Introduction
I was introduced to the idea of belonging in the inclusive sense a few years ago. Whether it applies to a workplace, family or a community it is a deeply powerful idea.
This was no better demonstrated in David R Samson’s Our Tribal Future where he cites research by a Dr Stewart Wolf which commenced in the late 1950s into the US community of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Wolf found that “heart disease was nearly non-existent” in the town. However, it turned out that “the Rosetans typically didn’t exercise, were heavy smokers, and many were clinically obese.”
Samson notes that the “secret to the Roseto mystery, Wolf and his team surmised, could not be diet, exercise, genes, or location, and therefore had to reside somewhere in the way Rosetans, as a group, were living their lives.”
We humans are inherently social creatures. In Tribal, Michael Morris asserts what made it possible for humans to evolve into the world dominating species we have become was our ability to form powerful groups of critical mutual support. Samson adds a fascinating dimension in saying, “Humans are compassionate and this capacity for empathy is contagious.”
A strong sense of connection and belonging is fundamental to our wellbeing.
We crave connection and belonging and when we can’t get it in a healthy manner, we will take it any way it comes. The epidemic of loneliness and psychological ill health that has become a hallmark of the past decade seems to be a consequence of our misguided hyper-affection for individuality.
All this has been reflected in the toxic environments in social media where offensive behaviour, mobbing and bullying and gaslighting have become pervasive.
Neuroscience reveals that the emotional pain we feel when we are excluded activates the same regions of our brains triggered by experiencing physical pain. Despite our craving for connection and belonging we still can be driven to treat others in profoundly unkind ways. If belonging is our deepest need, withholding it becomes powerful. We can use such withholding to punish or to define who is or is not one of us.
It is in these conditions that we must think more deeply about our workplaces and the consequences of discrimination, exclusion and the denial of belonging to people we see as members of an out-group – as not one of us.
Thinking about inclusion
For the past near 20 months, I have been supporting leads of several ERGs operating in my former department. I have had to expand my focus from Disability Inclusion to inclusion in a far wider context.
I discovered that being inclusive in relation to one particular theme doesn’t work as well as we hope. You can’t ask a person to be inclusive of only your group and be an effective champion of inclusion in general.
Being more inclusive takes effort that is particular and an intentional focus on modifying our thoughts and behaviors. Consequently, asking people to break up their efforts at inclusive thinking and behaviour into diversity group themed chunks is unreasonable – and it doesn’t work well.
I learned this as lead of a disability ERG, but it took a long time before it sunk in. I was justly chastised by my deaf and blind members because I forgot about their needs regularly. My disability is mobility related, and I just didn’t get sensory disabilities. It wasn’t a lack of empathy or respect. It was just cognitive overload. I was focused on a disability in particular – and not on the person.
But if we are asked to think and act in a way that is inclusive regardless – just a kinder thing in general – the rewards are available for everyone [the includer and the included]. And the reward-for-effort payoff is high. We can shift from thinking we have to be mindful about specific diversity attributes and just focus on the person.
Instead of ‘disability awareness’ training we might have ‘person awareness’ training?
David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute reminded me that efforts to introduce change rarely work well. If people see imposed change as a threat they will resist. Change requires adaptation and hence cognitive effort and that alone can be enough to trigger resistance to staff already under pressure.
So how do you sell change as a reward – so that staff will move toward it and gladly put the necessary effort in? How can being more inclusive become an effort worth undertaking?
I want to suggest that being intentionally kinder to everybody may be the way to go.
How diversity categories can work against the good intent that created them.
In an effort to foster greater inclusion we draw attention to differences in the belief that by making people more conscious of differences that trigger bias, stereotyping and discrimination we will be more motivated to overcome our adverse reflexes. I have had to rethink this rationale.
Samson argues that we are inherently disposed to stereotyping and bias. But we are also inherently disposed to building and sustaining connection and belonging. The two go together, naturally. But they are not a contradiction or a paradox – it’s a necessary balance.
Samson says that age and sex are our primary biases because breeding and bonding are our most essential needs. We are driven by a need to identify ‘fitness signals’ – indicators that a person might be a member of our key in-group. We can apply this bias even when we have no need for a mate or another member of any other in-group we belong to. It seems some biases are always on.
In our private lives we build connections that reflect our needs and our reflexes. Psychologically we have a limit to the number of people we can count as friends and allies. So, in a large complex community we must exclude to stay psychologically healthy. This creates a need to manage how we include and exclude – something we do reflexively, and sometimes thoughtfully.
In an organizational context we must balance our personal reflexes to stereotype and be biased against the interests of the organization. It is a rare thing that these two interests fully align.
Putting aside our personal reflexes in favour of our organization’s imperatives may be difficult if we don’t agree. And even if we find ourselves in accord with them it doesn’t necessarily mean our behaviour will match our beliefs.
