Erin Cihal Consulting

Erin Cihal Consulting I help leaders build stronger, healthier organizations.

With over 20 years of experience in HR strategy, operations, and team leadership, I bring clarity in complex times through a hands-on, people-centered approach.

I ask a lot of questions and have a lot of ideas.Sometimes that’s exhausting for the people I work with, but curiosity h...
04/15/2026

I ask a lot of questions and have a lot of ideas.
Sometimes that’s exhausting for the people I work with, but curiosity hasn’t killed this cat yet.
I go down rabbit holes.
I dig.
I connect things that don’t obviously go together.
That’s just how my brain works.
I’m not someone who’s ok with “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
I also know reworking every process every week is not exactly a sustainable business model 😉
But curiosity is usually what helps me notice when something feels harder than it should.
It helps me notice when the way something is supposed to work and the way it’s really working are two totally different things.
It makes me ask whether the issue is really performance, or if nobody was ever clear about what was expected in the first place.
Sometimes the rabbit hole isn’t a distraction.

It’s the thing that helps you get past the obvious answer and into the real one.

HR work has a confidentiality problem - and I mean that in the best way possible.The nature of this work means that some...
04/10/2026

HR work has a confidentiality problem - and I mean that in the best way possible.
The nature of this work means that some of the most important things you do, you can't talk about. Investigations. Employee situations. Legal matters. The hard calls that took weeks to work through. None of it gets a LinkedIn post.

And that's exactly how it should be.

But here's what I want leaders to understand: there is a real cost to the people doing that work. The HR professional or manager who handled something carefully, legally, and with integrity - they don't get to explain themselves. They don't get credit. They just carry it and keep going.

That's not a complaint. It's something I think gets underestimated when organizations are evaluating their HR function.

The visible stuff - the handbook, the job postings, the onboarding checklist - that's easy to point to. The invisible stuff - the situation managed quietly, the liability avoided, the person treated with dignity even when it was complicated - that's where a lot of the real value lives.
If you lead an organization, pay attention to what your HR person is not saying. That silence is often doing a lot of work.

The best HR professionals I know carry things carefully. They hold things that can't be shared. And they show up the next day anyway.

03/13/2026

If anything I've shared this week resonated, this is for you.

Every Friday I send a short newsletter for leaders navigating the people side of running a small to mid-sized organization.

One question worth sitting with.

Two things leaders often underestimate.

One concrete step to take before Monday.

It's called People, Honestly.

Not long. Not a sales pitch. Just a few minutes of honest thinking about the part of your organization that tends to get squeezed out by everything else that needs attention.

Link is in the comments. 😊

The same assumptions tend to surface in almost every organization I've worked with.None of them are bad assumptions. The...
03/12/2026

The same assumptions tend to surface in almost every organization I've worked with.
None of them are bad assumptions. They just tend to create problems that are harder to solve later.

Swipe through and let me know which one hits closest to home.

I've been inside enough small to mid-sized organizations to see the pattern clearly.The ones that handle transitions, ha...
03/11/2026

I've been inside enough small to mid-sized organizations to see the pattern clearly.
The ones that handle transitions, hard moments, and unexpected losses best aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated programs.

They're the ones that made quiet, unglamorous investments in their people infrastructure during the calm periods.
They wrote things down before they had to.
They clarified who owns what before a conflict made it urgent.
They built onboarding that worked even when the person who usually handled it wasn't available.

None of it looks impressive from the outside.
But when something hard happens, and something hard always happens, those organizations move through it without losing people or momentum.

The ones that struggle most aren't less caring or less capable.
They just didn't build anything to hold them during the in-between moments.

When working in an organization with multiple locations, I saw that many processes were different for each location. Whi...
03/10/2026

When working in an organization with multiple locations, I saw that many processes were different for each location. While that was okay for some things, it wasn't for offboarding.

Same organization, completely different experiences depending on where you worked and who your manager was.
That's what happens when processes live in people's heads instead of somewhere the whole organization can use them.

Three things I'd build first if you're starting from scratch. Swipe through.

Stop waiting for things to slow down before you build people systems.Things don't slow down. And the moments that expose...
03/09/2026

Stop waiting for things to slow down before you build people systems.

Things don't slow down. And the moments that expose the gaps don't wait for a convenient window.
What actually works is building before you feel the urgency.

Here's what I hear most often about why it keeps getting pushed:
There's never a good time.
Things are mostly working.
It feels like a project for later.

But later usually arrives as an unexpected resignation, a conflict that escalates, or a transition that reveals how much one person was holding.

Building people systems isn't a project you get to when things calm down. It's the thing that makes the hard moments easier to move through when they arrive.

What's one process at your organization that only works because a specific person makes it work?

I didn't learn what good leadership looks like from a book.I learned it from watching a manager who was never the center...
03/06/2026

I didn't learn what good leadership looks like from a book.
I learned it from watching a manager who was never the center of anything — and yet everything ran better when she was around. She redirected credit, absorbed friction, and made people feel capable. I didn't have a word for it then. I just knew I wanted to lead like that someday.
What I eventually understood: she wasn't leading at people. She was leading for them.
The best leaders aren't the loudest in the room. They're the ones who make everyone else feel heard. And that changes everything — for your team, your culture, and your results.
Swipe to see what that actually looks like in practice. →

11/24/2025

One underperformer.

Five teammates picking up the slack.

Zero conversations about it.

This is how trust erodes in teams that care but don’t have clear standards.

You don’t need to be harsh to set the bar.

You need to be clear.

✅ Define what “good” looks like

✅ Give direct, timely feedback

✅ Connect performance to the mission

Clarity isn’t cold.

It’s how you help people grow and protect the ones already carrying too much.

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Omaha, NE

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