The views expressed on this blog (and any posts within) are solely my own and do not reflect the views, positions, strategies, or opinions of any current or former employer, employee, client, customer, or affiliated organization. My commentary is based on general professional experience, education, publicly available information, and knowledge and skills acquired throughout my career and is not based on confidential, proprietary, privileged, or non-public information belonging to any current or former employer, employee, client, customer, or affiliated organization.
Any examples, scenarios, or observations are intended for general informational and educational purposes and may be presented in a generalized or hypothetical manner. Nothing in these posts is intended to identify, criticize, disparage, or comment upon any specific current or former employer, employee, client, customer, individual, or affiliated organization. The opinions expressed are personal in nature and should not be interpreted as statements made on behalf of any other person or entity.
June 22, 2026
FILED IN: Integrity, System Diagnostics, The Option 1 Leader
I will never forget the time someone once told me that I was too compassionate and I “cared about people too much” to be a good leader. That I’d need to develop a thicker skin and be “scarier” to ever move up in my career. They basically told me compassionate leadership was a scam. I […]
June 18, 2026
FILED IN: Integrity, Leadership, System Diagnostics, The Option 1 Leader
A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my husband about what makes someone a good people-first leader. He’s a middle manager, so this is a topic we come back to often, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation I found myself trying to name a pattern I’d been seeing for years […]
May 18, 2026
FILED IN: Integrity, Leadership, System Diagnostics
Most organizations that think they’re doing inclusion well aren’t. And the gap between believing you’re an inclusive leader and actually being one doesn’t show up on the good days. It shows up the moment things get hard. You may have seen this pattern in places that have visible markers of DEI commitment: a committee, pronouns […]
May 11, 2026
FILED IN: Leadership, System Diagnostics
Every organization has a story about why their good people left. The official version usually involves something tidy. A better opportunity. A career change. Personal circumstances. Sometimes it’s framed as a loss but an inevitable one, the kind of thing that happens in every organization and doesn’t really mean anything about this one specifically. The […]
May 4, 2026
FILED IN: Leadership, System Diagnostics
I’ve been asking a question my entire life: am I the only one who sees a problem with this? In classrooms, in boardrooms, in leadership meetings where I’d look around the table and feel the weight settle into my chest before my hand went up anyway. Most of the time, I was not the only […]
April 27, 2026
FILED IN: Integrity, System Diagnostics
Most organizations aren’t missing the will to create psychological safety. They’re missing the understanding of what actually holds it in place. If you’ve ever sat in a room with a facilitator, a whiteboard, and a stack of post-it notes — answering questions about what psychological safety means to your team and what actions you’ll all […]
April 7, 2026
FILED IN: Integrity, Rebuilding, System Diagnostics
If you’ve ever felt like you’re the only one who sees what’s wrong, this post is for you. There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from working in systems that ask you to compromise daily. It’s not the tiredness you feel after a long day of meaningful work. It’s the bone-deep weariness that comes […]
