Postcards from the Field: Belonging Clearly
Postcards from the Field is where I share brief field reports from my work with real leadership teams. Rather than polished case studies, these notes surface the moments that stop me mid-session and point to the everyday habits that shape performance when conditions are uncertain. My aim is to translate what I’m seeing in the field into practical value readers can apply in their own teams.
Last week, I spent time onsite with the HR division of a large commercial construction company that has been growing rapidly over the last several years. The growth itself has been impressive, but what struck me most throughout prep conversations was how much the nature of the work has changed alongside the scale of the organization. The company is taking on larger and more technically complex projects than it was five years ago. More functions are involved in strategic planning conversations. More coordination is required across business units. More specialized roles are entering the system. The HR team itself has doubled in size in just two years in order to keep pace with the demands of the business.
The experience I facilitated focused on three practical conditions that help belonging hold together during periods of growth and complexity: clarity, voice, and value. We explored habits that help teams stay aligned when priorities shift, habits that preserve candor and trust during tension, and habits that help people remain visible and connected to meaningful contribution as the pace of work accelerates. Toward the end of the session, I asked participants to identify one practical “go-do” action they wanted to bring back to their teams over the next two weeks. After a few minutes of planning, I asked the room to raise their hands according to which category they had chosen.
An overwhelming majority of the room had chosen a clarity-oriented action. Some were planning to revisit team priorities more frequently. Others wanted to create better visibility around trade-offs and ownership. Several leaders wanted more explicit conversations about what could slow down, pause, or simplify as new demands entered the system. Only a small number selected actions connected to voice or recognition.
That response stayed with me because the workshop itself was framed around belonging. The session explored three conditions that help belonging hold during periods of growth and complexity: clarity, voice, and value. Yet when people were asked where they most wanted to take action, clarity dominated the room.
At first glance, that may seem surprising. Conversations about belonging often center on recognition, inclusion, morale, or psychological safety. All of those matter. But what surfaced in this workshop was something more operational. The leaders in the room were describing the strain of trying to help people feel connected and effective inside a system where complexity had begun to outpace the organization’s coordination habits.
As organizations grow, ambiguity tends to multiply quietly. More teams become involved in decisions. More dependencies emerge between functions. Priorities continue to accumulate, even when capacity does not. In these conditions, teams can remain highly committed and hardworking while still becoming less aligned on what matters most in a given moment.
The consequences usually appear as operational friction. Different groups move from different assumptions about priorities. Work that once felt coordinated starts requiring significantly more meetings and clarification. Ownership becomes harder to interpret across cross-functional initiatives. Teams continue moving quickly, but spend more energy reconciling competing interpretations of the work itself.
Over time, this begins affecting something deeper than execution. When people are unclear about what matters most, where decisions are being made, or how their work connects to meaningful outcomes, it becomes harder to feel grounded in contribution. Effort starts feeling more transactional and less connected to shared purpose.
This is part of why clarity and belonging are more connected than many organizations realize. Belonging is not only shaped by whether people feel welcomed or recognized interpersonally. It is also shaped by whether people can locate themselves meaningfully inside the work. When priorities remain fuzzy, trade-offs stay implicit, and ownership shifts without visibility, people begin losing their sense of how they contribute to the larger mission around them.
What I heard from this HR group was not a request for more communication in the abstract. They were expressing a need for stronger mechanisms of realignment. In stable environments, clarity can often survive through repetition and shared familiarity. In fast-growing environments, teams need regular opportunities to revisit priorities, clarify trade-offs, and recalibrate around what has changed in the operating environment.
What stayed with me from that workshop was how instinctively the room understood this relationship. Faced with several worthwhile leadership habits, most participants gravitated toward clarity because they recognized it as one of the most immediate ways to reduce friction and restore connection inside their teams. They were not choosing operational effectiveness over belonging. They were recognizing that, in periods of rapid growth, the two become deeply intertwined.
In fast-growing organizations, clarity stops being a one-time communication task. It becomes an ongoing operational discipline that helps people stay aligned to the work, to one another, and to the larger mission they are helping build together.
