Fractional People Ops, Culture and Performance Strategist

As a team leader, you can create an environment that holds your team's fatigue, sadness, and fear with care. You can use that care to support their integration of these big feelings and refocus on the mission, boosting both capacity and performance. And - you can ensure you're modeling this care for yourself along the way.

I want to be clear: when I say "performance", I mean accomplishing the mission and supporting those you care about. For me, an example might be when one of our clients accesses vulnerability in a way that builds trust and strengthens their team. For some of you, it might be supporting a young survivor of human trafficking to build their support network, get a job and start a family. For others, it might be one of your partners in the field creating a policy around climate resiliency that gives hundreds of homes access to clean water when they once didn’t.

“Performance” is when deep care becomes an effective, reciprocal partnership with our communities and stakeholders.

2025 is a critical year to ensure this happens.

How?

Feeling held increases performance. Feeling seen increases performance. Feeling understood increases performance.

This is the ritual of culture and leadership.

Being treated fairly increases performance. Having clear expectations increases performance. Having agency in decision-making increases performance.

This is the rigor of culture and leadership.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to be your “ritual and rigor” partner in people ops, culture, and performance.

I’ve spent my life and career expanding into the polarity of “ritual and rigor.” I’m a mother interrogating the dimensions of power every day as I raise two human beings who will one day vote and make decisions about the future of our grandchildren in a democratic society. I’m a Black woman reconciling the complexity of owning my inherent power—power that can never be taken away from me—while unwinding the impact of systemic discrimination on my nervous system, so I can walk in the world as a peaceful, laser-focused leader.

I've been the fundraiser soliciting the $100 donations and the $500K institutional grants. I've been the manager who's hired dozens of people and negotiated between strong personalities. I've advocated for national policy on Capitol Hill and served as media surrogate. I've facilitated grief circles, celebrations, rites of passage for leadership transitions, and primal release retreats on land. I put our clients on my altar. I pray for their children. I hold them in my heart.

I've also been in the trenches of how hard leadership can be - I've been the executive who looked 75% of my team in the eyes as I did a round of layoffs; I've been up at 3am thinking about those salary negotiation conversations with my team; I've burned out from too much stimulation and not enough rest; I've been through the gauntlet of re-building my life after that burnout, and growing a successful business while growing a beautiful family.

I've spent the last 10 years partnering with 66 teams and 55 coaching clients to deliver training and provide high-touch operations and culture strategy. I've coached teams through bitter senior leadership transitions. I've supported co-founders to separate amicably. I've built, re-built, revised (and every other adjective you can think of!) management infrastructure to support effective performance.

So when I say I’m your “fractional senior people and ops strategist” and I use the words ritual and rigor, you can see that I mean it.

I’m about deep care with a healthy dose of strategy.

If this kind of support would be helpful for you as we move into 2025, read on—and let’s see if a partnership is in our future.
In early 2025, I’ll be looking for 10 organizations with whom I can partner to provide this support. This package is right for you if you’re struggling with several of the following dynamics:
Senior and junior staff are in conflict in a way that distracts from the mission and isn’t being efficiently resolved.
You’re dealing with consistent dissatisfaction among your staff, especially those early in their careers.
You’re having repetitive conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion that are draining your team's motivation.
Members of your team who are naturally good at interpersonal relationships are finding themselves in informal mediation conversations - it's distracting them from their actual jobs, and you don't have the HR capacity to support them.
You have limited resources for culture and people operations and need actions in this area to be leverageable and time-efficient.
Your managers need support, and the lack of standardized management processes is costing you.
You have limited diversity on your board or senior management team, and your team is impacted, but now’s not the time to hire a full-time senior leader or add new board members.
You do have a culture and people ops team, but there are dynamics that would be better communicated to your CEO, executive team or Board by someone who isn't in a subordinate employee relationship with them. You need a different messenger.
You need an outside perspective to break through whatever is draining your team's capacity and return to a performance-driven culture.
You have a vague sense that interpersonal dynamics on your team are sapping efficiency, but you can’t quite identify the issue. You need a boost to address this so you can refocus on fundraising, vision, and serving your communities.
If any of this sounds like you - I can help.

For a 1/5th of what a senior team member would cost (if you have between 10 and 75 team members), this people ops, culture and performance package includes:

Baseline Data and an Annual Plan: An annual engagement survey or review of your last engagement survey to develop a bespoke 12-month learning and development program with an emphasis on management practices and inclusion. We'll use Soil and Shadow's Framework for Inclusive Leadership and Culture as the foundation of the annual plan - a deep dive into high-candor feedback, psychological safety, purpose and power dynamics.

Full Team Training: This 12-month learning and development begins with a full-day full-team training (in-person or virtual) on giving, receiving, and integrating feedback, conflict resolution, and understanding implicit bias. The training includes scripts, practice assignments and cheat sheets to apply these with your team, along with "role plays" using real-time using situations in your workplace.

Quarterly Implementation: Every quarter, your team will receive:

A 1.5-hour planning/retrospective session with your senior leadership team

Monthly full-team pulse check surveys

Bi-weekly full-team group coaching calls with me

A digital learning community with courses, frameworks and tools, which includes a support feed to access personalized rapid-response written and video support.

One quarterly goal will always be implementation of the Framework for Inclusive Leadership and Culture checklist, which includes project team retrospectives, exploration of your performance review process, DEI statement review, decision-making framework review, and more.

One on One Support: One-on-one support for your CEO/Executive Director, including voice notes, email support, and the option for executive coaching sessions for an additional fee.

What people are saying...

I really admire Soil and Shadow's approach to feedback. After the training, I ended up constantly referencing and thinking about the frameworks!

Sara Chandler, Elemental Excelerator

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Soil & Shadow’s “Giving, Receiving and Integrating Feedback” training was a powerful and rich source of content guided by expert instructors that hit the root cause of whether you have high-functioning successful teams that know how to grow trust, integrity, and empathy. During the workshop, we were able to break out into small groups and immediately put the principles into practice and work on our next action steps. By having the workbook, recording, slide deck, and other materials from the workshop, I can refer to the learnings and continue the process of getting feedback right, even when it’s challenging and uncomfortable. Everyone needs this critical training (and ideally we’d all have learned this as children)!