Ask a leader with exceptional employee engagement scores and low turnover what their secret is. Nine times out of ten the answer will stop you in your tracks, because it isn’t complicated.
They’ll tell you, “I know their kids’ names. I know their dog’s names. I know their professional goals. We treat each other with kindness.”
That’s it. That’s the secret. And somehow we keep acting like it’s more mysterious than that.
Exceptional Leaders Know the People
Ask those leaders with the exceptional engagement scores what they do differently and the answer isn’t a program or an initiative or a new framework. It’s something far more human.
They know their people.
Not in an intrusive way. But they know what matters to the people on their team. They know who just had a baby and who is dealing with a sick parent. They know who wants to grow into leadership and who is quietly burning out.
This isn’t soft. This is strategy. Leadership expert Vanessa Druskat has studied team performance for decades, and what she's found consistently is that getting to know one another is irreplaceable and shows up as a driver of performance in nearly every high-functioning team she's studied. Because people who feel seen perform differently. People who feel belonging don’t leave.
The Most Powerful Habit You Can Build
According to Gallup, the single most powerful habit managers can develop to build high-performance relationships and drive engagement is holding one meaningful conversation per week with each team member.
One conversation. Per week.
It doesn’t need to be a formal log. It just needs to be genuine. Ask, care, and follow up. If you hear something and flush it, you haven’t built trust. You’ve broken it.
Seeing People as Whole Human Beings
Here’s something we ask people to do that doesn’t actually work: “leave your home life at the door.”
That has the same energy as telling someone in the middle of a panic attack, “Just calm down.” As if their nervous system simply missed the memo.
Humans are more than their job title. They are full human beings with a whole life running in the background, whether you can see it or not. Someone on your team might be missing their kid's first day of school today. Someone else might be quietly grieving a parent, or celebrating an engagement, or lying awake at 2am worried about a bill.
That doesn't mean it's your job to fix it. It isn't. You're not their therapist, their financial advisor, or their family. But it is your job to have empathy for the whole person, not just the version of them that clocks in. As Great Place to Work strategic advisor Julian Lute puts it, the parts of someone’s life affect the whole, whether we acknowledge that as leaders or not.
Author Mike Robbins, who wrote the book Bring Your Whole Self to Work, argues that when people show up authentically rather than pretending to be someone else, it creates a more confident, compassionate, and engaged environment for everyone. That's not a soft HR talking point. Great Place To Work research backs it up: employees who feel they can be their true self at work are twice as likely to look forward to going to work and 50% more likely to want to stay. Employees who feel their manager cares about them as a person, including their life and goals outside of work, are 40% more likely to say they can innovate on the job.
We have important work to do. Patients need us present, sharp, and here. Nobody's arguing against that. But presence and wholeness aren't opposites. A leader who makes room for the whole person, without trying to own or fix every part of their life, gets a sharper, more present employee in return, not a distracted one.
Following up Builds Trust
Remember what someone shared. Ask about it again. Act when action is needed.
Say a team member mentioned their mom was having surgery on Tuesday. On Wednesday, ask how it went. That’s it. Maybe they mentioned broken equipment, bring it up even if it is not resolved. That thirty-second check-in tells them you were actually listening, not just waiting for your turn to talk. Do that consistently and trust builds.
A Practice Worth Trying
This week pick one person on your team you haven’t fully seen lately. Not the loudest voice or the highest performer, the one who’s been quietly showing up. Learn something new about them. Ask about their goals. Find out what meaning looks like to them in their role.
Then do it again next week with someone else.
That’s how culture gets built. One genuine human interaction at a time.
If this resonated, there’s more where it came from. New leadership insights delivered every two weeks — written specifically for nurse leaders like you.
“Reflection: Think about your team right now. Whose name do you know — and whose story don’t you know yet? What would it mean to them if you found out?”
About the Author
Dr. Crystal Lawson is a nationally recognized nurse leadership expert, keynote speaker, and CEO & Founder of We Rise Up, LLC. She equips, empowers, and inspires nurse leaders to rise into their full potential, with confidence, clarity, and compassion. Learn more at DrClawRN.com.
