But the leadership team kept feeling the same thing in different parts of the building. Disengagement in one department. A respondent who stayed in role but stopped getting feedback from anyone. A complainant who left six months later and gave a polite but cold exit interview. A team that ran a little too quiet in meetings.

So they sent me the file.

The investigation wasn’t a disaster. It was thorough enough. The investigator had done the interviews. They’d reached findings. They’d written a report. On paper, it was fine.

That word though. Fine. It does a lot of work in our industry. And not always good work.

What “Fine” Was Actually Hiding

When I read through the report, here’s what I saw. The findings were technically defensible. The boxes had been checked. But three things were missing, and those three things changed everything.

The investigator never named the underlying pattern. They’d treated each allegation as a discrete event. Five separate things, evaluated five separate ways. What they’d missed was that the five events together told a different story than any one event alone.

The report didn’t acknowledge what employees had actually been pointing to. People came in talking about how the team felt, how decisions got made, who got listened to. The investigator translated all of that into the narrowest possible policy frame, which let them close the file without engaging the harder question.

And the recommendations were generic. Coaching. Training. Refresh policy. You know the ones. The kind of recommendations that sound responsible, get filed under “addressed,” and change exactly nothing.

Why “Almost Right” Costs More Than Wrong

When an investigation gets it flat-out wrong, organizations usually feel the pressure to revisit it. A bad finding brings on challenges. People push back. The case re-opens. Course corrects.

But an investigation that’s “fine” usually doesn’t trigger that. It closes, the file goes away, and the underlying issues keep moving through the organization on a slightly different timeline.

Six months later, you get the second complaint. A year later, you get the resignation. Two years later, you get the EEOC charge that points back to the case you thought you’d handled.

I’ve watched this happen often enough to call it a pattern, not bad luck.

The five practice tips below are the specific moves I use to catch the investigations that look fine on paper but don’t actually land.

Paid subscribers get full access to Deep Dives like this one, plus Casefiles, investigation tools, and training videos. It may also qualify as a professional development expense. Here’s a template if you want to ask your company to pay for it.

If you’re doing this work, or training people who do, this is the kind of content built for you.

Upgrade to Paid

Already a paid subscriber? Thank you. Every paid subscription is what makes it possible for me to keep showing up in your inbox with content worth your time.

Five Things I Do Before I Call a Case Closed

Read more

In Part 1, I shared the early experiences that shaped how I listen and approach this work.

In Part 2, I took you inside the Attorney General’s Office, where I learned how power and credibility operate in complex investigations.

And in Part 3, I talked about my time in plaintiff-side employment law, where I saw the gap between legal outcomes and real impact.

This is the part where things started to come together.

The Role That Made Me Pause

After everything I had experienced, the large-scale investigations, the client work, the burnout, and the questions about impact, I came across a job posting.

University of Washington Medicine. Workplace Complaint Investigator.

Something about it felt different. It was inside the organization, closer to the people, closer to the moment, and closer to the possibility of actually shifting something.

So I applied.

I was hired as UW Medicine’s first Workplace Complaint Investigator. UW Medicine isn’t small. Three hospitals, over 20 physician networks, faculty medicine, and Airlift Northwest. Every part of that system came with its own dynamics, its own pressures, its own culture, and its own version of “how things work here.” My role was to step into that complexity and make sense of it.

The Work Itself

This is where I fully stepped into investigations as I know them today. I handled cases involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, EEO concerns, and bias response matters. Real issues. Often high-stakes, often sensitive, always human.

This time, I wasn’t coming in from the outside. I was part of the system responding to it.

And that gave me something I hadn’t experienced before. The ability to see what happened, and what happened next. Not just, “What’s the finding?” But, “How does this impact the team? What does leadership do with this? What patterns are we missing?” I wasn’t just closing cases. I was seeing the ripple effects.

Bringing Consistency to the Work

Investigations weren’t new at UW Medicine when I arrived. The HR consultants had been handling them for a long time, and they brought real expertise to that work. What was new was having someone in a dedicated role focused specifically on how we approached them.

So a big part of my work wasn’t just investigating. It was streamlining. Looking at how cases were being handled across the system and finding ways to make our approach more consistent. Refining workflows. Helping define what gets investigated and how. Working closely with HR consultants to filter cases appropriately and align on process. Serving as a liaison to the Bias Response Team.

It was equal parts investigator, builder, and translator.

And this is where something clicked. Everything I had experienced before, SSA, FTC, AGO, plaintiff-side work, all showed up here. The empathy. The pattern recognition. The awareness of power dynamics. The understanding of what people actually need. It wasn’t separate anymore. It was integrated.

If I’m being honest, this was probably the best job I’ve ever had. Supportive leadership. A team that trusted my expertise. Work that felt meaningful. For the first time in a while, I wasn’t questioning whether I was making an impact. I could see it.

But Something Else Was Happening Too

Even in a role I loved, something was growing.

During my maternity leave, I took eight months, I found myself missing the work. Not just doing investigations, but thinking about them, reflecting on them, wanting to talk about them.

So I started writing. At first, just a blog website. Then LinkedIn. Sharing lessons, patterns, things I was learning in real time. No big plan. Just consistency.

And people started paying attention. Other investigators. HR professionals. Employee relations teams. People who cared about doing this work well, understanding the human side of investigations, and building processes that actually hold up. It grew. Slowly, then quickly.

What I realized was that I wasn’t the only one thinking about this work in this way.

Around that time, I also joined the Association of Workplace Investigators, and that expanded everything. Resources, conversations, connections with people who cared deeply about this work. It reinforced something I had been feeling. this work deserves real attention. It deserves people who take it seriously.

At the same time, my life outside of work was shifting again. My oldest daughter had started kindergarten, and we were navigating new challenges. IEPs. Advocacy. Figuring out what she needed to thrive. Suddenly, flexibility mattered in a different way.

So I started asking myself another question:

What would it look like to build something on my own?

Part 5: The Leap

In the final part of this series, I’ll share:

• What it looked like to step away from a role I loved to build my own practice.

• The uncertainty, the risk, and the reality of starting a business.

• And what it’s looked like to support organizations in a new way while building a community through this work.

My Two Cents

Working inside an organization taught me something I carry into every engagement today.

Investigations don’t exist in isolation. They sit inside systems. They reflect culture. They reveal patterns. And when done well, they don’t just answer what happened. They help organizations decide what to do next.

Once you’ve had the opportunity to work alongside a team and bring more consistency to how the work gets done, it changes how you see investigations. You realize the investigation is only part of the impact. What you build around it matters just as much.

So I’ll leave you with this: have you ever had a role where things finally clicked? What made it different?

Leave a comment or reply to this email, I read every one.

Leave a comment

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

The questions get a bit more pointed. The follow-ups get more careful. The faces around the table read your finding before you’ve finished walking through your reasoning. You know the shift. Most of us have walked into it more than once.

It happens when the finding doesn’t land where leadership expected it to.

Most investigators, in that moment, do one of two things. Some over-explain. They start defending the finding before anyone has pushed back, which makes the finding sound less certain than it actually is. Others soften. They hedge the language in real time, leaving wiggle room for the room to interpret the finding more flexibly than it was written.

I’m embarassed to admit that I’ve done both.

Both are mistakes. Both come from the same instinct, which is to manage the discomfort of the room. Neither serves the work.

The reality is, you’re not delivering bad news. You’re delivering accurate news.

The job at closeout is to walk through reasoning calmly. Not to convince. Not to soften. Not to apologize for the finding. To explain how you got there. What the evidence supports.

If the room pushes back, the pushback is information, not pressure. A factual challenge is worth hearing. Discomfort with the finding is something you can hold without absorbing. You can tell the difference once you’ve slowed down.

One sentence I now keep ready for closeouts when findings don’t match what was expected.

“I understand the finding may not be what was anticipated. Let me walk you through how I got here.”

That sentence does three things at once. It acknowledges the gap without flinching. It keeps you in control of the conversation. It refocuses the room on reasoning, not reaction.

Use it. Don’t rush past it. The reasoning is what carries the weight. The room either lands with you or doesn’t, but the work stays clean.

