The Best People Leaders
You've Never Heard Of.
Until Now.
Experienced, rigorously vetted People and HR professionals who embed in your organization and get to work.
Every coLeaguer in our network has been through a thorough application process, an in-depth interview, and reference checks from former managers, peers, and clients. We know their strengths, their working style, and the kinds of challenges they're built for. When we place someone, we're not taking a chance. We're making a match we already believe in. Here's a look at a few of the people who make coLeague what it is, and what they've been able to accomplish for the organizations they've served.
Meet the CoLeaguers
Julissa
Julissa is an HR operations expert with a talent for taking large, unwieldy bodies of work and turning them into clean, repeatable systems that organizations can actually use. She's the person you want when things are technically still running but quietly falling apart — the one who comes in, figures out what needs to happen first, and makes it happen without drama. She has worked across multiple coLeague engagements and is known for her calm, direct approach and her ability to build trust quickly in environments where trust has been hard to come by.
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AERDF (Advanced Education Research and Development Fund) is a national nonprofit focused on funding research to improve educational outcomes for students.
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AERDF came to coLeague at a moment of significant internal friction. Key HR deliverables — performance reviews, compensation adjustments, compliance filings — were not getting done. Payroll had been late. Deadlines were being missed. The COO was white-knuckling things to keep them from getting worse, but the people function was losing credibility fast and staff were running out of patience.
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Julissa was brought in to stabilize the function. She got the performance review cycle back on track, ran the compensation adjustment process, cleared a backlog of compliance gaps, and documented everything that had been operating on institutional memory and good intentions. She also served as a steadying presence inside an organization going through significant personnel changes, keeping coLeague closely informed so the support never stopped even as the situation evolved.
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The performance review cycle launched on time. Compensation adjustments went out. Compliance filings were completed, and Julissa built the documented systems and templates that the organization could keep using long after her engagement ended, including a performance review process memo that AERDF is still running on today. She laid the foundation that made everything that came next possible.
Kendra
Kendra Lee is a Chief People Officer with deep experience in organizational culture, people strategy, and the kind of trust-building that only comes from doing what you say you're going to do, consistently, over time. She's the person you bring in when the function needs to be rebuilt from the inside out, not just the systems, but the credibility of HR itself. Kendra works fast, communicates clearly, and has a gift for walking into messy situations and helping everyone involved feel like things are going to be okay. She is direct and empathetic in equal measure, and it shows in the results she delivers.
She is now the Chief Operations, Strategy, and People Officer at AERDF. They created the role for her after a year and a half of fractional work together.
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With its HR operations stabilized, AERDF needed someone to step into a more senior role and take genuine ownership of the people function — building culture, completing a long list of stalled initiatives, and restoring staff trust that had taken a serious hit over the previous year.
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Trust in HR was still fragile. Staff had been promised things that never materialized, the culture was fragmented, and the executive team lacked alignment. There was also a significant backlog of unfinished work: a core values process that had stalled for over a year, mid-year reviews, an organization-wide engagement survey, and an annual staff retreat, among other things.
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Kendra came in at approximately 30 hours per week and hit the ground running. She completed the core values process. She launched mid-year reviews and implemented an organization-wide engagement survey through Culture Amp. She ran the annual staff retreat. She managed a complex personnel situation with care and transparency. And she rebuilt the credibility of the HR function through the most reliable method available: consistently doing what she said she was going to do.
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Within months, staff who had spent over a year losing faith in HR were telling Kendra directly that things had gotten better. The executive team found alignment they hadn't had in years. AERDF promoted Kendra to VP so she could sit on the executive team, renewed her engagement twice, and ultimately created a brand new role for her — Chief Operations, Strategy, and People Officer, spanning finance, legal, IT, people, and general operations — and asked her to join full-time. She started in May 2026.
Kristen
Kristen is a senior People leader and executive coach who specializes in helping organizational leaders navigate the moments that feel impossible: a challenging board, a toxic team dynamic, a leadership transition that's taking longer than anyone hoped. She brings a rare combination of coaching expertise, HR knowledge, and organizational design experience that allows her to meet clients where they are, whether that's executive thought partnership, job description overhauls, or helping a team understand why the things they've always done aren't working anymore. She is known for her directness, her warmth, and her ability to keep telling the truth even when it's not what people want to hear.
Kristen's work across two very different organizations tells the same underlying story: new leaders inheriting complicated situations, and the difference that having the right thought partner makes.
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South Shore Conservatory is a 56-year-old community music school in Massachusetts that offers music education and performance opportunities across the region. They came to coLeague during one of the most significant transitions in their history. The Danielson Group is a nonprofit education consulting organization whose incoming CEO inherited a small but complicated organization with pockets of toxic culture and an HR function with significant gaps.
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At SSC, post-COVID leadership turnover had left the organization reactive, siloed, and operating on survival instincts rather than strategy. When Cynthia Krebs Lee stepped in as Executive Director, she needed someone who could help her navigate a complex board dynamic, restructure the team, and modernize the organization, all without losing the trust of a retention-heavy staff that had already been through a lot.
At The Danielson Group, the challenge was more immediately urgent: a difficult personnel situation at the senior level was creating ripple effects across the whole team, eroding trust and slowing work, and the CEO knew what needed to happen but needed someone in her corner to help her find the courage and the strategy to do it.
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In both cases, Kristen came in as an executive coach and thought partner, and the work quickly expanded to match what the organizations actually needed. At SSC, she helped Cynthia navigate the board while simultaneously coaching the leadership team through a major restructuring, interviewing every staff member, updating job descriptions across the organization, and helping the team understand how their individual roles connected to the larger mission.
At The Danielson Group, she moved from coaching into organizational design, conducting individual staff interviews, overhauling job descriptions, establishing clearer role definitions and compensation alignment, and helping the CEO navigate a prolonged personnel situation in a way that was legally sound, transparent, and ultimately liberating for everyone else on the team.
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At SSC, the organization moved from reactive to strategic. Staff found clarity in their roles and trust in their leadership. The executive team achieved alignment it hadn't had in years, and the organization now has long-term visibility into its people, finances, and future.
At The Danielson Group, the personnel situation was resolved, staff reported immediate improvement in their day-to-day experience, and the CEO had the framework and the confidence to lead the organization forward. In both cases, the organizations ended up with a structural foundation they simply didn't have before Kristen arrived.
LET’S FIND YOUR coLEAGUER
Whether you need an embedded fractional People Leader, a targeted consulting project, or something in between, we have the right person for it. Take a look at how we work and what we offer.
FROM THE C-SUITE TO THE FRONT LINES
We own the entire talent vertical. Yep. The whole thing.
Most fractional HR firms work at the C-suite level only. We have Chief People Officers, HR Directors, Business Partners, HR Managers, and Recruitment Directors in our network — the full spectrum. Organizations at every stage need different kinds of support. Whether you need ongoing fractional leadership or a targeted consulting project, we know someone who can help.
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