Why Going Fractional Made Me Realize Career Growth Needs an Overhaul

And how the research and science support it

I want to acknowledge that writing this blog post comes from a place of profound privilege; many people do not have the ability to curate a career of their choosing and societal/capitalistic constraints often push us to places of necessity vs. interest. My hope is that everyone finds fulfillment in one way or another in their career and lives.

When people ask me if I like being fractional, there’s only one answer: an unwavering, unequivocal yes. The past eighteen months have undoubtedly been the most fulfilling, transformative, deeply connected, and meaningful work of my career and life. What’s most interesting about this answer, perhaps, is the context that came before it.

My path into consulting work was nothing like what I hear from most folks in the HR space, where emotional and physical burnout from increasing demands and decreasing support drives people to overhaul their work and lifestyle entirely. For me, the story was different. Growing medical challenges, combined with changing business needs, prompted me to explore part-time work, which eventually became the fractional client model I have today. I was feeling secure, safe, happy, and fulfilled when I made this leap with leadership who fully supported me, a product I believed in, employees with whom mutual respect was abundant, and peers with whom I was consistently proud to work with.

All of this is what makes the dramatic improvement I’ve experienced over the past year so puzzling. So, as with most things in my life, I started analyzing precisely why this happened. If I hadn’t been operating from a deficit before, what really prompted my life to shift so dramatically? I wondered if I was just meant to be a consultant, or if the work I was doing was so fundamentally different, or if I had become a very different person from the one I had been before.

The truth, however, was more nuanced. As I began dissecting the past year and a half, I became resolved around three interconnected, significant reasons that seemed to explain everything.

Intentionality: Building my own decision-making framework based on core values, guiding principles, and impact areas meant every choice aligned with what actually mattered to me rather than what an employer expected.

Diversification: Creating a portfolio of complementary professional activities accelerated my learning exponentially compared to single-role employment, exposing me to different industries, business models, and ways of thinking that no single job could provide.

Compound Effect: Consciously integrating my lived experiences with chronic illness, LGBTQ+ identity, and mental health journey transformed what I’d always seen as personal struggles into my most valuable professional differentiators.

What fascinated me most was discovering that my experience wasn’t unique. When I started researching these three areas, I found academic studies validating precisely what I had lived through. Researchers across psychology, organizational behavior, and career development have documented that people who approach their careers with intentional frameworks, diversified experiences, and integrated identities report significantly higher fulfillment, engagement, and performance.

This could have been a lovely moment of personal revelation to ponder and move on, but I couldn’t leave it at that. As an HR executive who’s spent years helping companies design career architecture, I’ve come to see something profound in our approach to professional development. What we call career growth is fundamentally misaligned with what actually creates fulfillment and lasting success, and I realized we need to reimagine how we build careers.

Building My Professional Operating System

On June 15, 2024, I formed my LLC and jumped straight into fractional work, with two clients lined up as I transitioned from full-time to part-time at Cypress. Even as I moved fast, I kept thinking about how to make the most of this opportunity, since I had no idea how long it would last. My initial timeline was vague through summer, possibly until the end of 2024, but even that felt impossibly far away. I approach every opportunity with intense curiosity and a drive to extract the most from it, because I genuinely fear the regret of leaving potential unrealized.

This drive prompted me to begin interviewing and having informal conversations with people already doing fractional and consulting work. I spoke with anyone who would give me their time and energy, taking copious notes from each conversation. These discussions became the foundation for understanding what worked, what didn’t, and what I needed to consider as I built my own approach.

One of the best pieces of advice I received was one I’ve heard many times and even given myself: you can’t be everything to everyone, so choose who you want to be. In short, there are a lot of ways to make money doing HR consulting, but how do you want to do it? That insight stuck with me and became the catalyst for developing a systematic approach to this new path. Rather than simply reacting to opportunities as they arose, I decided to create a framework to help me make intentional decisions and maximize the potential of this career shift. This framework became what I now call my Impact Map.

Core Values: What I Stand For and How I Show Up

Authenticity has always meant being true to myself in every professional interaction, never compromising who I am to meet others’ expectations.

Ambition for me means pursuing meaningful growth that creates genuine value, not just busy work or vanity metrics that look good on paper.

Trust is built through relationships of reliability, transparency, and mutual respect, which I’ve learned is the foundation for everything else that matters professionally.

Inclusivity means creating spaces where people can contribute their whole selves without code-switching or hiding parts of their identity, and accessibility ensures my work serves people with diverse needs, abilities, and circumstances.

Guiding Principles: How I Make Decisions

Assume positive intent while learning quickly from what doesn’t work, because starting from a place of trust creates better outcomes even when I need to course correct.