That’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

Want to go deeper? This week’s paid Deep Dive does that. I talk about where bias actually starts in high-stakes cases (earlier and more subtle than most of us think). The four specific things I do differently when I can feel external pressure. How to ground your reasoning in a way that holds up when your findings don’t land the way people expected. And the document I keep on every case that has saved more of my findings than any other tool I have.

The real strategies and frameworks I use are in there.

Upgrade to paid to read the full piece. Most professional development budgets cover this. Here’s the template I built if you want to ask your employer to cover it.

If you liked this article, do me a favor and share it with a colleague or repost it to your network.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

It never does.

It came at the end of an intake call. Casual. Almost offhand.

“We’ve had some concerns about them for a while.”

A pause.

“I mean… I think you’ll see pretty quickly what the issue is.”

If you’ve done this work long enough, you know that moment.

Nothing explicit was said. No one told me what to find. No one asked me to substantiate anything.

But the tone shifted.

And just like that, the investigation didn’t feel neutral anymore.

You haven’t opened the case file, but the pressure is on

This is one of the most defining tensions in this work, and one of the least openly discussed.

You walk into a case where leadership already has a narrative. HR has context they didn’t quite share neutrally. The business is watching closely. And whether anyone admits it or not… there’s a preferred outcome.

Not because people are unethical. Because they’re human.

Because they’ve worked with the respondent for years. Because the complainant has a reputation. Because the timing is inconvenient. Because there’s risk on the line.

And now you’ve got the heavy lift of carrying, not just the facts, but the integrity of the process itself.

The quiet question investigators carry

You won’t hear it said out loud in meetings.

But you’ll feel it.

Can I run this investigation the way it’s supposed to be run… and still be supported?

That’s the real pressure.

Not just getting to the right answer. Getting there in a way that holds up when everyone’s watching, doesn’t get quietly redirected, and doesn’t leave you exposed if the outcome isn’t what people expected.

Because here’s the part most organizations don’t say clearly. If this case goes sideways, into litigation, escalation, or reputational risk, your work is what gets dissected.

Not the offhand comments. Not the early assumptions. Not the pressure.

Your investigation. Your notes. Your report.

Below, I’m walking through where bias actually starts in these cases (earlier than most of us think), the four things I do differently when I can feel the pressure, and how to ground your reasoning in a way that holds up when your findings don’t land the way people expected.

This one’s for paid subscribers. Upgrade to keep reading. It may qualify as a professional development expense. Here’s a template if you want to ask your employer to cover it.

Upgrade to Paid

Already a paid subscriber? Thank you. Every paid subscription is what makes it possible for me to keep showing up in your inbox with content worth your time.

Where bias actually starts (and why it’s harder to spot than we think)

Read more

“I don’t think she was being excluded… she just made things harder.”

They meant it.

They weren’t trying to mislead me. They were describing exactly what they saw.

But I’d already seen the pattern.

The missed meetings. The side conversations. Decisions that kept happening without her in the room.

What they were calling “difficult” wasn’t disruption.

It was resistance.

You know this dynamic.

Someone starts getting left out of things.

Meetings. Emails. Conversations that used to include them.

They notice. They push back. They ask questions.

And suddenly… they’re “difficult.”

What they were calling “difficult” wasn’t disruption.

It was resistance. To the exclusion. To the side conversations. To the decisions being made without them.

Here’s what happens next, and this is the part we don’t name enough.

Their reactions become the story. Their credibility starts to get questioned.

And the behavior that triggered it?

Fades quietly into the background.

That’s the move. Right there.

The shift from evaluating conduct to evaluating response.

So when I hear “difficult” in an interview, I don’t challenge it.

I get specific.

“Can you walk me through a recent example of what that looked like?”

Then:

“What was happening right before that?”

That second question is everything.

Because now you’re not just hearing about the reaction. You’re hearing about what caused it.

Sometimes it is personality…

But sometimes “difficult” is the first sign that something underneath has already gone sideways.

Before you accept the label, pause long enough to ask:

What changed? What access did they lose? What were they pushing back on?

Because sometimes “difficult” has nothing to do with who someone is.

It has everything to do with what they stopped accepting quietly.

And that’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

This week’s Deep Dive goes deeper into exactly this. How to investigate exclusion when it’s presenting as a personality conflict, including the questions I ask and documents I request when the harm is a pattern rather than a single incident. It’s for paid subscribers.

Read: The Complaint Said Personality Conflict. The Root Was Exclusion.

Have you encountered this framing in a case? I’d love to hear how you handled it. Drop a comment or reply.

And if this resonated, forward it to someone who does this work.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

Upgrade to Paid

She told me she’d stopped being invited to the meeting where her own project was being discussed.

Not once. For three months.

When she raised it, she was told she and her colleague “just had a difficult dynamic.” When she raised it again, she was told the two of them needed to work on their communication. By the time the complaint reached me, HR had tried to mediate twice, and the issue at intake was settled. Two colleagues who didn’t get along, a history of friction, a working relationship that had simply broken down.

That framing matters more than most people realize.

Because once a case gets labeled “personality conflict,” the organization often stops asking better questions. The conflict gets treated as mutual. The deeper pattern gets harder to see.

I started the interviews expecting what the intake summary had prepared me to find.

What I found was something else.

One person had been left out of meetings where decisions were being made about her work. She had been excluded from email threads she needed in order to do her job. In the meetings she did attend, she was interrupted, talked over, or treated like an afterthought. And afterward, the real conversation often continued without her.

Over and over.

And each time she raised concern, the response followed the same familiar script. This sounds interpersonal, this sounds like miscommunication, this sounds like a relationship problem.

But exclusion is hard to pinpoint because it can be explained away in language like that.

It rarely shows up as a dramatic moment. It shows up as access withheld, information delayed, influence narrowed, visibility reduced. The person experiencing it often knows something is wrong long before they can prove it. And the people around them may not see it at all, because each individual act looks small, defensible, even forgettable.

That’s what makes these cases so easy to minimize.

And it’s also what makes them so important to investigate well.

Because when exclusion gets mislabeled as personality conflict, organizations miss more than the conduct itself. They miss the power dynamics underneath it. They miss the cumulative impact. They miss the way workplace harm can operate without raised voices, explicit insults, or a single obvious incident to point to.

What looks like “two people not getting along” can, on closer look, be one person losing access, credibility, and standing while the other keeps control of the room.

That is not a communication issue. That is a pattern.

And for investigators, that distinction matters.

Why “Personality Conflict” Is Such a Convenient Organizational Story

To be fair, it’s not always intentional. Sometimes people genuinely believe that’s what they’re seeing. Two strong personalities. A strained history. Some tension on both sides. A relationship that’s gone sideways.

Sometimes that assessment is partly true.

But in my experience, it’s almost never the full story.

“Personality conflict” is one of the most convenient stories an organization can adopt because it sounds neutral. It suggests shared responsibility without requiring anyone to look more closely at how the dynamic is actually playing out.

What isn’t considered is the question of power:

• Who controls access to information?

• Who gets included in decisions?

• Who get’s described as “difficult”?

• Who can afford for the relationship to fall apart, and who can’t?

Once you start asking those questions, many so-called personality conflicts start to look very different. They start to show a bigger picture.

And that’s often the turning point in an investigation like this one. You stop looking only at tone, communication style, or interpersonal friction, and start looking at access, power, participation, and patterns.

That’s where exclusion tends to live.

Why Exclusion Is So Easy to Miss

Exclusion rarely leaves behind the kind of evidence we’re trained to expect

Most times there’s no slur. No shouting match. No single email that says exactly what everyone knows was happening.

Instead, there’s:

• A calendar invite sent to everyone but one person.

• A decision made before the relevant employee is looped in.

• A project reassigned.

• A follow-up meeting that “must have slipped through the cracks.”

• A stakeholder relationship managed around, instead of through, the person who owns the work.

Each incident sounds small when viewed alone. Together, they tell a very different story.

That’s why these cases require you to look not just for what happened, but what kept happening.

The missing invite. The missing email. The missing opportunity to participate.

That kind of evidence doesn’t announce itself. You have to know to look for it.

Why We Can’t Afford to Narrow the Scope Too Early

The biggest risk in these cases isn’t that the evidence isn’t there.

It’s that the issue gets framed too early, too narrowly, and too comfortably.

