Hi, I'm Latia
I know what the systems feel like.
I spent most of my career helping organizations make decisions about people, performance, leadership, and change. I was also one of the people whose life was being shaped by those decisions.
From inside the function, I saw how easy it was for smart, well-intended people to become so focused on performance, results, and what success required that the humans at the center became increasingly abstract.
I wasn’t outside the system taking notes. I helped build it, led within it, and built my own success through it too.
I didn't learn this from the sidelines.
I held senior People & Culture roles at Cisco, Box, HPE, Aetna, and Synopsys. I advised executives and led culture, talent, and strategy work through major acquisitions, enterprise-wide change, and workforce transitions.
I saw organizations continue to deliver while leaders carried more, teams adapted, and the Human Cost became harder to ignore. Having a good quarter can look like proof that everything is working. Sometimes it’s proof that people are very good at compensating for misaligned systems.
During my MBA at Vanderbilt, I concentrated on Human & Org Performance, Strategy, and Operations, so I could intentionally connect the dots between people and business outcomes. I got a Master’s in Organizational Conflict at SMU, which gave me another lens on power, relationships, and the tradeoffs humans make under pressure.
I know how personal patterns, leadership behavior, team norms, incentives, and organizational conditions shape one another
and how they impact us individually and collectively. I also know how to make those dynamics understandable without watering them down into inspiration and vibes or another corporate deck that says absolutely nothing.
My questions about success were personal before they became my practice.
I was a Black woman and first-generation college graduate learning to navigate spaces that did not come with instructions. I became an executive, a wife, and a mother of three while building a career I was proud of.
That experience shapes what I notice about power, belonging, opportunity, hidden expectations, and the mental math behind choices that look simple from the outside.
It also explains why I am skeptical of common advice that places every solution on the individual. “Set a boundary,” “say no,” and “just leave” can ignore money, identity, caregiving, representation, and the fact that the same decisions don’t cost everyone equally.
I also don’t believe those realities mean we’re helpless. My work pays attention to the conditions shaping a choice and the agency people and leaders still have inside them.
The kind of leadership that shaped me
I once told a hiring manager I was pregnant with twins just as she was preparing to extend an offer.
She didn’t miss a beat. She told me motherhood was an important part of my life journey, and she was glad the team would get to be part of it, and however it shaped me professionally.
I ugly cried. Obviously.
She hadn’t lowered the standard. She had simply made room for the full human being(s) she was hiring.
That leader clearly understood that humanity and ambition were not in competition.
Side-note: motherhood did in fact shape me professionally. Since then I’ve done some of my most impactful work with incredible business leaders, all while balancing bedtime routines and boo-boos.
why Latitude & Levity
Success was supposed to create more room for life.
Latitude is the freedom and agency success is supposed to create. Levity is the joy and lightness of a life well lived.
The “and” matters because I am not interested in choosing between ambition and humanity, performance and people, accountability and compassion, or meaningful work and a life we can be present for.
I built Latitude & Levity because “this is just how it is” isn't a good enough answer.
We may not be able to change every condition or avoid every tradeoff, but we can stop treating default choices as the only way.
How I work
You can expect nuance. You can also expect me to call out the BS.
I make distinctions that keep us honest: between a meaningful tradeoff and an unnecessary cost, between the conditions shaping a choice and the agency someone still has, and between an answer that sounds impressive and one that will work in real life.
I won’t force a clean answer where the truth is complicated. I also won’t let complexity, corporate speak, or someone’s title keep me from saying what is true.
FEELING LIKE I'm YOUR PEOPLE?
LET's talk.
Tell me what's going on in your career, your leadership, your team, or your organization. We'll figure out the next step together.
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