Fail fast, and embrace calculated risks as learning opportunities rather than threats to avoid, since the greatest risk is often not taking any risks at all.

Stay curious and approach every situation with a genuine interest in learning something new, because curiosity keeps me growing and prevents stagnation.

Never be the smartest person in the room because I want to surround myself with people who challenge and elevate my thinking rather than validate what I already know.

Don’t settle for mediocrity when I know there’s potential for something better, because accepting “good enough” isn’t good enough.

Maintain an abundance mindset and believe there’s always enough opportunity, resources, and success to go around, which allows me to be generous and collaborative.

Give more than you take in every relationship and interaction, understanding that generosity compounds in ways that purely transactional approaches never can.

Take risks when the potential for learning and growth outweighs the comfort of staying exactly where I am.

Bet on yourself, especially when you have conviction about your ideas and capabilities, even if others don’t immediately see the vision.

Impact Areas: Where I Focus My Professional Energy

HR Technology: anything that touches the HR realm, from ATS to compensation software and beyond. I’ve always had a deep interest in HR technology and am the first to raise my hand to beta-test products from my vendors.

LGBTQIA+ Health, Advocacy & Rights: as a member of the queer community, I want to do more than support local artists and give my money to non-profit and community efforts.

Women’s/AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) Health, Wellness & Fitness: my personal journey with chronic illness and health have been something I’ve longed to weave into my professional life.

Season Priorities: What Matters Most in This Life Phase

Create space to explore interests: make time to seek out things that I’m passionate about, even without predetermined outcomes.

Better work/life integration & flex schedule: create an integrated work-life flow with natural boundaries rather than rigid separation.

Health & wellness: prioritize the behaviors, activities, and goals that support my long-term health and management of my chronic illnesses.

Establishing this framework nearly a year ago has aligned my time and energy in ways I never experienced before. As of November 2024, I became the part-time Head of People for B/SPOKE Studios, a Boston-based boutique fitness brand focused on wellness and movement. In May of this year, I joined ChartHop, an HR technology platform, as their VP of People & Talent. Last summer, I began dedicating my time and money more formally to angel investing and mentorship for queer founders and companies. The framework has fundamentally changed how I allocate my time and energy. Instead of saying yes to everything or defaulting to traditional professional development, I now have the clarity and flexibility to pursue diverse learning opportunities, from industry events and conversations with people across different industries to advisory roles and side projects, because I can see how each contributes to my overall growth strategy. This approach doesn’t mean every opportunity perfectly aligns with all my values and principles. Still, it gives me the tools to evaluate trade-offs consciously and understand precisely why I’m choosing something, for how long, and what I’m gaining from it.

What I discovered through researching my experience is that my framework aligns perfectly with self-determination theory (SDT), a well-established psychological theory developed by Deci and Ryan that identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three fundamental drivers of human motivation and well-being¹. Clear values create autonomy in decision-making. Consistent principles build competence through reliable evaluation criteria. Focused impact areas generate relatedness by connecting work to purpose and community.

Extensive research has validated SDT’s workplace applications, consistently showing that when these three basic psychological needs are satisfied, people experience higher levels of work engagement, job performance, and satisfaction, while showing lower levels of burnout and turnover². Studies have found that autonomous forms of motivation and basic psychological need satisfaction are key mechanisms driving positive workplace outcomes, including creativity, knowledge sharing, and proactive behaviors³.

The more my choices align with this framework, the higher my fulfillment becomes. What started as an intuitive approach to career design has become a practical operating system grounded in decades of psychological research, one that creates sustainable career satisfaction from the inside out rather than depending on external structures to provide meaning and direction.

The Power of Professional Diversification

When I started doing fractional work and consulting, I gave myself the freedom to design my schedule and professional development in very different ways. Even at Cypress, where I had incredible support, I still felt beholden to optimizing my time for company priorities. Now I have autonomy over my schedule in ways I never experienced before.

The hours I spend connecting with people within and outside my industry, reading about workforce trends and emerging business models, and attending live and virtual events have increased exponentially. This has dramatically increased my satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment.

More importantly, this diversification gives me access to similar problems across contexts and a broader exposure to different ways of thinking. When I encounter a challenge now, I can process it more effectively and design better frameworks because I’m drawing from a much broader set of experiences. I’ve seen how startups handle scaling challenges, how established companies manage transformation, and how growth across industries can look very similar. This pattern recognition accelerates my time-to-solution and improves the quality of my output.

This creates a competitive advantage that’s difficult to replicate. My skills become less tied to any single company’s approach and more connected to universal business patterns. While specialists develop deep expertise within one framework, I’m building capabilities that transfer across industries and economic cycles. This adaptability protects against career risk.