Once “personality conflict” becomes the issue, the investigation starts asking the wrong questions.

Instead of exploring access, we focus on tone. Instead of patterns, we look at isolated incidents. Instead of direction, we assume mutual dysfunction.

And that changes everything.

It affects the documents requested. It affects the witnesses prioritized. It affects how the complainant is heard. And it often affects whether the harm gets named at all.

I’ve seen cases where the person raising concern becomes the problem, because they reacted to the exclusion in a way others found tense, emotional, or frustrated.

Of course they did.

People don’t usually respond calmly to being sidelined from their own work for months.

And when that reaction becomes more visible than the conduct that triggered it, the original issue gets buried.

“Personality conflict” is the framing that closes the most cases without ever examining what’s underneath them. If you’ve ever made a finding of interpersonal conflict and wondered whether you missed something, this is the framework for the next time you see it.

Paid subscribers get the full article and Exclusion Pattern Guide, along with every Deep Dive, Casefile, and tool in the archive. If your employer covers professional development, here’s a template to make the ask.

Read more

And in Part 2, I take you inside my time at the Attorney General’s Office, where I learned how power, credibility, and systems really operate.

You can catch up here before diving in.

Leaving the Attorney General’s Office felt like the right next step.

I had built a strong foundation. Learned how to investigate complex issues. Understood how systems worked at scale.

But I wanted something different.

Faster-paced. More hands-on. Closer to people.

So I made the move to a plaintiff-side employment law firm.

And just like that…

The work changed.

From corporations to people

At the AGO, the cases were big.

Industries. Markets. Systems.

At the firm?

It was people. Real people.

People navigating:

Discrimination. Harassment. Retaliation. Wage theft

And not in theory. In their day-to-day lives.

In the places they showed up to every morning.

And sometimes… the work felt closer than I expected

There was another layer to this experience that I didn’t fully anticipate.

I was working at a small firm. The only associate. And the only attorney of color.

And while I was advocating for clients navigating discrimination, harassment, and inequity…

There were moments where I was also navigating versions of that in my own workplace.

Not in the exact same ways.

But close enough that it stayed with me.

The moments that make you pause

It showed up in small comments that weren’t always treated as significant.

Being told I was “articulate.”

And thinking…

Why wouldn’t I be? I’m an attorney.

Being mistaken for the legal assistant. More than once.

Being asked if someone could touch my hair.

And having to say…uhm no.

Having to explain why.

And then still carrying the weight of how that moment shifted the dynamic.

And the part that was harder to name

Sometimes it wasn’t just the moment itself.

It was the response.

Or lack of one.

Hearing:

“Just push back.”

Or

“That’s just the way he is.”

Especially when it came from senior attorneys. People with power. People whose behavior wasn’t really being questioned, just managed around.

And in those moments, you start to realize:

Not everyone is navigating the same workplace.

Not everyone has the same margin for error. Or the same ability to “just push back.”

Holding both at the same time

So there I was, sitting across from clients, listening to their experiences.

Validating what they were navigating. Translating it into legal claims. Helping them pursue accountability.

And at the same time…

Processing my own experiences in real time.

It didn’t make me less objective.

If anything, it made me more aware.

More attuned to nuance. More thoughtful about impact. More careful about how I held space for people.

Because I understood, in a very real way:

How something can be dismissed as “small” and still carry weight.

Paid members get access to deep dives on real workplace investigation challenges, along with training videos, webinars, investigation tools, and professional resources. You’ll also join a growing community of investigators committed to elevating workplace investigations. It might even qualify as an educational expense at your company.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade to Paid

Already a paid subscriber? Thank you, genuinely. Every paid subscription is what makes it possible for me to keep showing up in your inbox with content worth your time.

What people actually wanted

When clients came to us, they were often carrying a lot.

Frustration. Confusion. Sometimes fear.

And over time, I started to notice something.

Yes, they wanted legal resolution. But more than that?

They wanted three things:

They wanted equity. To feel like they were being treated fairly, not differently.

They wanted transparency. To understand what was happening in their workplace and why.

And they wanted accountability. To know that what happened to them wouldn’t just be ignored or repeated.

That’s what they were really asking for.

But the system wasn’t built for that

Because in my role, most of the time, the outcome looked like this:

A settlement. Or a judgment.

And then?

Everyone moves on.

On paper, that’s resolution. But in reality?

Not always.

Because many of my clients didn’t want to leave. They wanted to stay. They wanted their workplace to be better.

To feel safe. To feel heard. To feel valued.

And I started to feel the gap between what the system could deliver…

…and what people actually needed.

The moments that stay with you

There are certain things you don’t forget.

Conversations where someone tells you what they experienced, and you can hear the weight of it.

Moments where you know something wasn’t right… even if proving it will be hard.

Cases where the legal strategy is sound, but still feels incomplete.

Because even when you “win”…

It doesn’t always feel like justice.

And then everything else was happening too

Then we hit 2020. The world felt heavy.

The conversations around race, equity, and accountability were louder than they had ever been.

And at the same time, my own life was shifting in a major way.

I had just given birth to my daughter. At 24 weeks.

She spent five months in the NICU. And during that time?

I was still working. Balancing calls. Cases. Hospital visits. Uncertainty.

Trying to hold everything together.

The quiet reality of burnout

Burnout doesn’t always show up the way you expect.

For me, it looked like:

Feeling disconnected from work I used to care deeply about. Questioning whether what I was doing was actually making a difference. Being exhausted, but still pushing forward

And underneath all of that, a question I couldn’t ignore anymore:

Is this the impact I thought I would be making?

The shift in perspective

I still loved employment law. I still cared deeply about the issues.

But I started to realize:

I didn’t just want to help people after harm had occurred. I wanted to be part of something that could shift what happened before it got there.

Something more proactive. More embedded. More connected to the workplace itself.

The question that changed everything

So I started asking myself:

What else could I do with this experience?

HR? Maybe.

Diversity work? Possibly.

(And as someone married to a DEI professional… we’ve had plenty of conversations about how that space has evolved, especially recently.)

But nothing quite clicked. Until I saw a job posting.

The posting that caught my attention

University of Washington Medicine.

Workplace Complaint Investigator.

And I remember thinking:

“Hm. This sounds… interesting.”

But more than that, it felt aligned.

Because it wasn’t just about legal outcomes. It was about understanding what happened inside the workplace.

And helping organizations respond in real time. From the inside.

Part 4: Where everything came together

In Part 4, I’ll take you inside my role at UW Medicine.

This is where everything started to connect:

• Investigating from within an organization

• Building systems and processes from the ground up

• Navigating complex, high-impact cases across hospitals and medical teams

And honestly?

Where I found the work I had been looking for all along.

My Two Cents

Working on the plaintiff side taught me something I carry into every investigation today:

Resolution doesn’t always equal repair.

You can close a case…

…and still leave people feeling unseen.

You can reach an outcome…

…and still miss the opportunity to create real change.

And that realization?

It changed how I think about this work.

Because investigations aren’t just about what happened. They’re about what happens next.

And once you start to see that gap, between what the system delivers… and what people actually need. You can’t unsee it.

It changes how you listen. What you prioritize. And what you push for in your work.

So I’ll leave you with this:

Have you ever had a moment where the “right” outcome didn’t feel like the right result? What did it shift for you?

Drop it in the comments, or reply to this email I read every one.

Leave a comment

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

The findings. The report. The communication to the parties.

What we don’t talk about much is what we leave behind.

Every investigation changes the workplace it touches. Not always in the ways we intend. Not always in the ways anyone acknowledges.

Sometimes the change is visible. A policy gets updated. A manager is moved. Something shifts in how the team operates.

But often the change is more subtle than that.

People saw who got believed. They watched how the process was handled. They noticed what got addressed, and what got quietly set aside.

And they drew conclusions.

Not about the specific finding. About whether this is a place where raising something is worth the cost.

That’s the part of investigations we rarely think about.

Not the outcome. The message it sent.

I’ve started asking myself a different question at the end of every investigation.

Not just:

did I reach the right finding?

But:

what did this process tell the people watching it about whether speaking up is safe here?

I don’t always love the answer.

But I’ve stopped avoiding the question.

