For Fractional and Internal HR Leaders

Better Managers, One Conversation at a Time

Use The Coaching Play instead – 6 AI-powered skills for feedback, expectations, 1:1s, and career talks. Built from 19 years of real HR casework, not an out-of-touch training deck!

Get the Coaching Play

Say the Thing Coach

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Expectation Setter

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One-on-One Builder

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Feedback Receiver

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Career Growth Conversation

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Conversation Practice Partner

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Say the Thing Coach ✳︎ Expectation Setter ✳︎ One-on-One Builder ✳︎ Feedback Receiver ✳︎ Career Growth Conversation ✳︎ Conversation Practice Partner ✳︎

Dear HR Pro,

You already know the pattern.

A manager brings you a problem in month six that started in month one. There's no documentation. There's no record of an expectation ever being set. There is a tremendous amount of feeling, though. “He just doesn't care.” “She's checked out.” “I've told him a hundred times.”

So you ask the only question that matters: what did you actually say, and when?

And there it is. The pause.

Here's the thing that rarely gets said out loud: most performance problems are not performance problems. They are conversation problems that were allowed to age. An expectation that lived only in the manager's head. Feedback that got softened into something nobody could act on. A 1:1 that quietly turned into a status meeting a year ago and never turned back.

By the time it reaches you, it's expensive, it's emotional, and your options have narrowed considerably.

Whether you're a fractional consultant coaching managers across several clients, an HRBP supporting more people than you can realistically sit with one at a time, or the person at a growing company who somehow became the HR function, the constraint is the same. You can't be in every 1:1. You can't be in the hallway when a manager decides to let it slide one more week.

I built The Coaching Play to be there instead.

Why I Built This

I've spent 19 years inside HR and talent functions at companies like Target, Cisco, AppDynamics, and DataRobot, and I now work as a fractional HR consultant helping companies build performance systems their managers will actually use, and use AI tools properly while they do it.

Somewhere in those 19 years, I stopped counting how many times I sat down with a manager in month six of a problem that could have been a two-minute conversation in month one.

I've watched good managers avoid a conversation until it became a case. I've watched expectations that were never written down turn into “he should have known.” I've watched career conversations get answered with “let's revisit next quarter” until the person stopped asking and started interviewing.

Here's what changed how I think about this work. Years ago at Cisco, I coached a manager through managing someone out of the company. A couple of weeks after his last day, that employee reached out and asked for my boss's email address. Not to complain. He wanted her to know how respected he had felt through the process.

He got let go, and he took the time to say thank you.

That only happens when the conversations along the way were clear, early, and human. Not softened. Not avoided. Not sprung on him at the end.

The Coaching Play is that methodology, the one I use with managers every week, built into skills you can hand someone on a Tuesday afternoon. It isn't theory, and it didn't come from a conference session. It came from the buildings.

Sara Rodgers
Performance Management Consultant

Here's How It Works

The Coaching Play is a set of six AI skills covering the everyday conversations that decide whether a manager is any good at the job. Feedback in the moment. Expectations written down where the employee can actually reach them. 1:1s that surface drift while it's still small enough to fix. Career talks that are honest rather than hopeful. And a practice room for the conversation they're dreading.

Each skill does one job and stays in its lane. All six share the same spine: facts instead of stories, clarity instead of comfort, written instead of remembered.

They're also opinionated on purpose, which is the part managers don't expect. Ask for help writing “he needs to take more ownership” into an expectation and the skill won't do it, because a camera can't film ownership. It'll push until there's something observable to actually hold someone to. Ask it to help document a case on someone who has never been told there's a problem and it will say no to that too.

None of this replaces you.

AI can hold structure and consistency across more managers than you can personally coach. It can't read a room, hear the wobble in someone's voice, or decide what's right for a specific person on a specific day. That's still you. The Coaching Play is built so your managers stop bringing you problems that never needed to become problems.

Here's What You Get

Six Claude skills, each built for a conversation your managers are already having.

