Journals
Inside, you’ll find a blend of lived experience, research, and emerging workplace trends, converging to inspire reflection, clarity, and action. Navigating change, nurturing talent, or simply carving out time to think more deeply are all imperative to your role as a leader.
Upskilling & Reskilling Your Team: People Development with Purpose
In my years working with small businesses and nonprofits, one truth has become crystal clear. While technology forges its striking path ahead, organizations thrive when their people are equipped to travel on that path. That's why I’m passionate about upskilling and reskilling, not just as buzzwords, but as cornerstones of a resilient, future-ready workforce.
Reframing Upskilling and Reskilling
Upskilling: enhancing your team’s existing strengths.
This looks like supporting your bookkeeper with professional development opportunities. Maybe enrolling them in a data analytics course. Or being your office manager’s biggest cheerleader as they carve out time to study for a project management certification. It’s focused, purposeful growth that builds confidence and directly improves your operations. When people feel supported in expanding their skills, everyone wins.Reskilling: preparing workers for new opportunities in their current roles or for stretch assignments.
While the very definition of a stretch project takes workers outside their comfort zone, it can morph into a safe space for personal growth. Maybe you notice your receptionist has a gift for storytelling. Perhaps it shows up in the way she recounts her grandson’s escapades with such vivid detail. So, you make the decision to invite her to try her hand at drafting content for the business’s social media. That one invitation might unlock a new skill set, a renewed sense of purpose, or even a future career path. Being a people leader means scoping the potential of your workers. Seeing their potential, nurturing it, and making space for your team to grow in ways they may never have imagined.
Why This Matters (And Why Now)
Every day, I see leaders frustrated by a shortage of talent or by smart, capable team members who’ve outgrown their current roles. In today’s fast-changing environment, organizations can’t afford to overlook potential or let great people feel stuck.
New tech = new challenges. AI, digital systems, remote collaboration: they demand fresh mindsets and methods.
Retention depends on growth. When we invest in people, they don’t just stay longer they feel valued, engaged, and creative.
Internal mobility saves money. You already know these people and your culture. Why hire externally when you can unlock untapped potential inside?
When we take calm, intentional steps with people at the center, transformation happens. It’s not about lighting paths to opportunity already present. Doing it thoughtfully maintains a lasting impact.
How to hire great leaders..
Often times being a good leader means giving team members more autonomy to get work done and make decisions on their own.
With hiring season here many companies are in the midst of creating job postings to fill essential roles and optimize the efficiency of their team. However, to have a productive and engaged team there must be a great leader to guide them. Without good leadership, employees will disengage, feel undervalued, question their own integrity, and eventually leave. Companies can risk losing some of their best employees by hiring unqualified leaders. Often times being a good leader means giving team members more autonomy to get work done and make decisions on their own. According to a study conducted by Gartner employees under autonomous leadership were 2.3 times more likely to achieve great performance when compared to those with less autonomy. According to Indeed, the benefits of autonomous leadership include:
Faster project turnaround
Better delegation
Growth opportunities
Improved employee morale
Innovative ideas
Trust and respect
Extensive professional development
How can an organization create an equitable process to hire great talent that will deliver great leadership such as the one presented above? First, it is always essential to make your expectations clear in the job description. Job postings are a potential hire's first introduction to your company. It is important that they feel welcomed and can be done by using inclusive language that outlines the position and scope of the role. Be sure to define how a person should be able to perform in a specific role without using gendered language, jargon, and idioms that could make potential candidates feel unwelcome to apply. Be sure to educate interviewers on the benefits of hiring a diverse team to avoid and counter the “just like me” bias. Make sure that all interviews are standardized to ensure that all candidates are on a level playing field. Leveling the playing field involves asking all candidates the same questions, choosing questions that focus on capabilities and not on the “soft stuff”, and maybe even having them submit work samples so that their skills can be assessed equitably.
Lastly, according to LinkedIn, it is important to establish a salary benchmark. If the salary you are offering is too low you could attract the wrong candidates but if it is too high you may scare good talent away because they may think there is a catch with that high number. Finding the proper salary benchmark requires looking through what other candidates with similar qualifications have been offered for the same position to calculate what you should pay. This process can be very complex without the help of a professional consultant. Consulting companies like Sabrina Narcisse Consulting are perfect for helping you determine that benchmark while also ensuring that your hiring process gives your company the best chance of attracting the best leaders for your team. So this hiring season be sure to equitably hire leaders and give them the room to autonomously make decisions to increase company productivity and output.
Beginners Guide to Organizational Culture
…everything starts with organizational culture.
When it comes to creating an environment where employees feel comfortable and customers feel well served, everything starts with organizational culture. But what is organizational culture? Some argue that there is no common consensus on organizational culture, but that it can be shaped by incentives – money, promotions, recognition, etc. – that influence employees to do what is right for the company. The Society of Human Resources (SHRM) describes organizational culture as “the way things are done within an organization”
Creating an environment where an organization can flourish requires creating a culture based on a strongly held and widely shared set of beliefs. According to SHRM when an organization has a strong culture, three things happen:
“Employees know how top management wants them to respond to any situation”
“Employees believe that the expected response is the proper one”
“Employees know that they will be rewarded for demonstrating the organization's values.”
Organizational culture is a major key to ensuring a company's success. However, it is important to remember there is no right or wrong organizational culture. Based on our research, there is no "best" or "worst" company culture. Company culture is chosen by how a specific company would like to run itself; there is no one-size fits all type of culture. Next, we will explain 4 different types of models that you can use as a guide when shifting or creating organizational culture.