Because an investigation doesn’t just resolve an issue. It teaches people what happens when they raise one.

That’s the part that lasts longer than any finding.

That’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

This week I published something for paid subscribers about what happens when your investigation surfaces something bigger than what you were asked to look at, and nobody asked you to find it. It’s one of the harder situations in this work, and it doesn’t get talked about enough.

Read: When the investigation reveals a systemic problem

If this landed, share it with someone who does this work.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

The one who asked too many questions. Who pointed things out when they didn’t quite make sense. Who asked why the process worked the way it did.
Who had thoughts (sometimes solicited, often not) about how it could be better.

Sometimes that was appreciated.

Other times, not so much.

I’ve made peace with that. Because I’ve come to understand that the instinct that made me “difficult” in some rooms is the same instinct that makes me good at this work.

I notice things. I ask questions. And when something is off, I can’t pretend I didn’t see it.

That quality is an asset in an investigation.

Until it isn’t.

The moment the scope starts to creep

That lesson shows up in investigations more than we talk about.

Because every once in a while, you start an investigation thinking you’re looking at a single complaint…

And you end up uncovering something much bigger.

You’re midway through the work. The allegations are defined. The scope is clear. You’re doing exactly what you were asked to do.

And then someone says something, almost in passing:

“This isn’t the first time.”

Or:

“That’s just how things work on that team.”

Or the one that always makes me pause:

“No one says anything because nothing changes anyway.”

It's not about the allegations. It's context. A pattern they've observed. A gap in leadership. A practice that's been in place for years. A culture issue no one has named out loud.

Something that was always there, you just happen to be the one in the room when it surfaces.

Sometimes you don’t even hear it. You see it. In the documents. A policy applied inconsistently. A dynamic that explains the specific complaint but points to something much broader. A picture that’s bigger than anyone told you to look for.

And now you’re not just investigating an incident.

You’re looking at a system.

And the question shifts.

It’s no longer:

“What happened here?”

But:

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

This is one of the most uncomfortable moments in investigative work. And almost nobody talks about what to do when you get there.

Below, I walk through exactly how I think about it, including the four questions I ask myself before I decide whether to raise something that wasn’t asked for, how I decide what goes in the report and what doesn’t, and what I’ve learned about the hardest part of all… when you raise something important and the organization does nothing with it.

This one is for paid subscribers. If you’ve been on the fence, this is the kind of content that makes the subscription worth it, and it may qualify as a professional development expense. Here’s a template to ask your employer to cover it.

Read more

You can read it here.

When I applied to the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, I’ll be honest…

I didn’t fully know what I was getting into.

It was my 3L year. I went through the Northwest Regional Job Fair. Submitted applications. Hoped for the best.

And somehow, I landed an interview for the Honors Program.

At the time, I didn’t realize what that meant.

300 law student applicants. 10 offers.

Three rounds of interviews. A lot of waiting. A lot of praying.

And then…an offer.

What I didn’t know yet? Where I’d end up.

The “blind date” that changed everything

The AGO Honors Program has this process that I can only describe as… professional speed dating.

You meet with different divisions. They meet you. And somewhere in that process, there’s a match.

And that’s how I ended up in Antitrust.

Antitrust.

I remember sitting there thinking…

“What is that?”
…and also, “Why me?”

Because here’s the thing…

Antitrust wasn’t a division that typically hired entry-level attorneys.

But there I was. Offer in hand. Questions in my head. And just enough awareness to know…

Say yes and figure it out later.

From “What is this?” to “Oh… this is big”

Very quickly, I realized this wasn’t small work.

This was multi-state investigations, national corporate players, complex industries I had never thought about before.

We were looking at things like, price fixing. Pharmaceutical practices…insulin, suboxone. Consumer goods…canned tuna. Agriculture and labor…H2A workers.

Even geoducks.

(Yes. Geoducks. And if you don’t know what that is… I’ll let you Google it.)

We reviewed major mergers too.

CVS. Aetna. Albertsons. Safeway. Kaiser. Group Health.

And suddenly, I was in rooms or on calls with federal regulators, state attorneys general offices, and corporate counsel.

As a baby lawyer.

What it felt like (the part we don’t always say out loud)

It was exciting.

And intimidating.

And, if I’m being honest…sometimes disorienting.

Because alongside learning the substance of the work, I was also learning something else.

How power operates in a room.

Who gets interrupted. Who gets deferred to. Whose questions get taken seriously the first time.

And where I fit into all of that.

Identity doesn’t stay at the door

I was a young, Black, female attorney.

And while I was absolutely qualified to be there.

There were still moments.

Moments where you feel like you have to prove it. Moments where you notice you’re being read differently. Moments where you’re navigating not just the work, but perception.

So I did what a lot of us do.

I got excellent at the work.

I learned the details. The patterns. The documents.

Because documents?

Documents don’t interrupt you. They don’t question your presence. They either support the story, or they don’t.

And over time, I became really good at spotting what mattered.

Paid members get access to deep dives on real workplace investigation challenges, along with training videos, webinars, investigation tools, and professional resources. You’ll also join a growing community of investigators committed to elevating workplace investigations. It might even qualify as an educational expense at your company.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade to Paid

Already a paid member? Thank you. Paid subscriptions are what allow me to keep doing this work, I don't take that lightly.

The work behind the work

If you’ve never worked on large-scale investigations, let me paint the picture.

Millions of pages of documents. Review platforms like Everlaw, Relativity and Concordance. Endless tagging, coding, analyzing.

Slow. Detailed. Methodical.

You learn patience. You learn pattern recognition. You learn how small details connect to much bigger stories.

And without realizing it, I was building a skill set I still rely on today.

Seeing what others might overlook. Tracking consistency over time. Grounding conclusions in evidence (not instinct).

But here’s what else I was learning

Outside of the formal work, I was also navigating my own experience inside the system.

Thinking about…

Mentorship. Who gets it, who doesn’t. Sponsorship. Who gets pulled into opportunities. Belonging. Who feels it naturally, and who has to build it.

So I got involved.

I chaired committees. Helped create onboarding processes. Tried to make the space better, not just for me, but for whoever came next.

Because I understood something early.

Workplaces don’t just shape the work. They shape the people doing it.

The moment it started to shift

As much as I valued the experience.

The scale. The exposure. The foundation.

I also started to feel a pull.

Because the work was important…

But it was also…

Slow. Document-heavy. Removed from the human impact in a way I hadn’t expected.

I wanted to be closer to the people. Closer to the impact. Closer to the moment where things actually shift.

Which is what eventually led me to employment law.

But before I got there…

There’s one more thing this experience gave me.

The foundation I still use today

That time at the AGO shaped how I approach investigations in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until much later.

It taught me:

That credibility isn’t about confidence, it’s about consistency. That evidence matters more than instinct. That power dynamics are always present, whether we acknowledge them or not. And that neutrality requires awareness, not just intention.

These aren’t things you learn from a checklist.

They come from being in the room.

Part 3: Where the work got personal

In Part 3, I’ll talk about my transition into plaintiff-side employment law.

This is where everything shifted.

From corporations… to people. From large-scale investigations… to individual stories. From legal outcomes… to human impact.

We’ll get into:

• What employees actually want (and why it’s not always what the system delivers)

• The disconnect between resolution and justice

• And the moment I started questioning whether I was making the kind of impact I thought I would

My Two Cents

I didn’t walk into the AGO knowing what antitrust was.

But I walked out understanding something much bigger.

How systems work. How power shows up. And how important it is to ground your work in something stronger than assumption.

Because in investigations…

What you see…what you question…and what you conclude…

Is never just about the facts.

It’s about how you interpret them. And the truth is, that interpretation doesn’t come from nowhere.

It’s shaped by the rooms you’ve been in. The moments you’ve had to prove yourself. The experiences that taught you how power actually works, not just how it’s supposed to.

So before we move into Part 3, I’ll leave you with this:

What’s something you’ve learned about power or credibility, not from training, but from experience?

Leave a comment or reply to this email, I read every one.

Leave a comment

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

The denial? The tone? How quickly they answer?

I used to think that was the right place to focus. I used to think the most revealing moment in a respondent interview was the denial.

How they denied. Whether they seemed surprised. Whether the words came too quickly… or not quickly enough.

