About Me
15 years in banking ops. I write about the hard parts of managing people — performance reviews, feedback, one-on-ones, and delegation. Practical. No frameworks.
I've spent 15+ years in banking and credit operations — product management, workflow design, team development, the whole ops stack. Not consulting from the outside. Actually in it, managing teams, running review cycles, building processes that had to work under real pressure with real people.
The problems I kept running into weren't unique to banking. They showed up everywhere: feedback that never reached the people who needed it, managers running one-on-ones that were just status updates dressed up as development conversations, performance reviews that shocked associates who should have seen them coming months earlier.
One of them stuck with me. An associate gets reorganized under a new manager right before mid-year reviews. The previous manager left a rating behind: this person ranked below their peers. Clinical. Documented. Never actually communicated to the associate in any meaningful way. The new manager sits down to deliver the review, and within minutes the associate is in shock. They took personal leave to process it.
The review didn't fail because the rating was unfair. It failed because the feedback never traveled the distance from the manager's head to the associate's ears.
That's the problem I write about here.
Who this is for
Working managers. People who have direct reports, run review cycles, give feedback, and are trying to figure out how to do it better without reading a 300-page leadership book written for someone else's company.
I write about performance management, feedback, one-on-ones, delegation, and the practical mechanics of leading people at work. Not frameworks. Not theory. What I've actually seen work — and what I've watched fail.
Where to find me
I write here when I have something worth saying. I'm also on Reddit as u/steele_prather, where I participate in r/managers and r/humanresources.
If something I've written has been useful, I'd like to hear about it. If you think I've got something wrong, I'd like to hear that too.