Employees Carrying Heavy Personal Burdens - Workplace Stories

I've been thinking about what actually makes an organization work. Not the software. Not the quarterly roadmap. Not the all-hands slide deck about strategic priorities. Not even the board of directors, with all their good intentions and expensive opinions. The people. The ones who show up on Monday morning after a hard weekend. The ones who take the call they didn't have to take, solve the problem that wasn't technically theirs, and still find a way to be present for a colleague who's struggling. The ones carrying something heavy—because most people are carrying something—and doing their jobs anyway. That's not a small thing. That's everything. I spent years in corporate communications, and I watched it happen constantly: an organization would invest millions in a new platform, a new process, a new initiative—and the thing that actually made it land was a person. Someone who believed in it enough to bring others along. Someone who explained it with patience when people were confused. Someone who showed up. I want to tell those stories. This is the first in a series of pieces I'm writing about the people inside organizations—what they carry, what they've overcome, and what it looks like to do meaningful work in the middle of a complicated life. Because I believe the best thing a workplace can do is see its people clearly. Not just what they produce. Who they are. I know something about carrying a lot and showing up anyway. I wrote a book about it—The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us—because I believe stories are how we make sense of hard things. And the workplace is full of hard things that rarely get named out loud. The role I'm looking for centers on exactly this: people. Their stories, their challenges, their contributions. Whether that's internal communications, people and culture, employee storytelling, or something that doesn't have a clean title yet—I want to be the person who helps organizations see what they already have. More to come. What's your story? I'd love to hear it. #PeopleFirst #InternalCommunications #PeopleAndCulture #EmployeeExperience #Storytelling #Leadership #TheLuckWeCarry