I was watching the wrong thing.

The moment that actually shifts my credibility read isn’t the denial.

It’s what the respondent volunteers.

Specifically, whether they offer something I didn’t ask for.

Detail that has no strategic value. Context that doesn’t help their case. Sometimes, something that actually makes things a little messier.

That’s the moment I pay attention.

Here’s why.

A prepared account usually covers the questions the respondent anticipated. It’s consistent because it’s been thought through. It sounds credible because it’s been prepared.

But prepared accounts also have gaps. The things that weren’t anticipated. The details that didn’t seem important enough to rehearse. The context that only comes out when someone stops managing the narrative… and starts just telling you what happened.

So when a respondent volunteers something that doesn’t serve them, like an awkward admission. A detail that complicates their version of events. Something that makes the picture less clean.

That doesn’t read as weakness to me.

It often reads as true.

It doesn’t mean everything they say is credible. It doesn’t mean the allegation isn’t substantiated. But it does mean I’m paying attention to a different sign than most investigators are trained to watch.

Not the polished story…but the gaps.

That’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

I go deeper on how to actually weigh moments like this week’s Guide to Credibility Assessments, including my full framework for credibility assessments.

And if you liked this article, do me a favor and share it with a colleague or repost it to your network.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

Two people. Same situation. Completely different accounts.
Interviews done. Documents reviewed.

And then you hit that moment…

You know the one… where someone, maybe leadership, maybe legal, maybe just your own internal voice, asks:

“So… who do you believe?”

That’s usually when credibility gets reduced to something much smaller than it should be.

A checklist. A vibe. A quiet, internal lean toward one version over another.

And if we’re being honest? Sometimes it does feel like a vibe.

But here’s the problem. The moment credibility becomes a feeling instead of a framework, you’re no longer running an investigation. You’re running a narrative.

And narratives, especially the early ones, are notoriously hard to unwind.

The training version (and why it’s not enough)

Most credibility training will give you a version of this:

• Consistency

• Plausibility

• Corroboration

• Demeanor (maybe… cautiously)

And to be clear, that’s not wrong. In fact, it’s foundational. Even at AWI, the reminder is clear, credibility isn’t a vibe, it’s grounded in structured analysis.

But here’s where things start to break down in real life…

Those factors tell you what to look at. They don’t tell you how those factors interact, what to do when they conflict, or how to explain your reasoning when none of it feels clean.

Because real credibility assessments rarely look like a checklist. They look more like…

One person is consistent… but vague. Another is detailed… but shifts on a key point. A third has partial corroboration… but a clear incentive to minimize.

Welcome to the gray.

Credibility is not about picking a winner

This is the first mindset shift that changes everything.

Credibility assessments are not about deciding who’s “telling the truth.” They’re about assessing which version of events is better supported by the evidence available.

That might sound subtle. It’s not.

Because the moment your credibility assessment becomes “Who do I believe?” you open the door to bias, likeability, communication style, and confidence (which, by the way, is not a proxy for truth).

But when you shift to “What does the evidence support, and why?” you stay rooted in something defensible. And frankly, far more explainable when your findings get questioned later, which they will.

In this post, I’m sharing how to weigh conflicting credibility factors when they don’t point in the same direction, what to do when multiple people are credible, how to handle cases where you simply can’t determine credibility, and the exact way to explain your reasoning so your findings hold up under scrutiny.

This one’s for paid subscribers. Upgrade to keep reading.

Upgrade to Paid

Already a paid subscriber? Thank you. Every paid subscription is what makes it possible for me to keep showing up in your inbox with content worth your time.

Read more

Paid members get access to deep dives on real workplace investigation challenges, along with training videos, webinars, investigation tools, and professional resources. You’ll also join a growing community of investigators committed to elevating workplace investigations. It might even qualify as an educational expense at your company.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade to Paid

Hi. I’m Chiedza Nziramasanga, and I’m the voice behind The Investigative Edge.

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ve probably noticed something.

I spend a lot of time talking about the work. How to conduct investigations, how to build trust, how to navigate complexity. What to do when the facts are messy and the people are messier.

But not as much time talking about how I got here.

And lately, I’ve been thinking… that part matters too.

Because the way we investigate…the way we listen, assess credibility, hold space, make decisions. It doesn’t come from nowhere.

It comes from who we’ve been, what we’ve seen, and what we’ve carried.

So this is the start of something new:

A series I’m calling Behind the Investigative Edge.

I think I’ve always been this person

The one who notices things..

I’ve always been the one who asks:

“Wait… what’s really going on here?”

The one who tries to understand both sides, even when it would be easier not to.

I didn’t have language for it back then. But looking back now, I can see it clearly:

I’ve always had this instinct to spot issues… and try to make them better. To spot a broken process and mentally start redesigning it.

And just as important?

I’ve always had the ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes. The person who walks into a space, clocks who desn’t feel seen or heard, and start thinking about how to fix that.

Not perfectly. Not without effort.

But enough to pause. Enough to ask better questions. Enough to care about what something felt like, not just what happened.

The first time I felt it… the other side of the desk

Before law school, before investigations, before any of this…

I worked at the Social Security Administration.

I was young. Fresh out of college. Making what felt like real money at the time, about $40K.

Enough for my own $600 apartment. Enough to feel like I had made it… just a little.

And my job? Helping people.

Processing SSN applications. Explaining benefits. Entering appeals for SSI and disability cases.

It was important work.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the process.

It was the people.

There’s this poem, “The Other Side of the Desk,” we had posted in the office.

And it captures something I felt every single day.

What it’s like to sit across from a system, when you’re the one who needs something
when you don’t have power, when you don’t fully understand the rules, when you just need someone to see you.

I knew that feeling.

And sitting on the other side of that desk? I understood, in a very real way, how much tone, patience, and empathy mattered.

That experience never left me.

It still shows up every time I interview someone.

Sociology, stories, and the beginning of curiosity

I majored in sociology at the University of Washington.

And honestly?

It all started with a high school class where we watched Hoop Dreams.

That was it.

But I became fascinated with one idea.

How two people can start in similar places… and end up in completely different outcomes.

Because of systems. Because of choices. Because of opportunity, or lack of it.

That question never really left me either.

It just evolved.

Today, it shows up as:

Why did this situation escalate?

How did these dynamics form?

What context are we missing?

That’s investigation work at its core.

Law school… and a quiet realization

I went to law school for the reason everyone says…

“I wanted to help people.”

Cliché? Yes.

Still true? Also yes.

Now look, some of my law school friends were honest. They wanted Big Law, a six-figure starting salary, and to bill their lives away.

No judgment.

But for the more benevolent among us? We were trying to save the world.

…One underpaid public interest job at a time.

I ended up at the University of Illinois College of Law, not because of some grand plan, but because it was a top school… and the people were nice.

And listen, if you’ve spent time in both the Midwest and Seattle? You know what I mean.

I figured if I was going to be far from home, I at least wanted to be somewhere that felt human.

Good call, past me (since it’s also where I met my husband).

The internship that quietly changed everything

My 1L summer, I externed with the Federal Trade Commission.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as “investigative work.”

But looking back?

That’s exactly what it was.

I worked on a consumer protection case involving telemarketing fraud. People, many of them non-native English speakers, were being targeted. Sold “luxury” goods that were anything but.

I spent that summer talking to individuals who had been defrauded, gathering their stories, drafting formal statements.

And something clicked for me.

Not just that I wanted to help people. But how I wanted to help.

By listening carefully. By documenting clearly. By taking someone’s experience and translating it into something that could be acted on.

That’s investigation work.

I just didn’t know it yet.

What I was learning (without realizing it)

Looking back now, that season taught me things I still use every day.

How to ask questions without leading. How to build trust quickly. How to sit with someone’s frustration, confusion, or vulnerability. How to separate emotion from evidence, without dismissing either.

It was the foundation.

Quiet. But critical.

The throughline I can finally see

At the time, none of this felt like a straight path.

It felt like…a job that paid the bills… major I found interesting…an internship that seemed like a good opportunity.

But now?

I can see the throughline.

Empathy. Curiosity. A desire to make systems work better for people inside them.

And maybe most fitting of all.

My name.

