The story behind the work.

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. These were not casual ensembles. They were organizations with high standards, real accountability, and students who showed up every day expecting to get better.

That experience taught me things about performance that I have never found in a framework or a textbook. Talent alone does not produce excellence. What produces excellence is clarity about what good looks like, consistent feedback delivered with care, and a culture where people trust the standards because they have 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.

From the podium to the org chart.

The move into talent management was not 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?

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.

At OpenSymmetry I got to test that instinct at scale. I built the internal recruiting function from scratch, designed the performance management program, developed competency frameworks, and launched the appraisal process through Paylocity. I also developed the Employee Success Plan as an alternative to PIPs, which 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. A performance framework built without manager input. A compensation structure no one can explain. A workforce plan sitting in a spreadsheet untouched. I've seen all of these.

My work starts with relationships. Not as a soft principle, but as a practical one. Understanding what hiring managers, department heads, and employees actually need is what makes the difference between a system that gets used and one that gets ignored.

I bring the same directness to every stakeholder relationship that I brought to the podium. I will tell you what I see, even when it is inconvenient. I will push back on decisions I think are wrong. And I will own the outcomes of the work I do.

You can be disciplined and human at the same time.

There is 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 have never found that to be true.

Clear expectations are a form of respect. Honest feedback is a form of care. Consistent consequences are a form of fairness. When those things are in place, people do not just meet the standard. They understand why it exists and they invest in it.

That is what I build toward: organizations where performance is understood, not feared. Where people know what success looks like and believe the organization is genuinely trying to help them get there.

The formal record.

Nine years of full-lifecycle recruiting experience in professional services. Director-level talent leadership spanning workforce planning, performance management, internal mobility, and talent operations.