Bettina A. Deynes Charts a New Course

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Bettina A. Deynes’s voyage to the top HR seat at Carnival Corporation wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. At seventeen, she left Uruguay on a beautiful summer morning and landed in Washington, DC, in the middle of a thunderstorm.

While she didn’t interpret the weather as a sign, Deynes did know the path ahead wouldn’t necessarily be a well-trodden one with sunlight and rainbows overhead. Along with her mother, she joined her brother, who had immigrated a year earlier, in a friend’s attic. Its low ceiling made it impossible for Deynes to stand upright. And Deynes needed a job.

It was the summer of 1990, and Washington, DC, was undergoing a transition. Thirty-five Senate seats and thirty-eight gubernatorial offices were up for grabs. The government had launched Operation Desert Shield in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Hip-hop and go-go were on the rise, and the tech and service sectors brought much-needed job growth to the region.

The atmosphere energized Deynes as she set out to find employment. Before long, she was working beside her mother as a janitor for PMM, a commercial cleaning company. “I was willing to invest my time and energy in pursuit of the American dream,” she says. One office Deynes cleaned had a view of the United States Capitol building. To her, it was a symbol of both freedom and opportunity.

Deynes’s efforts at PMM didn’t go unnoticed. After a few months, a manager invited her to apply for a receptionist position at the company’s offices in Maryland. Despite her intermediate English language skills, Deynes got the job. She spent the next seven years at PMM, where she advanced from receptionist to administrative assistant to payroll manager to HR manager. As HR manager at PMM, Deynes was responsible for building the human resources function, training existing employees, and recruiting new talent. 

“[We immigrants] question whether we belong, and we need moments that remind us that when we dream big and work hard, we can achieve our goals.”

Bettina A. Deynes

During this time, Deynes also got married young and started a family right away.  She was working hard at the office, caring for her babies at home, and pursuing a business management degree in the evening. Ten years into her career, Deynes sat for her first “big” job interview as part of a confidential search for a senior HR leader position.

Deynes got the job. She was excited to show up for her first day and finally see her new workplace. A feeling of déjà vu struck as she listened to her new managers chat in the elevator. “You’re going to love your office. It has such an amazing view,” they told her.

She entered the room and looked out the window, only to discover it perfectly framed the capitol building. Deynes would occupy the exact same office she had cleaned ten years earlier.

“Immigrants often suffer from imposter syndrome, even if they are doing well,” she says. “We question whether we belong, and we need moments that remind us that when we dream big and work hard, we can achieve our goals.”

Several pivotal career stops prepared Deynes for what she does at Carnival Corporation today. She developed the entire human resources operation for the Washington Nationals after the team relocated from Montreal to Washington, DC. She also served as the CHRO for the world’s largest HR membership association. Deynes then became senior vice president and CHRO of Carnival Cruise Line, where she was responsible for all related functions supporting forty thousand shoreside and shipboard employees.

Deynes started the position in June of 2019. Just months later, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought major changes to the cruise industry, leading Carnival to pause operations of its ships for more than twenty months. Deynes partnered with operational teams to repatriate tens of thousands of crew members who were stranded at sea and unable to get government clearance to return to their home countries.

Once Carnival prepared to resume operations, Deynes helped reactivate the same team members and bring a workforce back under dozens of new strict health and safety protocols. Thousands of crew members required new visas and new training. Meanwhile, local, national, and international agencies scrutinized the cruise industry’s every move as Carnival and its competitors implemented COVID testing, administered vaccines, and took steps to keep guests and crew safe onboard and during excursions at various port destinations.

Deynes compares the work to opening a new hotel every month for a year. “I had twenty years of experience in human resources, but the two years we spent addressing COVID provided a more significant education,” she remarks. Thanks to the dedication of Deynes and her colleagues, Carnival was the first cruise line to return to service, twenty-two months after the initial shelter-in-place orders.

By October 2022, Deynes’ performance had earned her a promotion to the Global CHRO position with Carnival Cruise Line’s parent company, Carnival Corporation. In that role, she manages HR functions for all nine Carnival Corporation brands while holding responsibility for recruiting, retaining, and rewarding all talent. She’s also working to enhance the organization’s DEI efforts. Carnival Corporation’s leaders promote a culture that embraces differences and is designed to remove barriers to fairness and advancement.

The maritime industry has historically been conservative and traditional, with gender and nationality often defining typical crew member roles.  Deynes has been focused on changing that—adjusting Carnival Corporation’s promotion process and making it more transparent so all crew members can understand how to progress in the organization. She also aims to give each person the tools and support they need to reach their goals, regardless of their gender or nationality.

Carnival Corporation HR is also partnering with colleges and universities to create career pathways for nontraditional candidates. The company’s flagship, Carnival Cruise Line, is well positioned to one day promote women to captain and chief engineer roles for the first time. Notably, Cunard Line, another Carnival Corporation brand, has already made strides in this area with its first female captain, showcasing the company’s commitment to breaking barriers in maritime leadership. Additionally, Carnival has increased its number of female marine officers and is seeing improved gender equality numbers in all departments.

While Carnival’s captains use gyro compasses, radar, automatic tracking aids, GPS receivers, and other advanced tools to reach their destination, Deynes had no such help in charting her own career path. Still, the journey from Uruguay to DC to the C-suite reflects her resilience, her resolve, and her commitment to not only seizing—but creating—opportunity.

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