Chiedza means light. Nziramasanga means crossroads.

And that’s the work.

Helping organizations see clearly, right at the moment where things could go in very different directions.

Part 2 is where things get real

Because the next chapter?

That’s where I step into the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.

Big investigations. High stakes. And my first real experience navigating this work as a young Black woman in spaces that weren’t built with me in mind.

I’ll talk about:

• Antitrust (and why I had no idea what it was at first)

• Multi-state investigations

• What it feels like to be the “only” in the room

• And the early seeds of how I approach power, credibility, and bias today

My Two Cents

I didn’t set out to become a workplace investigator.

But I’ve always been someone who notices what’s not being said. Tries to understand both sides. And cares deeply about what fairness actually looks like in practice.

This work didn’t start with a job title.

It started with perspective.

And if you’re in this field, chances are… yours did too. We all bring something into this work. Experiences that shaped how we listen. Moments that changed how we see fairness. Environments that taught us what not to ignore.

And whether you’ve named it or not, it’s already showing up in how you investigate.

So I’m curious,

What’s something from your own story that’s shaped the way you approach this work today?

Drop it in the comments, or reply to this email I read every one.

Leave a comment

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

I had a case a while back that I’m still thinking about.

A senior leader alleged that a colleague made an explicit comment.

He said he made a comment, but not that comment.

She was consistent. Filed her complaint promptly. Had a reasonable explanation for how she responded in the moment.

He was consistent too. Clear on what he said and why. Nothing in his history that raised flags.

I interviewed both of them and walked away believing both of them.

That’s a disorienting place to be.

And it’s more common than we admit.

Here’s what I’ve learned about that moment…

Stop trying to decide who’s more believable. Start asking what existed before anyone knew they’d need a story.

Before the complaint. Before the response. Before anyone knew they’d need to explain themselves.

An email sent the next day. A conversation or message to a colleague. A timestamp that helps solidify a version of events.

That kind of evidence carries a different weight.

It wasn’t created for you. It wasn’t shaped by the process. It just… exists.

And more often than not? That’s what moves the needle.

Not who feels more credible. But what holds up when no one was trying to be.

And in that case, itt was an email, sent the day after the interaction, before any formal complaint was filed, that was entirely consistent with one account and inconsistent with the other.

…And video footage that directly contradicted a separate, repeated claim one party had made.

And when you don’t have that? That’s your sign to zoom out.

Look at consistency over time. Look at whether either account shifts when challenged. Look at what doesn’t align with the known facts (timelines, access, patterns of behavior).

Not to “catch” someone. But to understand which version is better supported when everything is laid side by side.

Because in these cases, you’re rarely finding certainty. You’re finding what’s more probable, and being able to explain why.

If you’ve ever sat in that moment, believing both people and unsure what to do next, in this week’s Investigative Edge Deep Dive, What if I’m Wrong?, I walk through the exact questions I use to get unstuck and move from “this feels unclear” to a finding I can actually stand behind.

Because this is the part of the work that doesn’t show up in training.

But it’s where the real decisions get made.

That’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

And if you liked this article, do me a favor and share it with a colleague or repost it to your network.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

Paid members get access to deep dives on real workplace investigation challenges, along with training videos, webinars, investigation tools, and professional resources. You’ll also join a growing community of investigators committed to elevating workplace investigations. It might even qualify as an educational expense at your company.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

There’s a moment that happens for me at the end of almost every investigation.

I’ve completed the interviews. I’ve reviewed the documents. I’ve built the timeline, worked through the evidence, done the credibility assessment.

And now I’m sitting with a finding.

And a quiet voice shows up:

What if I’m wrong?

Not wrong about the facts.

Wrong about the weight I gave them.

Wrong about what I decided the pattern meant.

Wrong about the conclusion I’m about to put in writing… the one that will shape real people’s careers. Real lives.

I used to think that feeling meant something was off.

That I’d missed a step. That I wasn’t ready.

Now I know better.

That feeling doesn’t mean something went wrong.

It usually means you understand what’s at stake.

The part nobody teaches

Most of what we learn in this field focuses on the process:

How to conduct intake. How to interview. How to assess credibility. How to write findings.

But almost no one talks about what comes after all of that.

When the process is complete…

And certainty still doesn’t show up.

Here’s what I’ve seen, over and over again:

Uncertainty isn’t necessarily the problem…it’s what you do with it.

Not all uncertainty is the same

Before you can do anything with that feeling, you need to understand what kind of uncertainty you’re dealing with.

Because they’re not all equal.

There’s uncertainty with the evidence.

The evidence is incomplete. A key witness won’t engage. Documents don’t exist. You can’t fully reconstruct what happened.

That’s a scope issue. You may need more evidence.

Then there’s uncertainty with the analysis.

The evidence is there. But the conclusion requires judgment.

You’re weighing competing accounts. Interpreting patterns. Assessing credibility across people who all sound believable in their own way.

This is where most of us live.

And this is the part no checklist can solve. It is the process.

The trap nobody talks about

We tend to think uncertainty leads people to rush conclusions.

Sometimes it does.

But just as often?

It does the opposite. It keeps you circling.

One more document review. One more pass through your notes. One more attempt to find the piece of evidence that makes everything click.

It feels like diligence. Sometimes it’s avoidance.

I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, looping back through a file, not because something was missing… but because I wasn’t ready to commit.

Looking for certainty in a situation that was only ever going to offer probability.

And here’s what I’ve learned the hard way…

More evidence doesn’t always resolve uncertainty. Sometimes it just gives you more to question.

At some point, the question changes.

It stops being:

“Do I have enough?”

And becomes:

“Do I trust my analysis?”

Only one of those moves you forward.

This is the part of the work most of us never get real guidance on. Not the framework for conducting the investigation, but the framework for trusting your conclusions once it’s done.

Below, I walk through the five questions I ask myself before I’ll commit a finding to writing, including how I handle competing evidence, what I do when I’m uncertain about credibility specifically, and how I document my reasoning so it holds up long after the report is submitted.

This is what defensible decision-making actually looks like from the inside.

Read more

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

There’s a moment in almost every senior leader investigation where you realize that the outcome of your work won’t just affect individuals.

It might affect strategy. Workplace dynamics. Reputation. Board confidence. Careers that have been built over decades.

And suddenly, the question in the room isn’t just:

“What happened?”

It’s:

“What are we going to do with this?”

That’s when you feel it.

The weight.

Power Changes the Investigation, Whether You Acknowledge It or Not

We like to say that investigations are neutral. Objective. Process-driven.

And they should be.

But senior leader cases introduce dynamics that don’t exist in the same way elsewhere.

Visibility is higher. Stakes are higher. Pressure is quieter, but heavier.

No one may say “be careful.”

But you’ll feel it.

In how quickly emails get answered. In who joins update calls. In the subtle shift from curiosity to concern.

And if you’re not grounded in your process, this is where things start to slide.

A slightly softened question. A delayed follow-up. A conclusion that’s technically supported, but cautiously worded.

It’s rarely intentional. But it happens.

The Risk Isn’t Bias. It’s Deference.

We talk a lot about bias in investigations.

But in senior leader cases, what I see more often is something else.

Deference.

Not because the investigator lacks skill. Because they’re human.

When someone holds authority, influence, or long-standing credibility, it’s harder to challenge inconsistencies. Harder to sit in silence after a vague answer. Harder to push for clarity when the response feels polished.

Senior leaders are often highly articulate, strategically communicative, and skilled at framing narratives.

That doesn’t make them deceptive.

But it does mean your job requires a different level of discipline. A structured assessment grounded in consistency and corroboration. The same credibility framework you’d apply to anyone. Applied with consistency, regardless of who’s sitting across from you.

Below, I walk through how I navigate each of these challenges in practice. Managing organizational pressure, interviewing senior leaders, working with reluctant witnesses, handling conflicts when the senior leader is your client contact, and writing findings that hold up under scrutiny.

Read more

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

I didn’t take my usual holiday break last year.

While most people were logging off, spending time with family, and resetting, I was picking up new cases. High-stakes ones. C-suite leaders, government officials, allegations involving discrimination, retaliation, power dynamics that don’t sit neatly on paper.

Complex timelines. Multiple witnesses. Layers of history.