Say the Thing Coach

Everyday feedback built on Fact, Impact, Ask. Turns “he's got a bad attitude” into “the report was two days late,” which is the version an employee can't argue with. Hands the manager their actual opening sentence, then makes them say it out loud once before they go.

One-on-One Builder

Turns a messy post-meeting brain dump into a clean note in about two minutes: what was discussed, what was agreed, by when. Character judgments never make it into the record, and it flatly refuses to help build a quiet file on someone who doesn't know anything is wrong.

Career Growth Conversation

Honest career talks: path and criteria, never promises a manager can't keep. Covers the awkward case where the path the person wants doesn't exist at your company, and the more awkward case where this conversation is only happening because someone started interviewing.

Expectations Setter

Standards a camera could catch. Role resets after a reorg or promotion, and job descriptions rewritten to work like contracts instead of recruiting ads. It also won't let a manager discipline someone for a rule that was never announced, which saves you a conversation you did not want to have.

Feedback Receiver

For managers on the receiving end, because how a manager takes feedback is the loudest culture lesson their team ever gets. Finds what's true before they draft the rebuttal. Handles upward feedback from their own reports, which is the highest-stakes version and the one most managers fumble.

Conversation Practice Partner

The training room. It plays the employee across six realistic reaction types, from the Over-Apologizer to the Lawyer to the one who starts crying, and it responds honestly to technique. Cave on the ask and it will happily let you. Then it debriefs with one fix, not a report card.

Plus 3 bonus Skills arriving through the end of the year at no additional cost!

Team Conflict Navigator
Delegation Coach
New Manager Ramp

Note: These skills are built for Claude, and that's the environment where they run best. If you're working in ChatGPT, we can still support you in adapting the entire process, so don't let that stop you from reaching out.

Buy the Performance Play

Imagine Your Next Case With This Already in Place

A manager comes to you and the problem is three weeks old instead of six months old, because they had the words to raise it the first time it happened.

The expectation is in writing, dated, and specific enough that nobody has to argue about what “good” meant.

The 1:1 notes exist. Not because you nagged anyone into a documentation habit, but because writing them takes two minutes now.

And when something does escalate, and some of it always will, you're starting from a real record of real conversations instead of a manager's memory and a lot of adjectives.

The hard cases don't vanish. But a lot of them never form, and the ones that do arrive in far better shape.

Coach Your Managers

How The Coaching Play Works

Step 1 – 10 Minutes

Get the Skills in Place

Install the six skills into your Claude workspace. No setup beyond that. They're ready before your next 1:1.

Step 2 – 2 Minutes

Describe What's Going On

In plain language, the way you'd tell a colleague. No prompt engineering, no special format. The skill asks the sharp questions from there.

Step 3 – as needed

Use the Right Skill at the Right Moment

Feedback to give, an expectation to set, a note to capture, a career talk to prepare, a conversation to rehearse. Each one already knows its job.

Step 4 – 5 Minutes

Hand It to Your Managers

Every skill adjusts when it recognizes an HR partner rather than a manager, so you can coach with it yourself or pass it directly to the managers you support.

This is for you if…

You're a fractional HR or ER consultant whose clients keep bringing you month-six problems that should have been month-one conversations
You're an HRBP supporting more managers than you can coach one at a time, and you'd like your advice to scale past your calendar
You're a talent leader trying to make management quality consistent instead of a coin flip between one team and the next
You're a founder or ops lead at a company with no HR function and a growing number of people situations
You're a manager who wants to be genuinely good at this and doesn't have anyone to ask
You believe clarity is kindness, and that vague feedback is the least kind thing in the building

This is not for you if you're looking for something that manages your people for you. The Coaching Play makes your managers better at conversations. It doesn't have the conversations. They're still the one in the room.

And the Best News Is – You Don’t Have to Do Any of This…

No building a manager training program from scratch
No sending anyone to a two-day workshop they'll have forgotten by Thursday
No giving the same coaching advice to eleven different managers in eleven separate meetings
No sitting in on conversations you shouldn't have to sit in on
No discovering in month six that nothing was ever written down
No watching a fixable clarity gap turn into a documented performance case