There’s good but unflattering psychological research that tells us we not only overrate our abilities, but we also are expert self-deceivers. Put simply, while we are disposed to be caring and compassionate, opening up the scope of who is one of us means struggling against some powerful reflexes.
By drawing attention to diversity group categories, we risk highlighting differences and activating biases because we are stressing one only aspect of a person’s identity. This is interesting because we are drawing attention to what we want to be ignored.
Our goal as individuals is to be accepted as just another person who has multiple aspects to their identity. We are more about finding reasons to include a person than reasons to exclude. But not all fitness signals are visible. However, let’s be clear, so many of the ‘diversity group’ members are identified by visual signals [think gender, race, sexuality and disability]. We can activate biases from a distance.
I think Hugh Mackay in The Kindness Revolution has the right approach. Kindness toward a person gets us beyond the visual clues about what makes us different in some way and closer to the non-visible signals that a person is one of us.
Rather than talk about being inclusive of people we have categorized as ‘diverse’ it might be better to think in terms of being kinder to all people – of being willing to go beyond the stereotyping mask we have put over their faces.
But this brings us into contention with a deep reflex – not all people are ‘one of us’. That takes a philosophical effort to shift into all humans are ‘one of us’. We have to work at that. Again, we may believe we are that open, but we are probably not really. We have to evolve our ‘stone-age’ mind with all its reflexes into a consciousness that better suits our ‘space-age’ community and social environment.
Thinking about belonging
Belonging is a powerful idea. It is not just about being included. It is about feeling bonded to a community or culture or place.
It was only when I turned 46 that my addresses stopped outstripping my age. I moved into my current home in 2002 and that still amazes me. I feel deeply connected to where I live – my home, community and place.
Before I left full-time employment, I had been with my employer six months shy of 20 years. I did feel I belonged, but I left because I felt less engaged. I felt connected to my team well enough, but not to the overall workplace culture. It was time to go.
Contemporary workplaces are complex environments facing many challenges concerning demands on staff re workloads, the need to constantly adapt to environmental stressors and endlessly imposed changes, and a growing demand to address welfare concerns for staff.
Public sector agencies are expected to respond to well-intentioned legislation and policies to assure staff wellbeing – but often without the resources necessary, nor the understanding of just how complex the task is. This development is necessary, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that workplace cultures are way more complex than the originators of the good intent understood originally or understand now.
The past 25 years have generated a breath-taking amount of data delivered as books, articles and podcasts. But it’s hard enough keeping up with immediate demands on our time and attention without having to adjust beliefs about how things work on an ongoing basis.
Unfortunately, the public sector seems reluctant to invest in strategies that can foster ongoing professional development and awareness of better ways of doing things.
So where does this leave the idea of belonging in the workplace? It is still crucial, but it must begin at a very local level – the work unit team. This puts the focus on the team leader – and that is a challenge I will address shortly.
One of the great ideas is that when you have a sense of belonging you can bring your Whole Self to work. In a climate of psychological and cultural safety this sounds like a good idea, but its one I have struggled with because it can seem to be a naïve ideal. My immediate rection is that not all Whole Selves are workplace ready or suitable.
A more critical consideration is establishing a kinder workplace culture, so staff feel safe in revealing more of themselves. Bringing you Whole Self to work seems like putting the cart before the horse. Let’s make kinder work cultures first.
In On Belonging: Finding connection in an age of isolation Kim Samuel observes that workplaces risk becoming places where many may feel isolated because of how technologies are being used, and work is performed. You don’t have to be a member of a diversity group or a minority to feel isolated.
A common lament in public and private sector organizations concerns the level of demand on staff members’ time and attention. We need to remember that being at work isn’t a separate part of a person’s day. Rather it is a distinct phase and maybe an intensification of demand on our cognitive capacity. We can feel alone in a crowd – and feeling we belong there may be of little compensation.
There are good reasons to value belonging at work, but we risk turning the idea into what seems like a glib notion pushed by enthusiasts. Creating and sustaining a workplace atmosphere of belonging for everyone is no easy task.
On making oneself more inclusive
Being more inclusive is fundamentally about being more self-aware. And this requires genuine cognitive effort. We have to work at it.
It is interesting that this is also true of learning to be an effective leader. You have to be inclusive of the diversity of your team members. Being inclusive and an effective leader require the same core skills.
Here, in talking of the diversity of team members I don’t mean in the sense of diversity groups but the genuine diversity of staff. We are all very different, but we so often get treated with a cookie cutter mentality. It is just psychologically easier to apply stereotypes. They take less cognitive effort, and when you are under pressure that’s attractive.
However, near enough is not good enough when it comes to seeing and acknowledging an individual’s personhood.