By the time January hit, I wasn’t starting fresh. I was carrying cases forward… and adding more.

And for a while, I told myself what most of us do.

This is just the job.

Then life layered on top of it.

Our full-time nanny of three years, someone we trusted, someone our kids loved, had to leave suddenly due to health concerns. No notice. No transition plan. Just… gone.

We scrambled.

We found a preschool for our youngest. Navigated the logistics. Helped our kiddos adjust while managing everything else already in motion.

And then came cold and flu season.

It’s felt like our whole house has been sick for two months straight. I held out longer than everyone else, until right before a trip this past weekend, my husband and I had planned to Vancouver, BC.

A trip that was supposed to be a reset.

I did get rest. Just not in the way I’d hoped.

And somewhere in all of that, I hit a wall.

Not a dramatic one.

No missed deadlines. No dropped cases. No visible cracks from the outside.

But internally?

I could feel it.

The Part We Don’t Talk About Enough

In this work, burnout doesn’t always look like disengagement.

Sometimes it looks like over-functioning.

You’re still showing up. Still delivering. Still asking the right questions, documenting carefully, maintaining neutrality.

But it takes more out of you than it used to.

Decisions feel heavier. Interviews feel longer. The emotional weight of what people share with you lingers a little more than it should.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the steady presence in a room full of people who are anything but steady. You hold it together so that the process holds together. And you do it well. But no one sees the cost of that…because you’ve gotten very good at not showing it.

And there’s another layer, one we don’t name enough…

Moral distress.

The tension between what you know is right in an investigation… and the realities you’re operating within.

Tight timelines. Pressure from leadership. Incomplete information. Outcomes you don’t control.

It’s the feeling of carrying responsibility without full authority.

And here’s where it connects to burnout, because these two things feed each other. Burnout lowers your capacity to absorb the friction. Moral distress creates friction constantly. Together, they build up.

But they’re not the same thing. And it’s worth naming the difference, because it’s easy to conflate them in a way that’s unfair to investigators.

These aren’t the thoughts of someone who’s too tired to do the job well. They’re the thoughts of someone who’s doing it well enough to see exactly where the system is falling short:

This scope was defined before anyone understood the full picture, and I’m not sure it’s serving the people it’s supposed to protect.

I’ve been given a timeline that works for the organization’s calendar. Not for the integrity of this process.

I can see a pattern here that no one asked me to investigate. And I have to decide what to do with that.

I’m being asked to brief leadership in a way that feels more like managing optics than reporting findings.

The right outcome is clear to me. What I don’t control is whether anyone acts on it.

That last one is worth sitting with. Moral distress often lives in the gap between what an investigation surfaces and what an organization chooses to do with it. You did your job well. The findings are sound. And then you watch the outcome get shaped by factors that have nothing to do with what you documented.

It’s not that you’re too tired to see straight. It’s that you see exactly what’s wrong. That internal friction, between your professional judgment and the constraints you're working within, is one of the most underacknowledged sources of depletion in this field.

And holding that, case after case, with no outlet and no resolution, is exactly what makes it depleting.

Why This Work Is Uniquely Heavy

If you’ve been in this field for a while, you already know this, but it’s worth saying out loud:

This isn’t just process work.

We sit with people on some of their hardest days.

We hear things that don’t get said anywhere else.

We navigate conflict, harm, power, identity, and risk all at once.

And we’re expected to do it with clarity, neutrality, and composure.

Even when the systems around us aren’t always set up to support that.

What makes it more complicated is that many of us were drawn to this work precisely because we care. About fairness. About getting it right. About the people on the other side of the table.

That care doesn’t go away when you’re burned out. But it starts to feel less accessible. And that gap, between who you know yourself to be in this work and who you’re showing up as right now, can be its own source of distress.

I’ve written before about how “good enough” processes quietly erode trust over time. But there’s another side to that coin…

“Good enough” support for investigators quietly erodes us.

How Burnout Shows Up (Before It’s Obvious)

Burnout doesn’t usually announce itself.

It creeps in.

Here are some of the early signals I’ve learned to pay attention to, both in myself and in others:

• You start second-guessing decisions you normally feel confident about

• You feel behind… even when you’re not

• You reread notes multiple times and still feel unsure

• You avoid starting certain interviews because they feel heavier than usual

• You feel less patient in conversations, even when you’re trying not to show it

• You carry cases with you long after you’ve closed your laptop

• You start resenting the very parts of the work you used to find meaningful

• You find yourself going through the motions, technically correct, but not fully present

And one that I think matters most…

You stop feeling the same level of connection to the purpose behind the work.

Not because you don’t care.

Because you’re tired.

🔓 This article is free for everyone this week. Normally, everything below the fold is for paid subscribers, but this one felt important enough to share widely.

Paid subscribers get access to Deep Dives like this every week, plus Casefiles with anonymized walkthrough investigations, training videos, webinars, and investigation tools and templates. If this kind of content is useful to you, consider upgrading, it may also qualify as a professional development expense.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

What I’m Doing About It (Q2 Reset)

I’m not writing this from the other side of burnout.

(This is also why this article is going out on Tuesday instead of Monday. I gave myself a small break from writing this week, and I want to acknowledge that, because it feels relevant. Ironically, this space, putting thoughts into words, processing out loud with this community, is actually one of the ways I debrief. It doesn’t add to the weight. It helps me set it down. So even when the timing is off, I keep showing up here. Because it helps.)

And so here I am. Writing this from the middle of recognizing it, and choosing to respond differently.

Here’s what I’m intentionally shifting this quarter:

1. Redefining “Capacity”

For a long time, I measured capacity by time.

How many cases can I fit? How quickly can I move?

Now, I’m measuring it differently.

How much complexity am I holding at once? How much emotional load comes with these cases?

Because not all cases are equal. A single C-suite investigation can carry the weight of three standard ones. And treating your capacity like a simple scheduling problem is a fast path to running yourself down without realizing it.

Before you accept your next case, do a quick load inventory. Not just “do I have calendar space?” but, what am I already carrying emotionally? What complexity is already live? Is there space in my bandwidth to hold this well?

2. Building in Space Between Cases

Not just time off.

Transition space.

Time to close one case fully before stepping into the next. To review notes. Reset mentally. Let go of what I’ve been holding.

Because without that space, everything starts to blur, and that’s when quality slips. Not because you’re incompetent. Because you’re human. And you’re carrying fragments of other people’s situations in ways that accumulate faster than we acknowledge.

Build a “case close” ritual. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. A final file review, a brief written reflection on what you’d do differently, a deliberate note to yourself that this one is done. The ritual signals to your nervous system that you can put it down.

3. Leaning on Structure (So I’m Not Rebuilding Every Time)

One of the biggest contributors to burnout?

Reinventing the wheel.

Every intake. Every interview outline. Every report.

I’ve seen this over and over again, experienced investigators who know exactly what they’re doing, but still feel overwhelmed because they’re building everything from scratch each time. Templates aren’t a shortcut. They’re a cognitive load management tool.

Structure reduces decision fatigue. It creates consistency. And honestly? It gives you something to lean on when your energy isn’t at 100% which, in this season of the work, is more often than I’d like to admit.

Pick one part of your process that you rebuild every time and template it this week. Start small. One intake email. One opening statement. One credibility framework. See how much lighter it feels.

If you’re looking for a full toolkit with ready made resources and templates, I’ve got you covered.

The Investigative Edge Toolkit

4. Paying Attention to My Own Signals

This is the part that’s easy to ignore.

I’m getting more intentional about checking in with myself.

Am I thinking clearly? Am I rushing decisions I would normally take time on? Am I avoiding parts of the work?

Not to judge it.

Just to notice it.

Because awareness is what lets you adjust before something breaks. The investigators I’ve seen struggle most aren’t the ones who burned out, it’s the ones who burned out and didn’t realize it until they’d already made decisions they couldn’t take back.

Once a week, ask yourself three questions: What am I avoiding right now? What decision am I most uncertain about? What do I need to feel more grounded in this work? You don’t have to have answers. Just get in the habit of asking.

5. Letting Rest Look Different

That Vancouver trip didn’t go as planned.

But it still mattered.

