Your Peak of the Week
Hey Reader,
Welcome back to Peak of the Week — where we talk about what it really takes to perform at your best. As a person. As a leader. And increasingly, as an organization.
This Week →
- What belonging actually is — and what we get wrong about it
- The slow, invisible thing that happens when it erodes
- Why the most important person on your team might already be gone
Read Time 4-5 minutes
Remember Who You Were On Day One?
The night before a new job, most people can't sleep.
The anticipation, the electricity of a fresh start…new people, new purpose, a version of yourself that hasn't been worn down yet by the politics, the dynamics, or the accumulated weight of a hundred small disappointing moments.
Day one, people bring everything.
Every idea, every ounce of creative energy, every "what if we tried…" and "I wonder if we could…" and "back at my last place we did this thing that worked really well…"
They are fully there. Fully present. Fully in.
And then something starts to happen.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the everything becomes something. And then the something becomes just enough.
And by the time most leaders notice, that person who walked in on day one with everything ready to give has been gone for a long time.
What Belonging Actually Is
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately…
Because belonging gets misunderstood. Wildly.
It gets flattened into vibes. Into whether people “feel included.” Into the team offsites or the values poster or the open-door policy that everyone knows doesn’t really mean “safe”.
And those things can be fine. None of them are the thing.
Belonging, at its core, is about three questions every single person on your team answers every day, whether they realize it or not.
Does what I do here actually matter?
Do I know who I’m really working with, and do they know me?
Can I say what I actually see without it costing me something?
That’s it. Three questions. And your people are collecting data on all three of them constantly…. in every meeting, every interaction, every moment where leadership does or doesn’t do what it says it will do.
When all three answers are yes, something extraordinary happens. People stop protecting themselves and start giving themselves. Fully. The way they did on day one.
When even one of the three starts to erode…
That’s when the “everything” fades.
The First Thing To Go
As a recruiter for almost two decades, I watched this pattern play out repeatedly.
It almost always starts with purpose.
Someone stops being able to draw a line between what they do every day and why any of it matters. The mission lives in the all-hands and the annual report but not in the actual Tuesday afternoon. Their role has drifted or was never clearly connected to a mission to begin with — and nobody has named it or closed the gap.
So they start executing.
Just executing. Task after task, deliverable after deliverable, without the animating force underneath that makes hard work feel worth it. They show up. They perform. And quietly, the discretionary effort…the extra thinking, the proactive ideas, the staying late because they actually care…starts to drain away.
Because discretionary effort doesn't run on obligation. It runs on meaning.
And when meaning goes dark, you don't lose the person dramatically. They don't quit in a blaze. They just… recalibrate. Figure out exactly how much is required. And give that. Precisely that. Not a drop more.
The Second Thing
Not long after purpose/meaning starts to fade, connection follows.
And I want to be clear about what I mean by connection because this isn't about whether people are friendly in the hallway or grab lunch together on Fridays.
Real connectedness at work is knowing who you're actually building something with. Understanding how your work touches theirs. Having relationships with enough depth and enough trust that collaboration feels like collaboration, not a series of handoffs between people who happen to share a building.
Most organizations leave this entirely to chance.
People get hired, onboarded, pointed at their work, and left to figure out the relational landscape on their own. Which means some people figure it out naturally and build real working relationships. And others… often the quieter ones, the newer ones, the ones who don't naturally self-promote, spend years working alongside people they never really know.
Isolated. In plain sight.
In 8th grade, girls who were my friends wrote and posted a list on my locker: “The 25 reasons why we hate Laura”. I ate lunch in bathroom stalls for months after that because I was too scared to confront them. And that’s not just about reliving a bad memory, it’s about realizing I was eating lunch twenty feet from people who had no idea who I actually was. That level of proximity without real connection is its own particular kind of lonely.
And it happens inside organizations every single day, to people whose names are on the org chart and whose salaries are in the payroll system, who are technically part of the team and experientially… somewhere else entirely.
What You Actually Lose
What I want you to hear today, what I’ve been exposed to through my 20 years of recruiting and coaching…
You don't lose people all at once. You lose them in layers.
First, the discretionary effort. The going “above and beyond.” Then the creative energy… the ideas that used to come naturally start getting filtered before they reach you, because somewhere along the way the person learned that offering them wasn't worth the effort. Then, the real collaboration. Then the investment in the team's success versus just their own survival in it.
And all of this, every layer, while they're still sitting in the meeting. Still on the org chart. Still cashing the check.
You are paying full price for a fraction of what walked in on day one.
And the gap between those two things isn't a performance problem. It’s a belonging problem.
It's not a culture poster problem either. Or an offsite problem. Belonging doesn't get designed at a retreat. It gets designed in how work is structured. Whether people understand why their role exists, whether true connection is intentionally designed, and whether the environment consistently signals that the real version of each person is welcome here, not just the compliant, performing version.
Connection isn't accidental. It's designed. Or it isn't.
Now It's Your Turn:
Question #1: Think about someone on your team who came in on day one with big energy and big ideas. Where are they today compared to that version of themselves? What do you think happened in between?
Question #2: Ok that first one was a warm-up, now lets get real… Can your people answer yes to all three questions: does my work matter, do I know who I'm really building with, and can I safely say what I actually see in this environment? Pick one of those three and ask yourself what the environment is actually teaching them about the answer.
Be honest, because the most expensive person in most organizations isn't the one who left. It's the one who's been leaving slowly for two years and is still on your payroll.
Know a leader who's been scratching their head at why a team that looks fine on paper feels flat in practice? Forward this their way. Flat isn't fine.
And the good news - you can absolutely do something about. Which is exactly why Jason Player and I are partnering to bring our solution to more companies — UNLOK Human Potential.
Because behind every stalled initiative, there’s human behavior. And when we know better, we do better.
If you’d like to be one of our first case studies where we bring decades of experience to your organization, book 30 minutes with us here.
Next week: what happens when people have accountability without authority. And why that combination is one of the fastest ways to lose your best people without ever seeing it coming.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura
P.S. — If any of this resonates and you want to talk about what this could look like inside your team or company, book time here.
P.P.S. — I'm speaking in Minneapolis at Sunrise Social on April 9th. There are still a few tickets left, [register here].