We each have our own voice. Not that bland, polished, HR voice that performs respect by never expressing an opinion. Strong opinions on how companies’ decisions shape our lives in meaningful ways.

We ran together, but no one could run the race for her. She had to cover the distance on her own two feet. Hundreds of other people ran the same route as we did. She just needed one of those people to do it with her. And I got to be that runner.

But why would someone take a 40+% pay cut by choice? That time must be more valuable than money. There are plenty of reasons besides laziness why this might be true. 

Rudeness bothers me. It occurred to me that I could refuse in protest. Make everyone wait until the woman came out of the handicapped stall so we could all stare her down as she washed her hands. 

It takes strength to show calm, respect, and humanity to someone who isn’t giving it back or "did this to themselves." It takes discipline to hold space and structure until order is restored.

Your organization isn’t a spreadsheet. You can’t just delete the cells with numbers you don’t like.

It’s not that people don’t care, they just don’t know what to do about it. And the job still needs to get done.

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing.  “Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked. It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

This story still makes me laugh... and haunts me to this day. Is a boundary still a boundary if only one person asserts it? Or is it rebellion?

What started as a step back became a growth hack. When it came time to brand my service, I knew exactly what I was good at, where there was a gap, and what people would pay for. 

Companies don’t reward you for masking dysfunction. They rely on it. They reward the person patching it up with even more responsibilities. Not the kind that come with a promotion, but responsibilities that come with with more fire drills and more late nights. 

“Everything is broken and I hate it here.” Have you ever worked at one of those places where the work-arounds become the job? Onboarding someone new isn’t about learning your product or roadmap. It’s about learning where the landmines are, how to use The Beast and navigate the playbook.

I get it. All this talk about replacing humans with machines is anxiety-inducing. Especially to those of us who work in a fields built on people, like HR and People Ops. It just means that you can program it using the same language you use to talk to your team or your kids.

Self-promotion isn’t about ego. It’s a kind of management. It took me too long realize that self-promotion isn’t selfish. Staying heads-down just makes me easier to underestimate and overlook. If I didn’t tell people about my skills, they wouldn’t know when to bring me in so I could have the most impact. Or when to just get out of my way and let the magic happen.

Certifications like SHRM and HRCI that over-rely on recall without nuance only magnify this false sense of authority. Like passing the exam makes you Solomon or something. 

Let me give you a “hypothetical” example that has definitely never happened in real life. It’ll make your blood run cold.

When teams don’t plan for leave, the work gets spread across people already maxed out. That’s not “lean,” it’s a recipe for burnout.

Most teams treat FLSA salary exemptions as a payroll hack. But you need to do more than pay someone a flat rate for them to be exempt from overtime.

I was sending out resumes, but I was having a really hard time breaking back into the corporate world. I was typecast as "out to recess." No one wanted to give me a chance at a "serious" job. 

Just like us, dogs align themselves with power. Oscar intuitively knows who the pack follows. Once he knows who’s the boss, he tries to win them over just like everyone else does.