Being a leader isn’t about position within an organisational hierarchy but about the ability to influence what happens in an effective and desirable way. The demands on leadership are the same demands on anybody wanting to be more inclusive – develop greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence and practice both through kindness and with courage.
One of the weaknesses of our current situation arises from the steady demand on managers to be more attuned to the needs of their staff as individuals – sustaining their rights to inclusion and equity, considering their welfare and safety needs, assuring psychological safety, building a high performing team and so on.
These expectations are in line with the recognition that staff as ‘knowledge workers’ are no longer disposable the way they used to be. Employers have duties of care and staff have rights to dignified and safe employment.
Managers are the lynch pins in the process of transition from the old set of values and practices to the new set – which is largely still aspirational. They have a deep potential to influence workplace cultures – but I think we are overtaxing them, overloading them. ERGs can share in the change demand load by spreading it around.
Greater inclusivity is the fruit of kindness. It’s less complicated than a pile of policies, strategies and programs but it can deliver the same desired results.
Conclusion
I think we have over-complicated the situation by over-thinking it. Our good intent, the recognition of genuine need, and a sense of mission have driven a desire for action that hasn’t been informed by anthropological and psychological evidence.
We have framed the need for change in political and social justice terms. That was a good beginning – because that’s been the only way equity and inclusion movements have been launched. But now data has caught up with what we have always known to be right – and it offers insights to guide more effective practice.
We are deeply attuned to belonging to groups which affirm our fundamental identities. We are also imbued with reflexes that express as bias and stereotyping as we respond to our primal needs.
It’s all good. We are doing what comes naturally. If we didn’t discriminate and exclude, we’d not survive psychologically.
But we must adapt our behaviour to respond to contemporary values and expectations that guide our organisations’ efforts at creating healthy and effective work environments. Like any evolutionary need to adapt to novel circumstances we must work at changing by engaging in intentional effort. It is better that this effort is informed and guided by data rather than being driven by good intent alone.
We are inherently compassionate, but we can also be misguided and end up applying the scarce resources of attention and emotional commitment to no great effect.
Belonging is an important idea within the scope of our reflexes and our needs. But we can’t carelessly apply it to workplace cultures just because it sounds and feels good.
Belonging is vital in the wider community context, but workplace belonging is no substitute for community belonging. Staff with no effective sense of belonging in their personal lives beyond their employment are vulnerable at work if they experience exclusion. This means that any harm done can’t be ameliorated elsewhere. We must act with care.
I am increasingly drawn to kindness rather than inclusion as a goal – to the journey and not the destination. We don’t have to be concerned whether exclusion at work might be a breaking point for a staff member whose private life may already be placing them at risk of psychological or physical harm. If we are kind, then we may create the sense of safety and trust that gives our team members good cause to be open about their needs.
There are two points about creating safe and inclusive workplaces:
- It resonates with our natural desire to be compassionate and make where we work a good place to be.
- There are obligations on organisations to provide safe inclusive working environments.
But, as I observed above, we under-estimate how difficult it is to convert good intent into consistent practice. This difficulty doesn’t arise because what to be done is inherently complex or difficult. Rather the difficulty arises because we find intentional effort to become more self-aware and more emotionally intelligent hard work.
Workplaces are remarkable settings in which our aspirations to be a more inclusive culture are tested in a unique way. People who have no point of connection, other than the fact that they work for the same organisation, come together with a general agreement that they work together with mutual positive regard and respect. Sometimes that agreement is specific in the form of a code of conduct. This is also usually backed up by legislation and policy.
We have ERGs because this agreement is not uniformly honoured, and breaches are often not subject to an effective accountability process. Why that is so is complex and I am working on a draft post on this theme. However, I can say that part of that complexity is that we don’t do authenticity and vulnerability well as a culture.
That means accountability is seen more as a punitive response than a need to nurture deeper insight and better skills. And we aren’t into punishing our in-group members. But neither are we comfortable about nurturing them in an authentic way. Accountability becomes the ghostly ‘elephant in the room’.
This post started with a consideration of the idea of belonging and then looked at ways in which we might be hindering desired outcomes by too much of a focus on attributes we want others to ignore. Even saying we support and foster inclusion and belonging can seem remote and cerebral, even political. It can become words that get signed off because the sentiment is a good one.
Is that what we really want? I’ll remind you of what Samson said, “Humans are compassionate and this capacity for empathy is contagious.” When we create policies, programs and strategies in favour of inclusion we transition into head language. We could say that we are kind and our capacity for empathy is contagious – provided we get our heads out of the way of our hearts.
We are doing a decent job of being kind, but we are exposing gaps between ideals and reality, and we seem to be pretty bad at closing those gaps. That’s often that ‘elephant in the room’ and our response is more policy, strategies and programs – as if they are going to close the gaps by some kind of magic.
There is no substitute for greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence and the commitment to employing those capabilities in service of greater kindness and accountability.