The Dinner Table That Shaped a Leadership Style

Long before she was advising founders, building businesses, and helping leaders make sense of growth, Elles Skony was learning one of the most important lessons of her life around the family dinner table.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, conversations in the Coster household were rarely surface level. Her father, a native of The Netherlands, brought a direct, solutions-oriented communication style balanced with curiosity, and humor. Discussions often ended with a simple question: was there anything else that needed to be put on the table?

Those conversations taught her how to engage in healthy debate, navigate difficult discussions, and view challenges through a broader lens. At the same time, her mother’s unwavering gratitude and resilience demonstrated that perspective can change the way people experience adversity.

The combination left a lasting impression.

Today, clients, colleagues, and friends continue to recognize those same qualities in her leadership. Empathy, perspective, and humor remain central to how she approaches both business and relationships.

When Strategy Pointed in a Different Direction

Many leaders spend years climbing toward executive positions. Few are willing to question whether those positions still make sense.

After nearly two decades in people leadership roles across high-growth companies, including serving as Chief People Officer, Elles Skony found herself facing a business reality that required a different approach. The organization she was supporting was downsizing, and she recognized that maintaining a full-time executive HR position was no longer the best strategic decision for the company.

Rather than waiting for someone else to identify the issue, she raised her hand first.

What began as a practical solution soon revealed something much larger.

Founders and CEOs, she found, were making critical decisions about culture, hiring, and team structure without the benefit of senior HR expertise, not because they didn’t value it, but because a full-time executive hire felt out of reach. The fractional model changed that equation. Strategic people leadership, brought in early before the cracks appear, turns out to be one of the highest-leverage investments a growing company can make. When ChatGPT isn’t enough, and a lawyer is too much.

That realization became the foundation for Elles & Co., and revealed a second, more personal problem she hadn’t expected to find.

The Loneliness Hidden Inside People Leadership

One of the most surprising insights behind Skony’s work is that it was never driven solely by business opportunity.

It was driven by a problem she knew personally.

Human Resources is often viewed as one of the most people-centric professions in business. Yet those who work in the field frequently experience a unique form of isolation. They serve as trusted confidants across organizations, supporting employees, leaders, and executive teams alike, while often carrying those responsibilities alone.

For many HR professionals, that reality already exists inside organizations.

The move to independent work compounds it. Suddenly there is no team down the hall, no peer to debrief with after a hard conversation, no one who understands both the complexity of the HR function and the particular vulnerability of building a business alone.

Recognizing that gap, Skony founded Fractional People People, initially as a simple gathering of peers navigating similar transitions.

What started as a casual invitation has since grown into a community and business ecosystem of more than 800+ fractional HR professionals, consultants, and solopreneurs. The community provides resources, learning opportunities, events, business support, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of belonging.

Its mission is simple: solopreneurship does not mean you need to do it solo.

Building an Ecosystem Instead of a Network

Many professional communities focus on networking. Fractional People People was built around something different.

Skony wanted to create a space where experienced HR leaders could learn and develop the realities of business ownership together while continuing to support one another professionally and personally.

The result has become far more than a membership group.

Today, the ecosystem includes educational programming, industry events, talent matching services, strategic partnerships, and a growing network of senior leaders who understand both the complexities of HR leadership and entrepreneurship.

That philosophy resonates well beyond HR.

As more professionals seek flexibility, independence, and portfolio careers, Skony’s work reflects broader shifts happening across the future of work. Her community offers a model for how experienced professionals can build businesses without sacrificing connection.

Why Abundance Remains a Business Strategy

Elles Skony has a surprisingly simple business strategy: she leads from a place of abundance.

There is plenty for everyone.

While that philosophy can sound idealistic, she has always viewed it as one of the most practical decisions she could make.

That mindset became the invisible filter behind everything that followed.

The community she built wasn’t fueled by aggressive marketing campaigns or growth tactics. It expanded because people who believe in learning, sharing, and growing together tend to recognize one another and stay connected. They refer others. They create opportunities. They help build something larger than themselves.

None of it driven by paid acquisition. All of it built through consistent, generous community building.

But abundance is more than a philosophy. It is a signal.

When you create an environment that is genuinely open, collaborative, and human, you attract people who operate the same way. The right clients, the right partners, and the right conversations emerge naturally because people want to be part of something that feels meaningful.

Skony didn’t manufacture that outcome. She created the conditions for it and trusted the values to do the rest.

Perhaps her guiding question captures it best.

Why wouldn’t you build that way? What’s the risk?

Creating Space for What Comes Next

As organizations continue adapting to changing workforce expectations, new leadership models, and evolving business realities, leaders increasingly need advisors who can connect strategy, culture, and human behavior.

The future of work isn’t just changing how companies operate. It’s changing who does the work, and how they choose to do it. More experienced HR leaders are stepping out of corporate roles, building independent practices, and looking for a different kind of career – one with flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. Fractional People People exists for them.

But the community is only part of the story. Fractional People People also connects its members directly with founders and leadership teams who need them. Skony matches experienced, senior HR talent with growing companies that are ready to invest in people strategy before it becomes people problems.

Because Skony will tell you: waiting until you’re big enough to hire a CHRO is usually waiting too long. The fractional model makes strategic HR leadership accessible at exactly the moment it matters most; early, when culture is still being shaped and the right decisions compound.

The same question she learned to ask around the dinner table, “what haven’t we talked about yet?”, turns out to be exactly what most growing organizations need a strategic HR thought partner to ask.

Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is create a space where people feel safe enough to put it all out on the table.