Gateway to Employee Engagement and Innovation: Create a Sense of Belonging

Diversity and inclusion are necessary precursors to engagement and empowerment of today’s workforce, driving greater performance and innovation. But kicking this up a notch—by creating a greater sense of belonging for everyone in the organization—is even more important.

Diversity is about the unique differences that people bring, which translates into corporate statistics—ensuring a more equitable headcount of different types of talent. Inclusion is a choice—an organization may embed tools and practices in their hiring, performance management, and advancement systems to support inclusion, yet its leaders decide whether to utilize these or not. Or, you could be invited to a meeting, yet the invitation alone does not mean that your view will necessarily be heard or valued. But as Pat Wadors (who created the term DIBs—Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging) said: “D&I may capture your head, but belonging captures your heart.”

In other words, belonging is a feeling. While an organization may technically check all of the boxes for diversity headcount—and even may “include” everyone in the company by stating a commitment to the idea in general—these actions alone don’t mean that everyone in the company feels like they belong.

A sense of belonging is more than just a touchy feely concept; it’s a human need, based on SHAMBAUGH’s’s evidence-based studies for our clients, as well as other research. We have conducted numerous “listening tours,” engaging the company’s employees to understand details about how they experience work. We were not surprised to learn that there is a significant need for people to feel valued, respected, psychologically safe, and connected to something bigger than themselves—all elements of feeling like they belong.

What is belonging, exactly? At the most basic level, belonging means that you feel like you’re a member or a part of something, and that you feel secure to be yourself without fear of rejection. To understand what this means from the front lines, consider these three examples of how someone might feel when they don’t have a sense of belonging at work:

 

1. A female vice president, Sue, is participating in a senior leadership meeting. She is one of only 2 women in a group that includes 12 male leaders. Sue proposes a strategic idea, but a few of the men in the group come up with reasons why it won’t work, and the discussion moves on to other topics. Sue doesn’t feel comfortable enough to offer her other ideas after that, and by the end of the meeting, she feels demoralized. She wonders whether her idea was rejected because she is a woman.
2. John, who is a new director-level leader and also a gay dad, is in the kitchen with a few other directors who are talking about their weekends. The others in the conversation are also parents, but they don’t know that John is gay. John wants to chime in and talk about what he and his husband and daughter did over the weekend, but he feels nervous that he may be rejected for his sexual orientation. So he walks out of the kitchen and back to his office without connecting with the other directors.
3. Sarah, an African-American C-level leader, feels confident in her leadership role among her direct reports. She knows that they respect and trust her, and she helps create a strong sense of belonging for those on her team. But when Sarah sits on her company’s board as the only female (and only Black) board member, she doesn’t feel that same sense of belonging. She notices that the white male board members seem to have a tight bond, and they often reference events that she wasn’t invited to. Although she loves her job and her team, Sarah begins to look around for other opportunities at competitor organizations since she doesn’t feel a sense of belonging with her peers at the leadership level.

 

If Sue had felt a sense of belonging in her leadership group, she would not have wondered whether her idea being pushed aside had anything to do with who she innately is, and she would have offered additional creative ideas that could have helped the company. If John had felt a sense of belonging at his company, he would have felt psychologically safe enough to join in the conversation with the other directors, creating the types of bonds that lead groups to greater engagement and innovation. If Sarah had felt a sense of belonging among the other board members, her company would have retained her talents rather than losing them to a competitor.

Bottom line: when people don’t feel a sense of belonging, they can’t be as innovative or engaged as they would otherwise be, which hurts the organization, productivity, and the bottom line.

What do we need to do as leaders to increase the sense of belonging for all of our talent? Start by taking a page from SHAMBAUGH Leadership’s playbook, and go on a listening tour across your direct reports/organization. By listening to how your employees experience their workplace and being on your team, you’ll be positioned to make any necessary changes to increase psychological safety for people in your group.

Also, take this a step further, and don’t ignore the feedback that you receive from your talent. Even if you don’t hear all positive feedback, share their stories with other senior leaders and executives, as well as HR (and the D&I committee, if you have one). Share the positive experiences of course, but don’t sugarcoat the negative experiences, because they matter most of all in culture change. By identifying instances in which people don’t feel that they belong, you can take steps to address specific situations and the culture as a whole.

I will be speaking to business leaders in the Washington DC region this spring on belonging and how it can be the next “Superpower” for both the employee and organization to thrive—please contact me to learn about opportunities to join me. I would also love to hear your experiences on the value of belonging.

Contact me at info@shambaughleadership.com or link to SHAMBAUGH’s offerings to learn more about SHAMBAUGH’s innovative programs and solutions that create equitable and inclusive environments where people can thrive and feel they belong.

Rebecca is Founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, and blogger for the Huffington Post. She is author of the best-selling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor and Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results. 

Find out more about us at: www.shambaughleadership.com

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