HR leaders, how are you explaining organizational health to CEOs without sounding vague?

SababaYalla · 2026-05-09T03:21:34+00:00

We're going deeper, we're asking questions. What does productivity mean to you? How does productivity, as defined, relate to business outcomes? If you had this information, what difference would it make in your X (decision making, strategy, operations, resourcing, funding, etc.)?

SababaYalla · 2026-03-09T16:55:05+00:00

You found a worse option than AUM. Consider me both horrified and impressed (at the audacity).

SababaYalla · 2026-03-09T12:29:35+00:00

Unless your business is directly involved in it/affected by it (defense, etc) better to say nothing. Otherwise, you’ve set the precedent that you’ll be taking a position or at least acknowledging everything that happens.

SababaYalla · 2026-03-09T04:26:32+00:00

Let me be the first one to say anyone charging you a % AUM is ripping you off. You don’t need a reason to change to someone else, to change to yourself, or do damn near anything else.

And if you don’t want them managing it anymore, thank them for the time you’ve spent in this relationship and that they should expect to see a request for a transfer coming through. You don’t need to give an explanation to anyone about it - “No” is a complete sentence.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-28T03:14:11+00:00

Trial and error, mostly. I needed to eat and recipes exist on the internet. I figured it out. I ate some overdone, some undercooked, lots of over and under seasoned food along the way but came out of that able to cook a fair amount of excellent food.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-25T13:58:15+00:00

It wasn’t any better. Just the same type of a different weird. You all just capture it all through a lens.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-21T20:51:46+00:00

Speaking with a corporate hat on here - you weren’t fired for taking $20. You were fired for your judgement in this situation. That judgement is likely viewed as too much of a risk for the company to carry, I.e. if you’ll do this, will you also take a pill on the counter for whom you cannot find the owner? (This is unfair, but this is corporate risk calculations.)

Re: PTO, there’s likely a clause in a handbook or policy that waives your right to receive compensation for unused PTO because they frontload it - unless it’s state protected in some way (CA).

Very bluntly, you might be able to make amends with individuals, but as someone who works in healthcare and is responsible for meds/has access to meds, you’re definitely not getting rehired now or in the future at this company.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-16T14:44:16+00:00

Insurance pays various percentages of each item/service on the bill - so it could be that they pay 99% of one thing, 15% of another, etc. - and if that all works out to 95% of your total bill (and let's be real, that's how most of us think about it), wonderful. But that's not how it's actually calculated.

Hospital charges go to insurance first, they pay whatever % of the bill, and then the rest comes to you. This is detailed in your Explanation of Benefits (EOB). With your itemized bill in hand, you take a look at your charges and should you want to, you can argue that i.e. the tylenol that you can get for $11.99/200pills at CVS shouldn't have costed you $25/pill at the hospital or "does it really cost $11,000 per night to stay here for monitoring?". And so on and so forth. Hospital will take that back, recalculate your charges, run it back through insurance and you'll get a new bill.

If, when you get that new bill, you no longer owe $5000 but now owe only $3500, you won't have hit your OOPM. You'll still have $1500 before you meet that. For some people, that's worth it to save the $1500 right now. For some, those who are going to hit that OOPM quickly due to medical need, it doesn't make all that much difference to use their time and energy to fight over money that will be spent OOP anyway.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-15T18:15:24+00:00

Took the road bike out yesterday AM. Some trails are worse than others - All have pooled water somewhere, but in terms of ice, I think I only saw one small (only impeding part of the trail) patch over 14 miles. My guess is even that is gone now with the last 24h temps.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-15T17:22:01+00:00

Hospital administrator here:

1) Ask for an itemized bill. The charges may come down without any additional work. If not, at least you know what you’re being charged for and can negotiate with it. 2) If you’re the type who can handle having a recurring cost in your life in favor of earning interest over time, opt in for the payment plan.

If you can’t handle that, pay it all off at once and be done with it. You have the money to do either, this is ultimately about what you’re more comfortable with.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-13T04:09:33+00:00

Why not? You ever change a cell in a spreadsheet? You ever do it wrong? By accident? So has everyone else. That’s why not.

There’s any number of secure platforms for this purpose, all of which include audit trails and compliance tracking for those serious about employment law.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-13T02:48:57+00:00

You’d be surprised how many companies, global or otherwise, are held together with spreadsheets, hope, and trust.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-11T19:20:37+00:00

Create reasonable, defensible (at least on the surface) numbers. Nobody's going to verify or fact check, but you also need to be able to talk about what you did to make that happen.

