The Question Every Leader Should Be Asking

I want to start with a number that stopped me cold when I first heard it.

Sixty five percent of employees feel under appreciated. Thirty percent feel invisible. One in five feel lonely at work.

I heard those numbers at a conference session and I remember looking around the room at all of us, leaders from every corner of this industry, and thinking, those numbers are not happening somewhere else. They are happening on our teams. Possibly right now. Possibly to someone you walked past this morning without really seeing them.

Here is the idea underneath those numbers that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Mattering is a core human need. Not nice to have. Not a soft skill add on. A need, the same way belonging is a need, the same way feeling safe is a need.

And mattering is not the same thing as belonging.

You can belong somewhere. You can be invited, included, present in every meeting and every group chat. And still not feel like you matter.

Let me explain the difference because once I understood it, I could not stop seeing it everywhere.

Belonging is being accepted. It is being part of the group. Mattering is something deeper. It is the felt sense that you are significant to the people around you. That your presence changes something. That if you were gone, something would actually be different. A team member can show up every single day, clock in, do good work, be friendly with everyone, and still privately wonder if anyone would notice if they disappeared.

That is not a staffing problem. That is not a compensation problem. That is a mattering problem.

And I think it explains more of what happens on spa teams than almost anything else we talk about.

Here is what happens when people do not feel like they matter. There are really only two directions it goes.

The first is withdrawal. Quiet quitting. Withholding effort, withholding ideas, withholding the parts of themselves that used to show up in their work. Eventually, leaving.

The second is desperation. Complaining. Blaming. Gossip. Acting out in ways that seem disconnected from the actual issue because the actual issue was never named.

I have seen both of these on teams I have led. I have probably caused both of these on teams I have led, without meaning to, simply by being too busy or too focused on the wrong things to notice what someone actually needed.

There is a line I heard that I think about constantly now.

"It is hard for anything to matter to someone who does not believe they matter."

Read that again. Sit with it the way I had to.

If someone does not feel significant to the team, you can hand them the best training, the clearest expectations, the most generous compensation plan, and none of it will land the way you want it to. Because the foundation underneath all of it is missing.

So what actually makes someone feel like they matter. I think it comes down to four things.

The first is being seen. Not just observed, but actually known. Do you know what this person is good at beyond their job title. Do you know what energizes them and what drains them. Do you know something true about who they are, not just what they do.

The second is being valued. Have you named their strengths recently, specifically, out loud. Not a generic good job. Something specific that shows you were actually paying attention.

The third is being needed. Does this person understand the actual impact of their work. Not just the task list, but why the task list matters and what happens because they do it well.

The fourth is being safe. Can this person be honest with you without consequence. Can they tell you something is hard, or that they disagree, or that they are struggling, without worrying about how it will be used against them later.

Seen. Valued. Needed. Safe.

I have started running every difficult team conversation I have through those four questions and it has changed how I show up almost immediately.

There is one practice from this idea that I want to give you because it is small enough to start this week.

Once a week, write down one specific thing you noticed about each person on your team. Not a task they completed. Something true about them. The way they handled a difficult guest with more patience than the situation deserved. The question they asked that nobody else thought to ask. The way they made a newer team member feel comfortable on a hard first week.

Then the following week, bring it back to them. Tell them what you noticed. Ask how it is going.

That is it. That is the whole practice.

It sounds almost too simple to matter, which I understand is a strange thing to say in a newsletter about mattering. But attention is the purest form of making someone feel significant. Not a raise. Not a title. Attention.

The people who feel the most overlooked are very rarely overlooked because no one cares. They are overlooked because everyone is busy, and busy has a way of making us blind to the very thing that would cost us almost nothing to give.

I think about this constantly in the context of retention, because I think we have been asking the wrong question for a long time.

We ask, how do we keep good people.

I think the real question is, do the people on our team actually believe they matter here. Because if the answer is yes, almost everything else gets easier. And if the answer is no, almost nothing else will be enough to fix it.

People do not stay for spas. They stay for people. They stay for the feeling that someone noticed them, valued them, needed them, and made it safe to be fully themselves while doing the work.

That feeling is not expensive to create. It is just easy to forget, especially on the busiest days, which are exactly the days it matters most.

Here is what I am going to try this week, and I would love for you to try it alongside me.

Pick one person on your team. Write down one specific, true thing you have noticed about them. Tell them this week, in person if you can.

That is the whole assignment. See what happens. I have a feeling it will matter more than either of us expects.

See you on the other side of the treatment room,

Kristen

If you want to try this practice and not just read about it, I made something for you. A simple one page worksheet. Four weeks. One person at a time. A place to write down what you noticed and when you told them.

Reply and I will send it over.