Founder & Principal

Leslie Kinney.
30 years in the room.

Clients don't hire The Cadence Partners. They hire Leslie Kinney, a senior HCM and payroll practitioner who has spent 30 years inside the most complex implementations in the industry, and who built this firm because she kept seeing what happens when honest senior guidance is missing from the room.

Built from the inside.
Not the outside looking in.

Leslie started her career in healthcare, as a medical records clerk. That role gave her an early look inside how hospitals actually function, the documentation, the processes, the people who keep things running quietly behind the scenes. Her curiosity about people and her natural affinity for how organizations work eventually drew her toward HR and payroll, where she joined a hospital HR team doing the work HCM systems are built to support: benefits enrollments, recruiting, onboarding, and HRIS.

When the hospital launched an HCM implementation, leadership asked her to join the project team because of the business process work she had already done and the creative solutions she had developed to eliminate labor-intensive manual processes. That crossover shaped everything that followed.

She has never forgotten what it feels like to sit on the other side of a system decision. She has watched executives choose platforms without asking the people who would use them. She has seen the fear that runs through an HR team when an implementation is announced. She does not manage around that. She addresses it, because that is one of the reasons programs fail.

Thirty years of delivery across Lawson S3, Infor GHR, Ceridian, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Workday, and ServiceNow have followed. Most recently, she served as Service Delivery Director, led the PMO, and built the Infor practice at JK Seva, one of the most respected names in Infor consulting. In that capacity she oversaw the full portfolio of active client engagements and took the lead on the most complex recoveries. Among them: a Lawson S3 to Infor GHR migration that had cycled through multiple implementation partners and project managers without reaching go-live. She took over the engagement, stabilized it, and delivered a successful cutover. The client stayed. The system went live. Problem solving and execution are where she is most at home. That work is not delegated. It is why clients call her in the first place.

Outside of work she is a wife and mom who is actively involved in her community. She volunteers with her local K-8 school through PTSA, serves as HOA president for her community, and is a former member of the Cedars-Sinai Diabetes Advisory Board. She brings the same standard of follow-through and accountability to those roles that she brings to every engagement. Somehow she is still the person clients reach when something goes wrong on a Friday afternoon.

She has truly been the best consultant I have had in a very long time. Her eye for detail and personable way of delivering change has been a big success for our organization.
Michelle Bivans
Vice President and CHRO, DRH Health
Leslie can be counted on. If she says it will be done, it will be done.
Bill Mitchell
President, JK Seva
Very thorough work, with a dedication to complete documentation. Positioned us well for the next upgrade.
Karen Mitchell, MBA, SPHR
HR Executive
The way she communicates is the key to her success. Her approach of making people understand what she is doing and why is her plus. Detail oriented, committed, and most of all fun to work with.
Rajashanmugam Madhavarajan
Technical Consultant, Nassau University Medical Center

A senior team.
Built for the work.

The Cadence Partners is a women-owned firm built around a team of senior practitioners with deep experience in HCM consulting, client delivery, and business development. The emphasis has always been on bringing the right people to the table, practitioners who have done the work, understand the complexity, and are invested in the outcome.

Clients engage Leslie as their principal. Behind that relationship is a team with the depth, credibility, and experience to match every stage of a complex HCM program.

The current team includes: Head of Growth & Business Development, Senior Advisor & Principal, AI Delivery Lead, and Integration & Technical Architect. Additional capacity is built through partnerships with specialized HCM staffing firms and global delivery partners.

How she shows up.
Every engagement. No exceptions.

Honesty before comfort
If something is wrong, leadership hears it early, not after it has hardened into a crisis.
Senior presence, not senior oversight
Leslie is the practitioner on every engagement. Clients have direct access throughout, not through an intermediary.
Discipline and documentation
Structured meetings, clear outcomes, and knowledge transfer that holds after the engagement ends. Delivery is not complete at go-live.
Independence, always
No software affiliations. No vendor relationships. Recommendations reflect the client environment and objectives, nothing else.

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