About Me

I gave everything to the job

For years, I was the kind of worker who gave everything to the job: long days, late nights, weekends, willing to travel, even move. I tried to be exactly what a manager would want: useful, competent, always available. I didn’t really expect work to love me back, but some part of me hoped it would. The mismatch between how much work could ask of me and how little I could ask of it became a question I kept returning to.

I first became interested in research while working in advertising in Manhattan. As a young account executive, I was sent to help run consumer focus groups in Chicago, Manchester, and Mexico City. I remember sitting behind the glass and realizing this was the part of the job I most enjoyed: listening to people talk, noticing patterns in what they said, trying to understand why they saw things the way they did, and figuring out what those patterns meant in practice.

In retrospect, that interest wasn’t new. I’d been paying attention to people and how they made sense of the worlds around them for as long as I can remember. I grew up in rural Georgia in a family that was half Egyptian Jewish and half Scottish-Irish, in a place where most people around me were white and Baptist, often with family roots in the South going back generations. I got used to noticing social cues, figuring out what people expected, and adapting to different situations.

That interest eventually took me to a PhD in sociology at the University of Virginia, a postdoc at the University of Sydney Business School, and later work in program evaluation in Sacramento. Across those settings, I’ve worked with both statistics and people’s accounts of their own lives. I like moving between the two: figuring out what the pattern is, what explains it, and why it matters.

My book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us (University of California Press), grew out of years of research on workplace relationships and the role they play in shaping people’s experiences at work. It looks closely at what happens when organizations rely on trust, intimacy, and personal relationships to make work feel more humane, including what those relationships offer people and what they can ask of them in return. I now bring that research to stages and organizations as a speaker and consultant, helping people understand dynamics at work that are often easy to feel but harder to name.

I currently live in Athens, Georgia, near where I grew up and went to college (thank you, Hope Scholarship!). I never expected to come back to this part of the country, but family care needs brought me home, and I’ve found Athens to be a surprisingly generative place to live and work. I also love that a significant percentage of town knows my dog, Sam, better than they know me.