According to LinkedIn, Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy are the four most common organizational culture types. Clan-oriented cultures are family-like and focused on cultivating a nurturing atmosphere, with a focus on working together as a team. Adhocracy cultures are more entrepreneurial and innovative and praise getting things done first. Market cultures are competitive and employees are encouraged to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Lastly, hierarchical cultures are more organized and focused on efficiency and doing things the right way.
You can select one or two of these four typical organizational cultures that best suit your business and your staff and start implementing them.
Onboarding really means…
Onboarding begins during the recruitment phase when an employer acclimates prospective employees to the company culture. Onboarding is an executive leader’s opportunity to build foundational rapport with a new team member. The duration of onboarding is role-based but is often 30 to 90 days from the employee’s start date. Throughout the onboarding period, new employees are thereby enabled and engaged.
Pending context, the word enabled can have a bad connotation. In this topic of onboarding, enabling an employee means creating space for them to be creative, innovative, and utilize their skill-set. Glint’s simple definition is fitting and states employee engagement is the degree to which employees invest their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energies toward positive organizational outcomes. Make no mistake that employee engagement is a scrambled attempt to boost morale. Incorporating employee engagement in the onboarding plan and as a daily practice offers benefits such as work satisfaction, established lines of communication, and goal achievement.
Onboarding plans can include 3 phases :
A welcoming phase: This is an opportunity for the team to gather and celebrate a new addition.
A training phase: Role-specific training is one of the most important phases in the onboarding process. According to Survey Monkey, roughly 86% of employees say that job training is important to them—and nearly three out of every four (74%) are willing to learn things outside of work hours to improve their job performance.
A mentoring phase: This is often the last phase during onboarding. Executive leaders transition from teaching during the training phase to influencing, guiding, and directing new team members. Mentoring should continue throughout an employee’s tenure.
No human resource department, no problem.
…extend capacity and expertise.
As your small business or nonprofit grows beyond a party of one, the people that work with you will need holistic resources to complete their work efficiently and purposefully. These resources are managed in what is known as functional areas. Some subsets reside in more than one functional area but have a specific focus. For example, risk management can fall under each and may be highlighted in financial management differently than when it’s addressed in human resources management. The core functional areas of smaller businesses or nonprofit organizations are:
Human Resources Management - the process of managing an organization’s employees. HRM includes all aspects of people management to effectively meet an organization’s goals. (source)
Recruitment, Retention, Policy, Compensation, etc.
Financial Management - the business function that deals with investing the available financial resources in a way that greater business success and return-on-investment (ROI) are achieved. (source)
Financial Asset Control and Procurement, etc.
Operations Management - the administration of business practices to create the highest level of efficiency possible within an organization. (source)
Occupational Safety and Health, Logistics, and IT, etc.
Firms like Sabrina Narcisse Consulting have narrowed their service offerings to allow small businesses and nonprofits the opportunity to outsource these core functions to extend capacity and expertise. Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recommends hiring a dedicated HR team member when your company reaches 15 to 25 employees. Until that time your business can benefit from outsourcing human resources management services.
Candidate Interviews: Analyzing soft skills to find the right match.
Analyzing soft skills.
Traditional interviews can be daunting for the interviewer and the candidate. It can be tough to assess a candidate’s skills to gauge if they are a great organizational match in a 60 to 90-minute interview.
Finding the right candidate match means identifying the potential for interconnectivity between the soft and hard skills they possess and those of current team members.
Soft skills are interpersonal abilities, personal habits, or traits one displays in relation to people and work. Soft skills are subjective and are unquantifiable like hard skills. When asking questions during an interview, consider the context of each candidate's response.
Assessing multiple soft skills with fewer questions is possible. Doing so can thereby shorten the interviewing time. Here’s an example:
Sample Interview Question: Describe a problem that you’ve encountered in a previous role and the steps you took to solve it.
Soft skills assessed: This question mainly tests for awareness, initiative, and critical thinking.
Guided analysis:
Awareness - How did the candidate come to the realization of the problem? Noticing the problem on their own means that they were aware and alerted to the irregularities in either a procedure or an outcome.
Initiative - How did the candidate react to the awareness of the problem? Was their first instinct to attempt to resolve the issue? Did they disclose the problem to their supervisor first to either present a resolution or ask for delegation? Think about the procedure your business already has in place. Would the candidate encounter a learning curve to comply with existing procedures?
Critical Thinking - Probe the candidates’ thinking process by reviewing the steps mentioned from start to finish. Was inductive or deductive reasoning used to form a conclusion?
When hiring employees, carve out additional time to analyze soft skills to find the right match.
Holistic Human Resources for the Win!
Workers want alignment.
Forward-thinking companies are changing the structure of Human Resources to incorporate a holistic view of staff management. They understand that workers achieve goals and accomplish tasks with ease when the culture is restorative. Glass Door released its 1. Best Places to Work in 2022, report. The most common theme amongst reviewers is work-life balance.
Work-life balance is a state of equilibrium achieved amongst work and personal life demands. When reached, employees report having less stress and feeling more energized and engaged. Workers want alignment. However, factors such as increased responsibility at home and work, long work hours, and little to no autonomy in their roles disproportionately tip the scales of balance.
Holistic Human Resources implements an organizational strategy that is crafted with the consideration of workers’ internal and external environments. Workers are provided resources to reach equilibrium. This equilibrium is the steward of intentional organizational culture. And culture should by all means be intentional. Is your organization ready to win?