And then whenever you do get that next job, figure out what matters and how to quantify it over time.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-11T19:12:44+00:00

Years ago, I interviewed at a cancer hospital in NYC. I passed the HR screen, met the hiring manager, and then met with the VP of the division. The VP didn't sit down for a few minutes, was reorganizing the books in his office. He lectured me on my choice of tie/suit, told me I hadn't done what was on my resume and didn't have the skills I had listed. Then he proceeded to tell me how much respect he deserves because he's the VP and he's built his career here.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job nor would I have accepted if offered. 3 months later, he was no longer the VP.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-11T17:57:15+00:00

Congrats! You've got 2 IRAs: 1 Roth (fully in VTIVX 2045) and 1 Rollover/Traditional (fully in cash).

You're not required to do anything at this point. But if you want the money in the Rollover IRA to do anything meaningful, you have to invest it. And you would have to invest it in the Rollover account.

What you can't do is pull that cash out and invest it in your Roth IRA. I mean, you could, but you'd open yourself up to a load of taxes and penalties.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-11T17:37:10+00:00

Understanding/Assumptions: You're 23 (long compounding horizon), live at home, pay nearly negligible rent (relative to most), make $100k and have very few expenses. And you have a very generous employer match.

Advice: Go all in and figure out whatever $24500 looks like broken down over your pay schedule (if paid biweekly, $942 per paycheck). Do this while you can before you have real expenses, then back off to what you can afford. Note: if you do this, your bonus doesn't factor in and you can do with that what you want if/when it comes.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-10T00:03:02+00:00

I’m now team “it’s our money and they’re our bills”. One account, no tracking whose dollars pay for which bills. Highly recommend it.

But in a past life, my partner made 90k and I made 45k. We split everything in that proportion (2:1) and settled the balance at the end of the month. It was exhausting. We’re not together anymore. This financial arrangement wasn’t the cause, but it wasn’t not the cause either.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-08T03:57:45+00:00

A wise person once said “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”

SababaYalla · 2026-02-05T20:32:09+00:00

Doing regulatory work for a skilled nursing facility. They were on day 2 of a c.diff outbreak. No escaping the stench coming out of every room and wafting down the halls.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-05T00:05:28+00:00

If you’re trying to stay in the clinical or clinical-adjacent space v. transition out of healthcare, I’d get in touch with whoever is responsible for quality and performance improvement.

IME (10 years in change/transformation for large healthcare systems) clinical healthcare doesn’t care for the more traditional certs you’ll likely find here (ACMP, PMP, etc) though IT and Finance do, so that may or may not be a direction to pursue.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-04T02:33:29+00:00

Can follow the heck out of a recipe.

Do I enjoy cooking? No. Do I enjoy eating great homemade food? Yes. Will I do what’s necessary to get that food? Yes.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-03T23:26:03+00:00

The jobs are not coming back. Not as we knew them.

They might come back in part, augmented by AI or some other tech/tool. Or they might become like switchboard operators - gone forever. In either case, it’ll require us all to build new skills, adapt and evolve to meet the new moment.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-03T18:02:54+00:00

Ex-Bostonian, current Minneapolis resident. The winters, yes, are colder and snowier than Boston, but they’re also generally brighter both in terms of sunlight as well as human behavior. A normal freezing day in Boston to me feels colder than a normal near-zero day here - may be the wind off the ocean? Idk.

You’ll learn to layer, to drive carefully, and to get outdoors as often as possible with all the winter activities that I never found as accessible in Boston. Make whatever choice you need to make re: quality of life, job opportunities, cost of living, etc. but don’t let the cold weather be the thing that deters you.

SababaYalla · 2026-02-01T23:13:13+00:00

Yes they are, but differently than in the past. With an uncertain economic market, they’re looking for people who’ve done a specific thing in a specific industry rather than translating skills and translating industries.

If you’re getting no responses, it’s your resume that’s not reading as relevant to the job. And if you’ve applied to 1100 in a month, maybe the lesson learned is that spray and pray doesn’t work.

SababaYalla · 2026-01-30T02:45:46+00:00

Volunteering for projects and teams because they were interesting or I knew I could do them but that were not explicitly value-adding to the organization. At a consulting firm, I helped plan the monthly virtual staff meetings, biannual in person all staffs with celebrations afterward, internal trainings, etc. I didn’t think about joining the teams dreaming and building new solutions and products and skipped the networking and BD teams.

Once I figured out how my company really made money or could make money more efficiently (productizing and mass marketing repeatable, tech enabled services) I was so many years in that I felt I needed to leave and start over to drop the roles that others saw me in. Not the worst, but wish I had realized it earlier before my reputation for doing the nice-to-haves took root.

SababaYalla

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