ABOUT THIS EPISODE
What does it take to sustain your organization when your growth is outpacing your people strategy?
In this Force Multiplier episode, Queie Barnett, Founder and Principal of Kysin LLC, a strategic people leadership firm for mission-driven organizations, shares her path from an early-career tenure at the Atlanta Community Food Bank under founder Bill Bowen to founding Kysin, where she brings Chief People Officer-level leadership to organizations whose growth has outpaced their people infrastructure.
In our conversation, Queie shares
- Why a healthy organization means every people decision has a clear owner, and how that shift frees a leader to stop managing and start leading.
- Why burnout is a symptom of structure, not a standalone problem.
- What a new leader should do in their first few months before touching anything.
If you're wearing every hat in your organization, trying to figure out when to delegate, or watching burnout surface no matter how hard your team works, this episode offers candid, practical insight.
Build the organization your impact demands. By being the business you are.
Key Takeaways
- A healthy organization gives every people decision a clear owner.
- Burnout isn't the problem itself. It's a symptom of a structure that was never built to support the work.
- Human capital is usually an organization's largest expense, but its infrastructure rarely gets the same intentional design as the financial side.
- New leaders should listen before they act by taking the first couple of months to understand who really drives the organization before making any changes.
About Queie Barnett
Queie Barnett is the founder and principal of Kysin LLC, a strategic people leadership firm serving founder-led and mission-driven organizations, typically between 40 and 400 employees, whose mission has grown faster than the people infrastructure behind it. She has spent more than 20 years doing people strategy at the executive level, building HR functions from the ground up across nonprofit, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, and professional services organizations.
She has owned outcomes across talent strategy, compensation, culture, governance, and compliance and advised executive teams, boards, and funders on the people decisions that determine whether growth holds or unravels. She brings practical executive judgment shaped by years at the leadership table, the kind of thinking most growing organizations need long before they can justify a full-time executive hire. Queie holds SPHR and SHRM-SCP credentials.
About Kysin LLC
Kysin provides CHRO/CPO-level leadership to small and growing organizations that need experienced people strategy, governance, and risk oversight, without the cost or complexity of a full-time executive hire. Kysin serves as a people executive partner, accountable for how workforce strategy supports business goals.
Connect with Queie Barnett LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/queiebarnett Kysin LLC on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kysin-llc Website: www.kysinllc.com Email: QEB@kysinllc.com
Websites and Social Company Website: tacosa360.com Impact Catapult: www.impactcatapult.com YouTube: youtube.com/@Tacosa360
Connect with Tanja LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tanjahoran
Topics nonprofit HR infrastructure, delegation for nonprofit leaders, human capital strategy, nonprofit burnout prevention, scaling a growing nonprofit, nonprofit leadership development, organizational culture and structure, people strategy for mission-driven organizations
