Negotiation March 2026 · 9 min read
How to run the salary conversation
The salary conversation is not a negotiation over your worth. It’s a negotiation over a number – and the moment you conflate the two, you’ve lost, because any pushback on the number lands as pushback on you. Separate them before you walk in.
In this note: why you name a number first (and which number), the three sentences that carry the whole conversation, what to do in the silence after you’ve asked – you count, you don’t fill it – and the follow-up email that turns a “let me see what I can do” into an actual diary event.
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New managers February 2026 · 12 min read
Your first 90 days as a manager (without the panic)
Nobody tells new managers the most important thing about the job: you now succeed through other people, and every instinct that earned you the promotion will fight that fact daily. The backlog you could clear yourself in an afternoon? Leave it. That afternoon belongs to your team now.
This is the plan I build with first-time managers: what to do in weeks one, four and twelve, the one-to-one cadence that actually holds, the first delegation (with the handover script), and the early hard conversation almost everyone postpones – usually with the person they used to sit next to.
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Progression January 2026 · 8 min read
The promotion case your boss can actually use
Here’s what I learned running promotion rounds for eleven years: your case is rarely decided in your presence. It’s argued for you, second-hand, by a manager with six other cases in the same meeting. Which means your real job isn’t to be impressive – it’s to be quotable.
This note shows you how to write the one-page case your boss can defend without you in the room: evidence over adjectives, the impact numbers that survive being repeated, the gap you fill at the next level (not the current one), and why “ready for more responsibility” is the weakest sentence in the English language.
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Leadership November 2025 · 7 min read
Influence for the quiet: saying the thing
“Speak up more” is the least useful feedback ever given, and quiet senior people receive it constantly. Volume was never the point. In every meeting, there is usually one sentence that needs saying, one moment it needs saying in, and one person the room will hear it from. Often, that person is you – which is precisely why silence feels so expensive afterwards.
Inside: the first-ten-minutes rule, how to disagree upwards on ground you’ve chosen in advance, why ending your point with a full stop instead of a question mark changes how it’s received, and what to do the meeting after you’ve stayed silent – because there is a recovery move, and almost nobody uses it.
Read the full note in the Letter archive
Career moves October 2025 · 10 min read
Should you quit? A framework that isn’t a coin flip
By the time someone asks me “should I quit?”, they’ve usually been asking themselves for a year – and the question has quietly rotted into “am I allowed to want to leave?”. Those are different questions. The second one isn’t mine to answer; the first one has an actual method.
The note walks through it: separating the job, the company and the chapter (people regularly quit the wrong one of the three), the fix-first test – what would have to change for you to stay, and have you actually asked for it out loud? – the arithmetic of a runway, and the one-way-door check for decisions you can’t cheaply reverse.
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New managers September 2025 · 6 min read
Delegation without guilt (or micromanagement)
New managers don’t hoard work because they’re control freaks. They hoard it because handing it over feels like dumping – so they keep the worst tasks for themselves as a kind of penance, then wonder why they’re working evenings while their team asks for more responsibility. Both sides lose.
The fix is a proper handover, and it fits in one conversation: the outcome, the deadline, the constraints, what good looks like, and – the part everyone skips – how often you’ll check in, agreed out loud so it’s support rather than surveillance. Handover, not abandonment. This note gives you the script and the two-week weaning plan.
Read the full note in the Letter archive