Developing leaders. Designing change.
I spent 14+ years running clinical programs, so I’ve watched what happens when a strong provider leaves, when a new hire still isn’t ready in week four, or when a policy change lands and no one has been trained on it. I help clinics and hospital teams hire providers who stay, close skill gaps, and lead their people through change.
Build the people side of healthcare
Choose one service or combine them. Every engagement is scoped to your team, your care setting, and the results you need.
Talent Acquisition & Retention
Hiring a provider is expensive, and so is losing one in their first year. I work on both ends: interviews that show how a candidate really works with patients and teammates, and onboarding that gets new hires confident and independent sooner.
- Role clarity and provider job description design
- Structured interview guides and scorecards
- Hiring manager interview training
- First 90 days onboarding and early-tenure check-ins
This is for you ifProviders keep leaving within their first year, and you want to hire people who stay and onboard them so they’re practicing independently sooner.
Learning Design & Workforce Development
Most clinical training gets built around what’s easy to schedule. I start with what your staff can and can’t do yet, role by role, then design the learning to close that gap, using a mix of live, hands-on, and self-paced formats with practice and feedback built in.
- Skills gap assessment by role
- Curriculum, workshop, and onboarding design
- Live facilitation, in person or virtual
- Follow-up measurement to show what stuck
This is for you ifYour staff completes the training but skills still vary from person to person, and you can’t say what changed after the last one.
Leadership Development
When your strongest clinician becomes a supervisor, the job changes completely. I coach new and emerging leaders to read what’s driving their team’s behavior (motivation, burnout, or just a hard week) so they respond to the real issue instead of guessing.
- Clinical-to-manager readiness programs
- The Clinical Leadership Bridge, a 90-day program
- Leadership cohorts and 1:1 coaching
- Feedback and difficult conversation skills
This is for you ifYou promoted a strong clinician into management and they’re now leading their former peers, and you want them confident, not just surviving.
Change Management
Healthcare changes constantly: new policies, new systems, AI showing up in the workflow. A rollout succeeds or fails in the hallway conversations after the announcement, so I plan for how people will actually react and equip managers to lead their teams through it.
- Change readiness assessment and stakeholder mapping
- Manager guides and staff communication plans
- Support through policy, system, and AI changes
- Implementation timeline and check-ins
This is for you ifA big change is coming, whether a new policy, system, or AI tool, and you want your people bought in and moving with you, not quietly checked out.
Built on frameworks the field trusts
Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels
Evaluates training at four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results, so you can see what changed.
Knowles’ adult learning principles
Adults learn best when training is relevant to their work, practical, and builds on what they already know.
ADKAR
Guides each person through change in five steps: awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.
Kotter’s 8 Steps
A structured path for leading change, from building urgency to making new habits stick.
Bridges’ Transition Model
Separates the change itself from what people go through as things end and begin, so leaders can support both.
I also bring two frameworks from clinical practice and apply them to organizations.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Applied to organizations, it looks at adaptive capacity: when staffing, policy, or growth pressure hits, do leaders freeze or react from fear, or keep acting on the mission and values they’ve committed to?
Psychological safety · Change readiness · Adaptive capacity · Values alignment
Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
Applied to teams, its focus areas (role disputes, role transitions, and relationship gaps) point to the roots of unclear roles, friction between departments, and rocky onboarding or promotions.
Role clarity · Stakeholder alignment · Conflict resolution architecture · Cross-functional synergies
Shakirah Forde, LCSW
Before I consulted, I ran clinical programs and supervised the people delivering care, the kind of work where you learn fast that what someone says in a meeting and what they do on the floor can be two different things, and your job is to catch the gap early.
That instinct is the backbone of everything I do now. I hold an LCSW and spent 14+ years in behavioral health leadership, I’m finishing an M.Ed. at UGA in Learning, Leadership & Organizational Development, which is a formal way of studying how people actually learn, and somewhere in there I picked up a Human Capital Management certificate because apparently I like collecting letters after my name. What I bring to the table isn’t a framework off a slide, it’s a trained eye for what’s really going on with your people, and the tools to do something about it.
Based in North Atlanta. Available in person or virtual, depending on how far you want me to drive.
From first call to lasting results
Discovery call
A free 60-minute conversation to understand what’s happening on your teams and confirm we’re a fit.
Assess
Staff conversations and a look at your hiring, onboarding, and training to find where people leave or get stuck.
Design
A tailored plan, program, or toolkit with clear deliverables and a timeline.
Embed
Rollout support and check-ins so new practices hold after we’re done.
Ready to calibrate your team?
Start with a free 60-minute discovery conversation. Send me a note at Hello@CalibrateChange.com and we’ll find a time.