hi, i’m janie.
I work on the organization beneath the organization
There is the organization as it appears on paper: the org chart, the policies, the roles, the meeting structure. Then there is the living, changing, dynamic collection of humans and narratives making something happen. That second organization is where I work.
I spent 15+ years inside the machinery of mission-driven organizations, beside leadership. My most consistent unofficial title: “the person behind the person,” close enough to the role at the top to understand the vision (and the pressure), and deep enough in the organization to see what that vision becomes when it reaches the people doing the work. It gave me a view of organizational behavior that very few people have: I can see what leadership believes is happening, what the team is experiencing, and most importantly, the connection between the two.
My work is equal parts operational leadership and human behavior because, in practice, they’ve never been separate.
Structure <> Humans
I don’t look at a broken process without looking at what people have learned to do around it, and I don’t treat a “people problem” as separate from the conditions producing it. Organizations develop habits, coping mechanisms, unspoken rules, and entire shadow systems. I’m very good at finding them.
Communication became a specialty because it’s where so much of that becomes visible: who is allowed to decide something, what does a team not feel safe to say, what a manager is assuming the team understands, where information black holes are. Ops can’t op without comms that comm.
I don’t build systems in isolation from the people expected to use them. I listen to the people doing the work and figure out what the organization is actually asking of them, then build from there. Whether that means a better process or a complex conversation, structure and human behavior both come into play.
A tech entrepreneur—the multiple-startups, $50M-valuations kind—once told me, “When you want something big done, wait for the Taurus to show up. That was you.” It was his quirky way of describing something I’ve heard from clients, executives, and founders in different forms for years: relief.
The relief of having someone beside you who understands what you’re trying to build, can see why it isn’t working, and knows how to move between the human and the operational without losing either.