I’ve spent a lot of years in the messy middle of organizations—HR, Operations, store floors, shift schedules, board decks, acquisitions that were “totally seamless” until they weren’t. When people ask me what makes teams feel aligned and alive, I don’t point to an org chart. I point to the conversations. The daily flow. The moments where someone shares a quick win, asks for help, answers fast, and keeps the work moving. That’s internal communication. And it’s either happening

(Fewer channels. Clearer beats louder. Phone-first, or it didn’t happen.) Most internal comms are designed on a laptop and die in a...

(Map the job, shrink the steps, teach where the work lives.) Onboarding gets bloated because we mistake information for integration. We...

(Keep the results, fix the ripple, protect the team.) I’ve managed a few “stars” who lit up the board and burned the room. You know the...

(Build a fair system that makes on-time the easy thing.) Tardiness looks like a people problem. Usually it’s a system  problem. Schedules...

(Spoiler: it’s not . It’s clarity, progress, and care.) When I first became a manager, I thought happiness was a perk. Free lunch. A...

Recognition isn’t balloons and pizza. It’s a manager noticing something specific and saying it out loud, soon, in a way that makes the...

Feedback gets heavy when we wait. I used to store it up for reviews. People got blindsided. I felt like a judge. Now I give feedback like...

A good one-on-one turns a regular Tuesday into a better one. Not because you gave a speech. Because you made work clearer and lighter for...

Assumptions are soft. Agreements are hard. I used to say “ASAP” and “end of day.” I thought I was being flexible. What I was doing was...

I start most days the same way: a seven-minute huddle. Not a meeting. A reset. Headcount, hazards, focus, help. That’s it. When we keep...

I’ve spent my career where HR and Operations meet the floor—on the bar line at Starbucks, in distribution centers that hum like engines,...

When I became a frontline manager, I thought it was all about control — the checklists, the schedules, the rules. It took me a while (and...

When I first became a frontline manager, I thought I had to know everything. Spoiler: I didn’t. What I needed was less about knowledge...

Every morning, before the noise of the day takes over, I do one thing that’s probably the most important part of my job: I talk to my...