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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]