Why Does a Sense of Belonging Matter More Than Ever? 2040's Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 85
Belonging Matters
Issue 85, December 8, 2022
According to the British Columbian First Nation Haida, if you have forgotten or lost your language and your stories you are among the walking dead. (And there are only 24 people left in that nation that speak their endangered language.) The same could be said about evolving an organization’s purpose, using the past to help redefine the future, moving toward a shared purpose and always staying true to an organization’s North Star. A last word about the Haida worldview: their ethics and values are fundamental to its culture and society – respect, responsibility, interconnectedness, balance, seeking wise counsel, and giving and receiving. Full disclosure, we see many parallels between the Haida philosophy and healthy organizational constructs.
Poetic? We don’t think so. As it turns out, belonging (not being the walking dead) is one of the most powerful operating principles of any organizational culture. Even the outliers and iconoclasts in an organization need to know they belong; they all have a role and a contribution to make to the greater community.
How Is Belonging?
Belonging seems both fundamental and sentimental. But without it, the center will not hold, and organizations can splinter and implode. So, with today’s highly volatile interpretation of diversity, inclusion, and gender norms, how does belonging work? The challenge is not to have a lot of separate affinity groups, operating with their own independent ideologies. The goal needs to focus on creating a sense of belonging for everyone.
Consider the silos found in most if not all organizations. Responsibility and purview over a product, service, operational focus or process aligns sets of individuals to their own shared purpose, where each member of a team, department or business unit understands the terminology, roles each person plays along with the mechanics of executing and delivering. These silos create a sense of belonging for team members to fit in, determine how they can contribute, conceptualize and define their professional net worth.
But there’s a problem here. Leaders often promote a silo-based sense of belonging as it contributes to expected bottom-line results. But what they often do not realize is the impact the siloed belonging has on the larger organizational system. Teams, departments and business units that operate in isolation may be successful for achieving their individual goals, but at the expense of other parts of the organizational system. Belonging is great, but when it operates independently an organization’s strategies, shared purpose, market orientation and most importantly its North Star can be compromised.
True belonging is created holistically, making it clear how everyone fits into a larger whole. A systemic approach reinforces each individual’s understanding of how they belong, why they belong and the role they play. It may seem easier to operate with silos, but the outcome diminishes a shared experience, which in turn begets belonging. Our advice is: Don’t take the easy road, it will trip you up in the long run.