Follow us on LinkedInIf you had told me fifteen years ago that my career would lead me into the heart of people systems, organizational culture, and talent leadership, I would have laughed.
Back then, I was a biomedical engineer at the Department of Defense, building weapons systems, auditing manufacturing facilities, and flying across the country to test them.
I lived and breathed mechanics, structures, and failure analysis. The work was precise, tangible, measurable.
But somewhere along the way, between the long drives to remote bases and my conversations with the soldiers and engineers who kept those facilities alive, I discovered that what lit me up wasn’t the metal systems. It was the human systems.
Roughly 20% of my role at the time involved supporting an Army base of about three thousand people, creating belonging initiatives, counseling soldiers, listening deeply to their day-to-day challenges.
I didn’t have a name for what I was doing then. I just knew that those moments mattered more to me than torque calculations or thermal analysis. They felt human, real, and consequential.
Life has a way of accelerating your lessons. In 2010 my mother passed. In 2011 my father followed. My partner’s mother passed shortly after. And there we were, two grieving young parents with a daughter, a fridge full of magnets, and an overwhelming question about what really mattered.
I remember one night in particular. We pulled every magnet off that fridge and wrote one sentence across the door: “What do we love?”
It was our way of navigating grief, stripping life back down to essentials. Time suddenly felt finite. Every hour spent became a choice.
And when we asked ourselves what brought us joy, the pattern became obvious: every meaningful moment pointed back to people, to connection, to helping others belong and succeed.
So we made a decision that surprised everyone, including ourselves. We packed up our life in New Jersey and moved West.
Mawulom Nenonene
From the East Coast to the Bay: Discovering my craft
The Bay Area was a different world: fast-paced, experimental, boundaryless. I started out at Google on a contract role, then did a quick stint at LinkedIn, and eventually found my way to Thumbtack, the first true tech startup I supported internally. Thumbtack felt like home.
It was the first time I was in a place where, if you saw a pothole in the middle of the road, you could just fix it. If a process was missing, you could build it. If a system wasn’t working, you didn’t have to wait for permission to redesign it.
That freedom helped me understand what I really wanted to do: build scalable, inclusive, high-performing talent systems. Systems that don’t just serve the business, but respect the people inside it.
Since then, I’ve had the privilege of:
- Running two talent search firms
- Leading talent in-house at organizations like Nava PBC, BetterUp and LTSE
- Advising founders and leadership teams on talent and operational strategy
Why process is an act of care
People sometimes hear “process” and think bureaucracy. I don’t. To me, process is an act of care.
When I step into a new organization, the first forty days are about understanding the system as it exists today. The first thirty are diagnostic:
- How do roles get opened?
- Is there a clear definition of success for each role?
- Do we have structured interviews, or are we “winging it”?
- What does a “yes” or “no” actually mean in our hiring decisions?
- Is there alignment on compensation and growth?
I’m not just mapping steps. I’m looking for where friction, bias, and confusion live.
The next ten days are about building a roadmap: what needs to change, why it matters, and in what order. That usually includes better scorecards, structured interviews, interviewer training, role launch processes, and clear alignment across teams.
All of this is happening while the organization is still hiring at speed. So there’s always a tension between keeping the lights on and upgrading the wiring.
That’s why I often start by piloting new processes with one team, commonly engineering or data.
When you can show that a new hiring framework reduces time-to-hire and improves candidate quality, you’re not just making an argument for change. You’re showing it.
Early wins build trust. Trust creates momentum. And momentum changes culture.
Sabrinthia Donnelly
Global teams, local realities
One of the biggest tensions I’ve experienced in talent work is between standardization and localization.
You want consistent principles across the company, but you can’t ignore local realities. What works in the Bay Area may not work in the Philippines. What’s standard for benefits in the U.S. doesn’t map neatly onto norms in other geos.
In the Philippines, for example, rice allowances or travel stipends might be common practice. In some countries, contract structures mean you onboard differently or convert to full-time after a defined period.
You can’t copy-paste.
So my approach is to build global frameworks anchored in values and outcomes, then empower regional leaders and subject matter experts to localize the execution. That means designing systems that are:
- Repeatable
- Culturally adaptable
- Grounded in trust
When candidates and employees feel that the system respects their context (not just the company’s convenience) they’re far more likely to engage with it fully.
Culture, community, and the cost of misalignment
I don’t see companies as “families”. Families are unconditional. Work isn’t and shouldn’t be.
I see companies as communities.
In a community, you choose to be there. You contribute. You benefit. You also have rules about how you treat each other in shared spaces: how you disagree, how you repair, how you celebrate.
Culture is the lived experience of those rules.
I’ve seen cultures where fairness is real, not just promised in a slide deck. Those are the places where, even when work is hard, people know the system isn’t stacked against them.
They’re willing to give more because they trust that feedback, growth, and conflict will be handled with integrity.
