MISA
Portfolio Drive

Vice President for Human Resources Candidate

Zerna, Gabriel D.

Goals

My primary goal for this term is to deeply humanize HR by normalizing vulnerability and shifting our organizational culture away from the pressure of perfection. I want to establish an environment where acknowledging our 'honest unknowns' and making mistakes are treated as necessary parts of growth, rather than personal failures or doubt of our competence. To achieve this, I want to equip our members with the confidence to solve their own challenges. Ultimately, my goal is to build a MISA community where every single member feels genuinely valued for who they are as a person, and not just for the operational output they deliver for our events.

Platforms

To achieve my goal of deeply humanizing HR and transitioning the cluster from a reactive to a proactive HR, I will implement a set of platforms. These initiatives are designed to systematically dismantle the culture of over-commitment, enforce sustainable boundaries, and equip members with the structural support needed to thrive independently.

To ensure structural continuity for these platforms, I will introduce the Training & Development (T&D) Subcluster. Explicitly mandated to facilitate workshops and formalize organizational knowledge, T&D will produce a comprehensive deliverables guidebook to eliminate role ambiguity for the Executive Board (EB), BETAs, and Third-Level Officers (TLOs).

Some of my platforms are:

I. Normalizing Vulnerability

Grounding Workshop (Owner: AVP for ORel): Executed in the first 2-3 weeks of 1st semester, this Tier 1 workshop establishes norm-setting for officers before the semester grind begins. Through exercises such as the "Worry Box" and "Empathy Mapping," officers will collectively acknowledge shared fears and explicitly identify their "Honest Unknowns," demonstrating that admitting vulnerability is a prerequisite for effective leadership.

The Resilience Lab (Owner: AVP for T&D): This mid-semester workshop reframes resilience as "sustainable presence" rather than endurance. It teaches members to map their energy drains, practice decision-making under pressure (using the OODA Loop), and enforce strict boundaries even if they are officers, PD, or core team members for the org, so that work does not leak into their personal lives. I plan to talk with OAA (they have SchoTalks on Resiliency) and OSA (they held a Highly Resilient Leadership Workshop) to request tools for resiliency training to get a good grasp on how to run a resiliency workshop.

II. Decentralizing Knowledge & Empowering Members

MISA Knowledge Hub (Owner: AVP for T&D): T&D will launch a centralized repository, starting with formalizing deliverables and job descriptions of informalized roles in the organization. They will archive roles, in collaboration with OSG, housing Recweek SOPs, HRPO Guides, Email Etiquette modules, and, eventually, anonymized IC syntheses & SWOT-R for future events' PDs' reference.

The Open Suggestion System (Owner: MemRel): This establishes a continuous pipeline for lateral feedback and upward ideas. Member ideas are collected from the event eval forms and co-created into project ideas and possible HR initiatives, with MemRel publicly tracking "What We Did With Your Idea" to demonstrate follow-through.

III. Protecting Bandwidth & Aligning Manpower

Event Core Team Evaluation (Owner: AVP for HRPO and ORel): This evaluation, gathered through post-event core team meetings, forms, or both, reveals that value is added to the Cote team members of events that may reveal to the EB possible revisions to the current system.

IV. Proactive Retention

Continuing Mandatory BETA Individual Consultations (Owner: ORel): To ensure BETAs have a structured avenue to voice concerns, ORel will facilitate mandatory, once-a-semester individual consultations. This serves as a proactive measure to identify and address issues related to their integration and workload before they escalate.