Yolanda Green Barnes left corporate America in December 2025 and did not go looking for another job like the one she had. She started The Ashayé Group, a leadership consulting firm doing consulting, executive advising, coaching and speaking, after more than 30 years of work, nearly two decades of it on Houston television.
The word most people would reach for is starting over. Barnes refuses it. “You’re not starting over, you’re starting from experience,” she said. For a woman who is told that a pivot late in a career costs her the title she already earned, that is a different way to count the same thirty years.
She has the record to count. In broadcasting she earned eight Emmy nominations in the first two years of one program. The work she names first is not an award: a public service campaign she created and led that helped more than 5,500 children in foster care find permanent homes. After moving from Houston to Denver for a corporate role, she built and led a leadership development program that reached more than 3,000 leaders at a Fortune 50 company.
That program is where she found the problem her firm now sells against. Companies promote their strongest individual performers into management and hand them nothing. “A lot of times experts will become leaders without any training, without any facilitated leadership,” she said. She argues that leadership development is a business strategy and not an HR line item, and that emotional intelligence is the part most companies skip.
Her work increasingly points at the women the line was built for: capable, and unwilling to say so out loud. Brigid Roberson, who chaired an event where Barnes gave the keynote, said Barnes “resonates with her audience and empowers Black women.”
Barnes does not tell it as a straight line. She remembers a woman at church handing her $25 while she was struggling to feed her daughter, and she counts that too.
“In this fourth quarter of my career, I’m going for it,” she said. “It’s never too late to do something different.”
