Today we’d like to introduce you to Dawanna Kennedy.
Hi Dawanna, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
WiseHR Solutions Consulting was born out of my professional experience in the nonprofit sector, but more specifically, out of what my experience taught me.
I have spent much of my career working in and around human resources, people management, and organizational development. Along the way, I experienced many of the same workplace challenges that I now help organizations navigate. I have been misunderstood, watched good people struggle under poor management, seen employees disengage because they did not feel supported, and experienced firsthand how much leadership decisions can affect a person both professionally and personally.
Those experiences gave me perspective and made me wiser.
That wisdom changed the way I understood the experiences themselves. I began to recognize that difficult seasons often leave us with lessons we could not have gained any other way. And once those lessons became part of me, I became curious about what could happen when they were used in service of someone else. I wanted to do more than simply learn from my own experiences; I wanted to use what I had learned to help make another person’s path a little clearer.
WiseHR Solutions became the foundation for putting that wisdom into practice. The name reflects my own transformation and my belief that wisdom is not about having all the answers. It is about having the humility to learn from what life teaches you, the willingness to reflect and grow, and the intention to use what you have learned in ways that can serve others. That belief has shaped both who I am and how I approach my work.
That philosophy shaped the kind of work I wanted to build. WiseHR Solutions grew into a people centered consulting practice focused on helping organizations and managers navigate the human side of work with greater intention. At the center of that work is a simple belief: leadership is about more than authority. It is about understanding people, developing people, and creating the conditions for them to do meaningful work and grow.
Today, I am still building WiseHR Solutions from that same place. Every experience continues to teach me something, and every lesson becomes another tool I can use to serve my clients. In many ways, the business is a reflection of my own journey: turning experience into wisdom, and wisdom into service.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, the road has not been smooth. I founded WiseHR Solutions Consulting in 2024 with a dollar, a dream, and a few disadvantages, including limited financial resources, limited visibility, and no established client base. I quickly learned that expertise alone does not build a consulting practice. I had to learn how to make WiseHR Solutions visible, build relationships from the ground up, earn trust, and adapt to the changing ways people discover and engage with businesses. That has required me to be intentional about showing up both online and in my community, even when growth has been slower or more difficult than I anticipated.
Access to capital has been one of the more difficult barriers to navigate. Without significant financial resources to invest in growth, I had to be deliberate about how I built the business and where I invested my time and energy. Rather than viewing my work in corporate leadership and my work with WiseHR Solutions Consulting as separate paths, I began to see how each could strengthen the other.
Continuing to work in senior management roles has allowed me to deepen my leadership skills, stay connected to the operational realities organizations face, and gain firsthand insight into the challenges managers and employees are navigating. I bring those experiences back to WiseHR Solutions, which keeps my consulting grounded in what is actually happening inside organizations, not simply what looks good on paper.
The road has taught me some fundamentals that I could not have learned from a business plan alone. I have learned to understand my numbers, know my value, build relationships before I need them, and stay open to learning beyond the service I originally set out to provide. More than anything, I have learned that building something of your own requires you to evolve while remaining grounded in the reason you started.
That has become one of the most valuable parts of building WiseHR Solutions. I am not simply building a business; I am becoming a better business owner through the process. Every challenge has required me to think differently, make adjustments, and keep moving with intention.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Part of what makes WiseHR Solutions Consulting different is that I am not afraid to question what has become normal. I see myself as a disruptor of conventional workplace thinking, particularly when a practice continues simply because “that is how it has always been done.” In HR, there can be a tendency to confuse compliance with effectiveness, policy with practice, or tradition with what actually works. I challenge those assumptions.
To be clear, that does not mean disrupting for the sake of being different. It means asking better questions. Why are we doing this? Who does it serve? What problem are we actually trying to solve? What is happening beneath the surface? And does this approach work for the people who are expected to live with it every day?
That lens shows up throughout WiseHR Solutions. I challenge organizations to rethink how they develop managers, approach employee relations, communicate expectations, design processes, and think about wellness. I am willing to look at the uncomfortable parts of an organization and ask questions that may not have been asked before. Sometimes the most useful intervention is not creating something new. It is having the courage to question something that everyone else has accepted as normal.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
I do not think I can tell the story of WiseHR Solutions Consulting without acknowledging the people who shaped me along the way. Some gave me opportunities. Some challenged me. Some stretched my thinking, and some showed me, through their own leadership, exactly what I wanted to carry forward and what I wanted to leave behind. All of them contributed to the person and professional I am today.
My mother, Norma, deserves a special place in that story. She was the first HR professional I ever knew, so in many ways, I grew up in Human Resources. From an early age, I watched her navigate people, policies, conflict, leadership, and organizational decisions. She taught me that HR is not simply about knowing policies and procedures. It requires the ability to understand people while also understanding the responsibility those policies carry for an organization. That balance became part of my own foundation.
My career continued that education. Leaders taught me through both example and contrast. Employees, managers, executives, colleagues, clients, and business owners each gave me a different perspective on what people need from their workplaces and from the people leading them. Some experiences affirmed what I believed. Others challenged it. Some forced me to rethink what I thought I knew. I learned to value all of it because not every lesson arrives in a form you would have chosen.
One person whose work has had a meaningful influence on me since I started WiseHR Solutions is Amber Cabral, entrepreneur, author, podcast host, trainer, and the voice behind Humaning Well. I discovered her work early in my entrepreneurial journey, and I found myself returning to her perspective because she gave language to something I had already begun to feel deeply: we need to learn how to human well.
That idea has become central to how I think about my own work. I do not believe we spend our working lives simply exchanging our time for a paycheck. Work can shape our character. At its best, employment can develop us, challenge us, give us purpose, and help us become more of who we are. When the workplace consistently works against those things, it can begin to erode our sense of self and teach us that we have to become someone we are not just to survive it. I want to help change that.
That is part of what I mean when I talk about WiseHR Solutions. I want to help organizations and leaders create workplaces where people can do meaningful work without losing their humanity in the process. Amber’s work has been an important source of inspiration as I have developed that part of my own philosophy, and I am grateful that our paths crossed through her work.
To this end, WiseHR Solutions Consulting is a collection of people, experiences, lessons, questions, and convictions that have shaped me over time. My mother gave me an early foundation. My career gave me a front-row seat to the realities of work and leadership. The people I encountered gave me perspective. People like Amber Cabral gave me language for ideas I was still learning how to articulate. I am grateful for all of it because the business I am building today could not exist without the person all of those experiences helped me become.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wisehrsolutionsllc?stkn=bHFodTM5Y2o3aHhq&utm_source=qr
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/111953125