Rest doesn’t always look like you imagined it would. Sometimes it’s quieter. Less productive. Less “perfect.” And still necessary.

I’m trying to stop measuring rest by whether I came back feeling transformed. Sometimes the best rest does is take you from depleted to functional. And functional, right now, is enough.

Why This Matters

I want to name something broader here, because this isn’t just personal.

The quality of workplace investigations depends on the quality of the investigators conducting them. And investigator quality is directly tied to capacity, clarity, and the emotional resources available in the room.

When investigators are burned out, the risks are real.

Credibility assessments become less nuanced. Witness interviews get rushed. Reports start to sound like they’re going through the motions. Findings that should be carefully weighed get resolved the quickest way rather than the right way.

None of that is intentional. All of it is predictable.

Organizations that care about getting investigations right need to care about the people doing that work. That means realistic caseloads. It means meaningful debrief structures. It means not treating investigator burnout as a personal failing and instead recognizing it as an organizational risk.

And for those of us who are independent or internal, it means advocating for ourselves, even when no one else is asking the question.

For Investigators Reading This

If any part of this feels familiar, here’s what I want you to take with you:

Burnout in this work doesn’t mean you’re not capable.

It usually means you’ve been carrying too much, for too long, without enough support or structure.

And moral distress? That tension you feel when things don’t sit right? That’s not a weakness. That’s your professional integrity doing its job.

I was reminded of this recently in a consultation group I’m part of, a small circle of solo and small-firm investigators, women at similar stages of life and career. Last week, as we went around and shared where we were, it became clear that so many of us were in the exact same moment. Different cases, different circumstances, but the same weight.

I left that conversation feeling both seen and held. Sometimes just naming where you are, out loud, to people who get itis enough.

My Two Cents

You can have the best process in the world. But if the person leading it is running on empty, it won’t hold. This quarter, I’m not aiming to do more, I’m aiming to do this work in a way that I can keep doing it well. And that starts with paying attention to the cost.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment, reply to this email, or just let me know, are you feeling this too? What are you doing about it? This community is full of people navigating the same terrain, and sometimes the most useful thing is just knowing you're not alone in it.

Leave a comment

If you liked this article, do me a favor and share it with a colleague. Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

I’m sharing it because I think the most useful thing I can offer isn’t an example of perfect practice. It’s an example of honest practice. And honest practice includes sitting with the cases that still make you think.

When Dissent Becomes Disengagement

The Setup

A newly appointed department head, I’ll call him Dr. Warren, came into a unit with years of accumulated dysfunction. Staffing had been cut significantly over time. Leadership had turned over repeatedly. Several long-tenured employees had operated with wide autonomy under prior leadership and had built informal systems and relationships that sat well outside the formal structure.

Within months of Dr. Warren’s arrival, a pattern emerged. Staff entered the shared workspace through an alternate route to avoid passing his office. Greetings were minimal or absent for months. His proposals were met with consistent pushback in meetings, often without substantive rationale. He was left off communication threads that fell within his purview. Planning conversations happened around him rather than with him.

A staff grievance eventually circulated, including several of his direct reports. It named Dr. Warren directly and attributed deteriorating conditions to his leadership, despite most of those conditions predating his arrival by years.

Dr. Warren filed a formal complaint alleging racial discrimination and workplace bullying. He named multiple respondents.

Below I walk through the full analysis, the finding, an honest reflection on what I would do differently. I also provide a detailed breakdown of how I actually draft a bullying analysis, including a before and after of the same finding, written two different ways.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you can upgrade below. It may also qualify as a professional development expense. Here’s a template to ask your boss.

Read more

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

There’s a moment in almost every investigation when you start to feel it.

You’re halfway through the interviews. You’ve reviewed some of the documents. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet voice says:

I think I know what happened.

That moment isn’t unusual. It’s almost inevitable.

Patterns start forming. Certain accounts line up. One explanation begins to feel more plausible than the others. Experienced investigators get good at noticing those signals early.

The risk isn’t noticing the pattern.

The risk is letting the conclusion settle before the analysis is finished.

I’ve reviewed investigations where the evidence was solid, and yet the final analysis felt… thin.

Not because the investigator didn’t understand the case. Often it’s the opposite. They understood it so well that they skipped a step without realizing it.

They moved straight from knowing to stating.

The report said what happened.

But it didn’t fully show how the investigator got there.

And that’s where findings can start to unravel. Not because they’re wrong, but because the reasoning isn’t visible enough for someone else to follow.

Here’s a small practice I’ve found helpful when writing findings:

When you reach a conclusion, pause and ask yourself:

“What evidence would someone need to see to agree with this?”

Not what convinced you.

What would convince someone who wasn’t in the room for the interviews… who didn’t hear the pauses… who didn’t see the dynamics unfold in real time.

That extra step often turns a quick conclusion into a stronger analysis.

Because a defensible finding doesn’t just say what happened.

It walks the reader there.

If you want to dive deeper into this part of the process, I break down how to build clear, defensible analysis, including the most common places investigators unintentionally skip steps, in my full guide (you’ll also get my evidence analysis tools and credibility factor cheat sheet): The Ultimate Guide to Findings & Analysis.

That’s your Sharp Edge for the week.

And if you liked this article, do me a favor and share it with a colleague or repost it to your network.

Together we’re building a community of investigators committed to elevating workplace culture.

Share

This newsletter is brought to you by Transformative Workplace Investigations.

Here’s a template you can use if you’d like to ask your company to cover your subscription.

Upgrade Subscription

The interviews are done.

The documents are reviewed. The timeline is built. You know what happened (or at least, you know what everyone said happened). And now you’re sitting with all of it, and the question changes.

It’s not ‘what happened’ anymore.

It’s ‘what do I do with all of this?’

This is the part nobody warns you about. Intake has a structure. Interviews have a rhythm. But analysis? Analysis is where you’re on your own, where the work becomes less about gathering and more about thinking. And thinking, it turns out, is the hardest part to get right.

I’ve reviewed hundreds of investigation files (including my own). Some were airtight. Others made me uneasy in ways I couldn’t immediately explain.

The difference was rarely the evidence.

It was whether the thinking showed up on the page. Whether I could follow the reasoning from what was alleged, to what was found, to why it mattered. Whether the finding felt like the natural conclusion of the analysis, or whether it just appeared, without explanation, at the end.

That gap, between what an investigator knows and what they can show, is usually where findings get challenged, neutrality gets questioned, and outcomes fail the people they were supposed to serve.

This guide is about closing that gap.

What Analysis Actually Is

Analysis often gets misunderstood as the part where you decide who you believe.

Thinking of it that way is…well…wrong.

What analysis actually is, is a bridge between the evidence and our conclusions.

It asks:

What facts are actually established? Where does the evidence align, and where does it conflict? Which explanations are plausible, and which are supported? How does this measure up against the standard of proof?

What analysis is not:

• A summary of what everyone said

• A restatement of the allegations

• A credibility assessment without explanation

• The place to land conclusions you reached emotionally

Good analysis makes your thinking visible. Not just to whoever reviews your work, but to yourself. Writing it out is often what reveals the gaps.

Where Analysis Usually Breaks Down

Holes in analysis aren’t always obvious. Some of the most problematic findings I’ve reviewed were long, detailed, and confidently written. The issue wasn’t the length. It was what the analysis was leaving out…

Jumping from facts to conclusions.

This is one of the most common things I see. The report lists facts. Then, suddenly, there’s a finding. What’s missing is the reasoning in between. How did those facts lead here instead of somewhere else? Why does this evidence support this conclusion instead of another?

If the reasoning feels obvious to you, that’s usually a sign you need to explain it more, not less. Obvious reasoning is only obvious to the person who did the reasoning.

Credibility assessments that can’t be explained.

Saying someone was credible isn’t analysis. Saying why they were credible (what specific factors supported that assessment, what you weighed and how) is.

When credibility assessments aren’t grounded in factors someone else can evaluate, they look subjective even when they aren’t. And when findings get challenged, “I believed them” is not a position you can defend.

Below, I break down my process for building defensible analysis, handling cases where the evidence is genuinely inconclusive, and writing findings that hold up under scrutiny, plus my evidence analysis tools and credibility assessment cheat sheet that I use in every investigation.

Read more