I’ve also seen the opposite, environments that look polished from the outside but are deeply misaligned on the inside. Those cultures wear people down. They create microcultures of fear, passive aggression, or quiet resentment.
And sometimes, the cost is devastating.
When toxicity turns deadly
There’s one story I carry with me into every leadership conversation. It’s painful, but it’s important.
A close friend of mine, Michael Joseph, was one of the most brilliant engineers I’ve ever met. Self-taught. An SRE from the South. His wife was a physician. They had two children who spoke fluent Cantonese and Mandarin.
He had offers from both Apple and Uber, and he chose Uber because it seemed to offer better work-life balance.
From the outside, it looked like a dream scenario. From the inside, it became a nightmare.
He started experiencing malicious behavior from teammates: undermining, hostility, and dynamics that went far beyond healthy conflict. I coached him through what I thought were the right steps, document everything, raise it with leadership, escalate to HR if needed.
He did all of that. Nothing changed.
Accountability never materialized. The culture didn’t protect him. The systems weren’t there, or they weren’t being used.
Eventually, the weight of it became too much, and he took his own life.
When we went to his wake, friends flew in from three thousand miles away. Former colleagues from LinkedIn showed up. People whose lives he had touched came to honor him.
No one from his employer came. That absence said everything.
That experience fundamentally reshaped how I think about my work. Culture is not a “nice to have”. People processes are not a side project. The lack of fairness, safety, and accountability in a high-pressure environment can be fatal.
When I build systems now, I build them with that awareness. I’m thinking not just about performance, but about protection. Not just about velocity, but about humanity.
Data, experiments, and better questions
My engineering background never really left me. I still think in terms of variables, constraints, and experiments.
Data, to me, isn’t just numbers on a dashboard, it’s pattern recognition. It’s a way to ask better questions.
A few years ago, we ran what seemed like a strange experiment: we posted SRE roles on Craigslist. It felt almost counterintuitive in a world obsessed with LinkedIn.
The result? We got a surprisingly strong response from highly skilled engineers who simply didn’t have a big online presence elsewhere.
That data point changed our sourcing mix.
This is how I use data: not to replace human judgment, but to challenge assumptions. It helps me understand which messages resonate, which channels produce real outcomes, where talent density exists, and how processes perform over time.
I often think of it like driving a car. Data is your speedometer, your fuel gauge, your indicators. It tells you what’s happening. But humans still decide whether to speed up, slow down, or pull over.
Sabrinthia Donnelly
Coaching, managers, and multipliers
I genuinely believe that every person in an organization is a leader, because leadership starts with personal responsibility. But managers occupy a special role.
A manager is either a multiplier or a bottleneck.
When managers are equipped with coaching skills, emotional intelligence, and clear frameworks for feedback, they amplify the talent around them. They spot potential, create clarity, support growth, and handle conflict in ways that deepen trust.
When they’re not equipped, their teams bear the cost. People leave roles they once loved because they can’t see a path forward or don’t feel safe being honest.
My time at BetterUp deepened my belief in coaching. When you give people the tools and space to reflect, they start to self-align. They become more intentional about how they show up, for themselves and for others.
That’s why I see investing in managers as one of the highest-leverage moves any organization can make. You’re not just supporting one person; you’re influencing everyone around them.
The human side of AI and fairness
I’m a technologist at heart, so it might not surprise you that I’m optimistic about AI’s role in the future of work.
But my optimism is specific: I believe AI can help us create fairer systems.
Humans are biased. We just are. We don’t always see our own patterns. We’re influenced by mood, pressure, and incomplete information.
Imagine an AI system embedded in your communication tools, a quiet observer that helps surface misalignments, patterns of exclusion, or potential conflicts before they explode.
One that can coach both sides of a disagreement, suggest more constructive language, or highlight where feedback is inconsistent across different demographics.
Why do I lean toward AI in this space? Because, when designed well, it can give us a mirror we’ve never really had before.
I’ve seen teams on the brink of toxicity transform simply because fairness was restored, because structure, transparency, and alignment were reintroduced into the system.
On the flip side, I’ve also seen organizations that appeared fair on the surface but were riddled with quiet misalignments underneath. Those environments drain the human spirit.
AI won’t fix everything. But it can help us notice what we might otherwise ignore.
Lish Barber
What I want future people leaders to remember
If you’re stepping into people leadership (or aspiring to) here’s what I hope you carry with you:
- You are not “just the people person”. You are a business leader who specializes in people.
- Data is your ally, but empathy is your compass. You need both.
- Process is not the enemy of humanity; good process protects it.
- Culture is built in the everyday moments: how you disagree, how you repair, how you listen.
- Fairness isn’t a slogan. It’s a system.
Most of all, remember this: people spend a huge portion of their lives at work. The systems you design will shape not just their careers, but their confidence, their families, and their futures.
Build as if that matters, because it does.
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