Leadership

Two people work the same checkpoint under the same gun, and only one of them has a flight out.

Ask a person in a matrixed organization who their manager is, and watch the pause. They have a line manager for their contract and a technical manager for their work, a country lead for the operati…

Our performance systems are built to grade the past and feed the file. They rarely help a person grow, and almost never tell us why our best people are about to leave.

We recruit as if every post were an emergency and then expect people to stay through years that are anything but. The gap between how we hire and how we keep is where our best people leave.

We think the rolling short contract saves money and keeps us flexible. It quietly charges us in lost knowledge, divided loyalty, and people who leave before they were ever fully here.

Two people can carry the same risk, hold the same knowledge, and answer for the same outcome, and still sit on terms that tell them their work is worth different amounts. We built that gap. We can…

We hand a partner a curriculum when what they asked for was a budget line they could move, and we call that capacity building.

There is a moment every few years that most of us recognize. Results are disappointing, pressure is rising, and a new structure is announced. Departments merge. Reporting lines redraw. Titles chang…

We write our values on the website. We live them in who gets invited, who talks, and what we decide to call done.

We learned to design programs that satisfy the form and forget the face.