06/17/2026
There’s a lot that goes into building a strong team but at the end of the day, what it’s built on matters more than anything else. If the foundation isn’t right, it won’t last.
Over the years, I’ve worked with leaders across the country, and I continue to see the same challenge come up. Teams aren’t struggling because they don’t know what to do. They’re struggling because of how people are being seen, how they’re being led, and how they’re being responded to. That’s where this starts.
You must find something to love in every person you lead. Not because it comes naturally, but because it changes how you show up. And it does, especially in our industry. In home health and hospice, the work is already heavy. People are tired, emotions run high, and expectations are constant. It doesn’t take much for frustration to build, for assumptions to form, or for someone to quietly get labeled as “difficult” or “checked out.” And once that happens, leadership shifts, even if we don’t say it out loud. We lead them based on who we’ve decided they are instead of who they could become, and that’s where teams begin to stall.
Strong leadership requires something different. It requires you to pause long enough to look at your own perspective before trying to change someone else’s behavior.
Because many times, it’s not that someone doesn’t have more to give, it’s that they haven’t been led in a way that draws it out of them.
I’ve seen this play out time and time again in agencies just like yours. When a leader makes this shift, you can feel it. The tension softens. Trust starts to rebuild. People begin to engage again, not because policies changed, but because leadership did. And in an industry like ours, where the work matters this much, that kind of foundation isn’t optional. It’s what holds everything together.
Something to think about this week:
Is there someone on your team you’ve already made up your mind about?
Have you unintentionally limited what they could become because of it?
This is the work I care deeply about, helping leaders strengthen what’s underneath the surface so their teams can actually sustain the work they’ve been called to do.
