Welcome to Friday 411, issue #141. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll help fulfill one of the greatest longings of the human heart.
1 Insight
One of the most important leadership skills you can develop is providing the people you lead with a sense of home.
Eleven years ago, we lost our home. Those of you who have experienced a loss like this know it’s not something you ever get over.
A jolting ejection into homelessness catapulted me (Dorothy) on a desperate search to restore my sense of home again.
After attempting to resettle ourselves with two moves in two years, I still felt lost, my foundation irreparably shaken. What is home? Why can’t I get it back? I began to research everything I could on human nature’s drive toward home, why the desire is so deep, and how to find home again when it’s been stripped from you. What I discovered blew me away for two reasons:
- Though some of us are natural settlers and others more nomadic, we all share a need for home. In fact, one common experience that unites as all, no matter where we are on the planet, is the sensation of spending our lifetimes wandering the earth, searching for home.
- One of the most important leadership skills you can develop is providing the people you lead with a sense of home. Consider a great leader you had the privilege to serve under. I bet you’d say you felt “at home with” or “welcomed by” that leader.
Creating a Sense of Home
A sense of home can feel like an overwhelming bite to serve. But when you slice it up into five pieces, it becomes easier to chew. Here are five feelings you can cultivate to help your team feel at home:
- A Sense of Safety
Home is a refuge where people can drop their defenses.
People should feel both physically and emotionally safe under your leadership. Physical safety requires you establishing protocols that limit potential for harm. Emotional safety involves you nurturing a culture where people know they will be treated with dignity and respect by everyone they work with.
Start Here: In your next one-on-one, ask, “Is there anything about our work environment that makes you uncomfortable or uneasy?” Then listen without defending.
- A Sense of Trust
Home is where people are known, accepted, and appreciated.
As a leader, you are responsible to build three types of trust among your team:
- Relational Trust
- Integrity Trust
- Skill Trust
We do a deep dive into these three types of trust here.
Start Here: Pick one team member this week to build relational trust. Learn something new about their life outside of work.
- A Sense of Growth
Home is where people feel seen and encouraged.
People deliver better results when their potential is recognized, and they believe that someone is invested in helping them reach it. Drawing out potential includes providing:
- A clear understanding of what you need from them and why.
- Autonomy over how they do the work.
- Challenges that push them forward.
- Freedom to dream about a better future.
Start Here: Identify one person on your team whose potential you haven’t fully acknowledged. Tell them one strength you see in them this week.
- A Sense of Collaboration
Home is where people know how to do life together.
Good collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. It requires rules that govern how your team makes decisions and how team members treat each other, along with clear role-definition so no one has to guess about their expected contributions.
Start Here: If your team doesn’t have agreed-upon rules of engagement for how you work together, schedule a conversation to create them. Even five or six shared commitments can transform the way your team “plays” together. Learn how to create Team Operating Principles here.
- A Sense of Shared Purpose
Home is where people feel part of something bigger than themselves.
Without a shared purpose connecting them, your team will feel untethered. Safety, trust, growth, and collaboration only hold together when they’re anchored to a common vision that everyone understands and believes in.
Start Here: Ask yourself if every person on your team could articulate why your team exists and where you’re headed? If the answer is no, that’s your next conversation.
Where (or Who) is Home?
Not long after we moved to Tennessee, I sat chatting with my mom on the sofa while Garland set up our projector to watch a movie. I shared with her about losing my sense of home and all the research I had been doing to learn how to restore it.
“You don’t need to read all those books,” she told me with a laugh. “There’s your answer right there.”
I looked up to see where she was pointing. In front of us, Garland had managed to turn on the projector. He was now bent over, fiddling with the speakers. The Home Screen had popped up on our wall in front of him.
Illuminated perfectly centered across both his denim-clad butt cheeks glowed the word, HOME.
In all my searching for home, this is one of the most significant lessons I learned. Home is not a place. Home is people. You, Leader, are an important person in the lives of those you lead. You can help fill that shared human longing for home with the relationships you build and connections you facilitate through safety, trust, growth, collaboration, and purpose.
1 Action
Study the five ways that you can spark a sense of home. Select the one you need to work on the most. Implement the “Start Here” suggestion.
Bonus Action: Still questioning whether or not a sense of home is important to people? In my quest to understand home, I also studied how this desire reveals itself in artistic expression. I began compiling a Spotify playlist with songs that voice a hunger for home. So far, it’s 7 hours and 46 minutes long. Use this link to access my ever-growing Spotify “Home” playlist.
Bonus Bonus Action: Even if you’re successful in establishing a sense of home for others, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve achieved it for yourself. That is why we created the Unleashed Community—so leaders could have a place to feel safe, accepted, seen, encouraged, understood, and supported. See below for how to join!