She Learned to Read People at a Flea Market. Now She's Teaching Leaders How to Listen.

by Sergio Domeyko August 17, 2026

Welcome, Nancy Marmolejo, our newest Executive Cultura Ambassador

From swap meets to boardrooms, one skill never left her.

Some leadership lessons come from boardrooms. Nancy Marmolejo's came from a snack bar counter at a weekend flea market, where she spent her teenage Saturdays and Sundays serving burgers, chips, and soda to bikers, treasure hunters, and everyone in between.

She wasn't just making change. She was learning to read people. Their strengths, their stories, the things they carried that nobody else bothered to notice. That skill would go on to shape a career spent helping others see what they couldn't yet see in themselves.

The Teacher Who Refused to Give Up on "At-Risk"

Nancy's first career was in the classroom, working as a public-school teacher with immigrant students the system had already written off. She refused that label. Instead of letting her students fall through the cracks, she reflected their strengths back to them, brought community resources into her classroom to teach immigrant rights and personal safety, and got her students into service learning across the city. That work earned recognition for her and her students and opened the door for her to train other teachers on the same approach.

After more than a decade in education, Nancy took what she'd learned at the flea market counter and in the classroom and built something of her own: a coaching, consulting, and training practice for small business owners, executives, and workplace teams. In the early 2000s, she was one of the first coaches to build a brand rooted in Latina identity, unapologetically challenging what leadership was expected to look like, years before that conversation became mainstream.

Ahead of the Curve, On Purpose

That instinct to be ahead of the curve has defined Nancy's career ever since. She has brought her signature work in personal branding, communication, and expert positioning to mission scientists at NASA, tech leaders at Microsoft, aerospace engineers at global firms, faculty at UC Davis, and teams across nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies. The thread running through all of it: emotional intelligence, cultural understanding, self-awareness, and empathy.

Her work has been recognized by the U.S. Congress and covered by Forbes, The Huffington Post, Univision, Latina Magazine, and more than a hundred other outlets. For over three years, she served as Chief Strategy Officer for Lean In Latinas, where she founded the Latina Speakers and Coaches Circle and co-chaired the annual Take Charge Conference, helping bring a wider, more diverse range of voices to the stage and opening the door to a deeper sense of belonging for everyone in the room.

Now, She's Teaching Us to Listen

More than two decades into that work, Nancy has poured her energy into a body of work devoted to a single, often-overlooked leadership skill: listening. Her upcoming book, Heard: Transforming Leadership Through the Power of Listening, in development since 2025, makes the case that people who feel heard feel valued, and that this single shift moves the needle more than almost anything else on healing toxic workplace culture.

It's a fitting next chapter for someone who has spent her entire career proving that the strongest leaders aren't the loudest ones in the room. They're the ones paying attention.

Outside her consulting work, Nancy is the proud mother of a UC Berkeley graduate, a self-described museum nerd and trivia addict, and a licensed spiritual counselor who shows up for her local community in ways that rarely make headlines but always make a difference.

Bienvenida, Nancy

Many in our community already know Nancy. Her name has been part of the Bay Area Latina leadership conversation for years. Silicon Valley Latino is proud to welcome her into our comunidad in a new way: sharing her voice, her decades of experience, and her insight directly with our readers in the months ahead.

Her story is proof of something SVL believes to its core: expertise doesn't always come from where you'd expect it. Sometimes it comes from a flea market counter. Sometimes it comes from a classroom full of kids nobody else believed in. And sometimes, it just takes someone willing to listen.

Welcome, Nancy. We're ready to listen.

Learn about Nancy's work at www.heardleadership.com

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