helps professionals and entrepreneurs navigate career transitions, including how to use tools such as LinkedIn and artificial intelligence to organize ideas, articulate their experience, and explore new opportunities.
“How do you take the ideas that are in your mind and put them on paper and then have them come to fruition?” Virgil said. “That’s what I do.”
A different definition of success
Virgil’s pivot hasn’t meant walking away from the experience she accumulated in corporate America.
Instead, EDifeye allows her to use it differently.
Her work combines mediation, employee relations, investigations, executive and business coaching, training, and facilitation. But beneath those services is a broader mission: helping people communicate through disagreement without allowing conflict to destroy working relationships.
It also gives Virgil control over what the next phase of her professional life will look like.
Outside of work, she has maintained a commitment to community service. Virgil is a past president of the South Belt Houston Chapter of Jack and Jill of America, Inc., and is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and the Houston Metropolitan Chapter of The Society, Inc. She is also the mother of two sons.
After decades spent helping corporations and employees navigate change, Virgil has now navigated a major transition of her own. She didn’t discard nearly 30 years of experience to start over. She figured out which part of it she wanted to keep.
And for the woman who willingly walks toward the workplace conflicts everyone else would rather avoid, finding her rare bird meant recognizing that the thing that made her different might also be the thing she was supposed to build her next chapter around.
