Talent leader. Former band director. The connective tissue between those two things is what I build — systems where clarity, feedback, and trust produce performance without burning people out. 11+ years in talent, 6 years on the podium before that, and a steady belief that rigor and humanity are the same thing, not opposing forces.
I learned performance management on a podium.
Before I ever worked in HR, I was a band director. For years I led programs that competed at the national level — not casual ensembles, but organizations with high standards, real accountability, and students who showed up every day expecting to get better.
Late-night rehearsal — putting clarity, repetition, and trust into practice. Creating performance as a habit.
That experience taught me things about performance I've never found in a framework or a textbook. Talent alone doesn't produce excellence. What produces it is clarity about what good looks like, consistent feedback delivered with care, and a culture where people trust the standards because they've seen them applied fairly.
You also learn that sustainable performance is built through endurance. Programs that burned bright for one season and collapsed the next usually traced back to the same problem: leaders who prioritized the result over the people producing it.
A trophy is a trailing indicator. The real result was the students who knew the standard, and trusted enough to put in the work.
Excellence doesn't come from pressure. It comes from people who understand what they're working toward and believe the organization is working alongside them.
From the podium to the org chart.
The move into talent management wasn't a departure from that work — it was an extension of it. The same questions that shaped my time as a director followed me in: What does good performance actually look like in this role? Are expectations clear enough that people can meet them? Are we supporting people to succeed, or just measuring whether they do?
Where I learned it all, alongside these experts who felt comfortable enough to welcome me into their team and share their formula for success.
I started building recruiting functions, then performance systems, then competency frameworks. Each one grew from the same instinct: that organizations perform better when the talent infrastructure underneath them is built deliberately.
I got to test that instinct at scale — building an internal recruiting function from scratch, designing performance management programs, developing competency frameworks, and launching appraisal processes. The Employee Success Plan I developed as an alternative to PIPs produced a 90% retention rate among employees placed on them. That number still matters to me. It represents people who stayed and grew.
Relationships first. Systems second. In that order.
The most technically sound talent system will fail if the people responsible for running it don't trust it. I've seen it happen — a performance framework built without manager input, a compensation structure no one can explain, a workforce plan sitting in a spreadsheet untouched.
My work starts with relationships, and I mean that practically rather than philosophically. Understanding what hiring managers, department heads, and employees actually need is what separates a system that gets used from one that gets ignored.
I bring the same directness to every stakeholder relationship that I brought to the podium — I'll tell you what I see even when it's inconvenient, push back on decisions I think are wrong, and own the outcomes of the work I do.
You can be disciplined and human at the same time.
There's a version of talent management that treats rigor and humanity as opposing forces — as if holding people accountable requires being cold about it, or caring about people means going easy on standards. I've never found that to be true.
When expectations are clear, feedback is honest, and consequences are consistent, people don't just meet the standard — they understand why it exists and they invest in it.
That's what I build toward: organizations where performance is well enough understood that conversations about it feel fair. Where people know what success looks like and believe the organization is genuinely working to help them get there.
Humility
I don't have all the answers. I ask a lot of questions and listen closely to the people doing the work.
Reliability
If I commit to something, it gets done. I would rather under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.
Trustworthiness
People share things with me in confidence. I take that seriously and I protect it.
Good company
I am a husband and a father. Outside of work I want to be around people who are smart, funny, and genuinely good.
Why the work has to be sustainable. The four people I want to come home to.
The formal record.
Eleven-plus years of full-lifecycle recruiting experience in professional services, with director-level leadership spanning workforce planning, performance management, internal mobility, and talent operations.