The broader workforce validates this approach. Full-time independent workers increased from 13.6 million in 2020 to 27.7 million in 2024⁴, and fractional executive roles grew 57% since 2020⁵. As organizational psychologist Adam Grant notes, employers increasingly value agility over ability⁶, the capacity to adapt across contexts has become more valuable than deep expertise in one domain.

The Compound Effect

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of my fractional journey has been the conscious integration of my personal experiences into my professional value proposition. For years, I compartmentalized my life, keeping my personal experiences separate from my professional identity. The framework I built explicitly connected my impact areas to the communities and causes I care deeply about through my lived experience, and this shift ignited a profound sense of authenticity and purpose I hadn’t known was possible.

Eighteen years of managing chronic illness have given me a kind of technical fluency in benefits design that most HR leaders don’t typically develop through traditional career paths. I’ve navigated insurance denials as a patient, learning how specific plan language translates into actual coverage decisions. I’ve had conversations with medical providers about how they interpret different plan structures because I needed to understand why my care was or wasn’t being covered. When I’m designing benefits now, I’m asking questions that come directly from that experience, questions about utilization patterns across different demographics, about denial rates by specific procedure codes, about coverage gaps that won’t become visible until someone actually needs care. My lived experience created a form of expertise that’s genuinely difficult to acquire any other way, and it extends beyond benefits design into how I think about inclusive workplace practices. Remote and hybrid work options, flexible schedules that accommodate medical appointments, creating space for people to step back when their bodies demand it, these are accessibility fundamentals I advocate for because I’ve lived the difference they make.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I bring a deeper understanding of benefits design and workplace inclusion than most HR professionals gain from training programs. I know what questions to ask about gender-affirming care coverage, what the requirements are for different procedures, how approvals work, and what the timelines look like. I understand how same-sex couples are defined under infertility treatment programs and where coverage gaps typically exist. Understanding what trans and gender non-conforming employees need to feel safe at work is critical. This means ensuring preferred names appear in every system employees interact with, removing deadnames from anywhere managers or colleagues could access them, and supporting employees through transitions with communication approaches that align with their own journey and timeline. Employee safety has always been one of my top priorities, and my lived experience has helped me establish guardrails that many organizations don’t even know they’re missing.

My own mental health journey has fundamentally shaped how I design hiring processes and team communication. I keep candidates in constant communication throughout interviews and provide specific feedback to reduce anxiety. I prepare people in advance with detailed information about who they’re meeting, what each interview will cover, and what questions to expect. I document everything because not everyone processes information well in real-time, and having things written down means people can contribute more effectively, regardless of how they work best. I create opportunities for people to participate asynchronously because not everyone is comfortable with public speaking or performs well in group settings. These practices make the work environment better for everyone, and they came from my own experience of navigating workplaces that weren’t designed with these considerations in mind.

Research consistently shows that employees who can integrate their identities at work rather than compartmentalize them report higher engagement, creativity, and job satisfaction. What I’ve discovered through my own experience is that this integration creates genuine organizational value. My lived experiences have made me technically more capable at solving specific problems that traditional HR expertise often misses entirely, and this has become one of the most significant sources of differentiation in my work.

Moving Forward

What started as a practical response to changing health needs and business circumstances became the most fulfilling period of my professional life. The integration of my lived experiences into my professional work has created a kind of authenticity and capability that I couldn’t have developed any other way. Going fractional forced me to divest from the career architecture models I had built and arguably clung to for over a decade, and that’s what created the real transformation. I think the traditional career development models we’ve built, the ones that ask people to compartmentalize who they are from what they do, are fundamentally misaligned with what actually creates fulfillment and lasting success. I’m convinced this shift is possible for more people than we realize, but it requires moving away from career frameworks built around what companies provide and instead creating ones that stand alone, that speak to who we are and what we want our lasting impact to be.

References:

1. Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.
2. Van den Broeck, A., Ferris, D. L., Chang, C. H., & Rosen, C. C. (2016). A review of self-determination theory’s basic psychological needs at work. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1195–1229.
3. McAnally, K., & Hagger, M. S. (2024). Self-determination theory and workplace outcomes: A conceptual review and future research directions. Behavioral Sciences, 14(6), 428.
4. MBO Partners. (2024). State of Independence in America Report. https://www.mbopartners.com/state-of-independence/
5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Referenced in multiple industry publications, 2024). Temporary business management and fractional executive roles data.
6. Grant, A. (2025, January). Interview with Fortune. “Top psychologist Adam Grant talks career pivots, the importance of staying agile, and his top workplace predictions for 2025.”