Essay 6 - April 14, 2026

There was a guide.

I don't remember exactly who handed it to me — just that I was new to the role of district D&I champion, genuinely interested in doing it well, and grateful someone had thought to give me somewhere to start. The questions were printed out. I read through them and chose one that seemed, on the surface, almost too simple to matter.

If your house were on fire — all living things already safe outside — what's the one thing you'd go back for?

There were fifteen of us in that room. All general managers. People I worked alongside, competed with in the good-natured way peers do, knew in the way you know colleagues: reliably, professionally, partially. I asked the question. And then I watched something shift.

Some answers were practical. A fireproof box of documents — passports, birth certificates, the paper infrastructure of a life. Sensible. Organized. Exactly what you'd expect from people whose job was to run things efficiently.

And then the other answers came.

A letter a father had written. A child's baby blanket. Things that had no replacement value, only meaning. The answers didn't follow a hierarchy of importance — they followed a hierarchy of what people actually held onto when they stopped performing competence for a moment and just answered honestly.

When it was my turn — I usually wait until the end — I said a small jewelry box. My grandfather's, then my father's. Inside it: cuff links, rings, the small metal evidence of two men's lives. My father died when I was young. I have very little of him left. I said that out loud, to fifteen peers, in a professional meeting, and I meant every word of it.

What I remember most is not my own answer but what happened in the space the question opened. People I had read as guarded — the ones whose professional composure I had mistaken for the whole of them — turned out to be carrying something tender just beneath the surface. The question didn't manufacture that. It simply made space for what was already there. And one by one, as people answered, the room became something different than it had been sixty seconds earlier.

We talk a lot in leadership circles about psychological safety. About creating environments where people feel comfortable speaking up. What we talk about less is the specific, repeatable acts that actually build it — the small decisions a leader makes before the agenda starts that determine whether the people in the room feel like colleagues or like whole human beings.

A connection question is one of those acts. Not because it's therapeutic. Not because work needs to feel like a support group. But because people collaborate better when they see each other more fully. They extend more grace. They assume better intent. They are, simply, easier to work with — because they are no longer just a function or a title or a problem to manage. They are a person who would go back into a burning house for a letter their father wrote them.

That changes things. Quietly, durably, in ways that don't show up in any metric but are unmistakably real.

I'll be honest with you. Not every room has been ready for this.

I've asked the house fire question to groups who looked at me like I'd suggested we all share our astrological charts. I've had someone ask, with genuine skepticism and zero apology, why does this matter? And I've had to resist the instinct to justify the practice defensively, to cite research or make a business case, to earn the right to have asked something human in a professional setting.

What I've learned to do instead is let the question answer itself. I tell them: you don't have to go deep. Share whatever feels right. And then I go first, and I go honestly, and I let the room do what rooms tend to do when someone in a position of authority decides not to perform invulnerability.

Sometimes it works immediately. Sometimes it takes a few meetings. Occasionally it doesn't land at all — and that's information too. A group that cannot tolerate a single human question before the agenda starts is telling you something important about what's been asked of them before.

I've been doing this for nearly twenty years now. I open almost every meeting I run with some version of it. Not always the house fire. Sometimes it's lighter — what's one thing you're grateful for this week? What's giving you hope right now? If you could have one superpower, what would it be — and more importantly, why? The why is always where it gets interesting.

I've been leading a new team recently. Change initiatives, new dynamics, the particular challenge of building trust while also asking people to move. I started this practice on day one. We have run over time in meetings — not because we lost discipline, but because the conversations were worth having. My team has told me they appreciate it. And I've watched the other work get easier because of it.

That's not a coincidence. It's not a morale initiative or a retention strategy. It's what happens when people feel known by the person asking things of them.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it gets softened too often in conversations about leadership culture: this is work. Getting to know your people as human beings — not as functions, not as headcount, not as the sum of their performance metrics — is part of the job. Not the soft part. Not the optional part. The part that determines whether everything else you're trying to build actually holds.

You don't have to start with the house fire. Start with gratitude. Start with a superpower. Start with whatever feels like a question you'd genuinely want to hear the answer to. The specific question matters less than the decision to ask one — and to mean it.

What you're building, one meeting at a time, is not a team-building exercise. It's a culture of being known.

I still have it. The jewelry box sits where I can see it — small, a cracked and glued lid, heavier than it looks. Inside: my grandfather's cuff links. My father's ring. The kind of objects that mean nothing to anyone who didn't love the person who held them.

I think about it sometimes when I'm preparing to open a meeting. Not in a sentimental way, exactly. More like a reminder. Every person walking into that room is carrying something. A loss, a hope, a thing they'd run back into a burning house for. They have agreed — by showing up, by doing the work, by sitting across from you and giving you their time — to set most of it aside for the duration of the meeting.

The least a leader can do is pause, just before the work begins, and acknowledge that the setting aside costs something.

Ask them a question. Mean it. Answer it yourself, honestly, and let them see that you're a person too.

Before you begin, give them a reason to believe the story is worth telling.

Because tonight, at someone's dinner table, they'll be asked how their day was. And somewhere in that answer — if you did this right — will be a moment from your meeting. Not the deliverable you hit or the decision you made. Something smaller. The question you asked. The answer someone gave. The two minutes before the work started when everyone in the room remembered they were human.

That's the story you're writing. You just don't get to hear it.