Lessons for life and parenting, not just leading and work
A month into a new school year, when many kids were finding it hard to work out where they belong, Richard looked at the role of ‘belonging’ in leadership, teams and life in general. How important is it to belong? What impact does it have if we do or don’t feel we belong? And how do different people interpret the very notion of belonging?
A very good friend of mine recently asked "Do we ever really know where we belong...?"
She'd good reason to ask that question. She'd been moving from country to country for the past ten years, trying to find somewhere to settle and struggling to really find a home. But she's not the only one. Her question triggered a conversation with my wife and daughter and has, I realise, been a challenge for several leaders and teams I’ve coached over the years. Topics like belonging and identity are often written off as esoteric, fluffy or philosophical, but that is a huge mistake. These are topics that define how we interpret and interact with the world around us. They make or break teams. They can send organisations into space or into freefall. They make, shape and break entire nations – and even collections of nations, like NATO, the EU, the UN and the African Union.
Even in traditional organisations with simple hierarchies, challenges with belonging can be incredibly significant. Ask a leader which team they feel they "belong" to and they'll typically feel forced to choose between the team they lead and their team of peers. While that choice might seem a minor one, it has significant implications when it comes to prioritisation, stakeholder management, accountability and questions of loyalty and trust – all of which are potential sources of stress and conflict.
While it’s hard enough for people in organisations with fairly traditional structures, it’s even harder for senior leaders who operate in highly matrixed organisations where they're members of multiple teams. Their responsibilities to each of those teams takes up perhaps 10-20% of their time and attention. So, to which of those teams do they feel they belong? All too often, it's none of them.
And what of those leaders' stakeholders and the people they lead? Each leader is running several teams at once. In addition, each person they want on each of those teams is being asked to be on a host of other teams simultaneously. When everyone is spread so thin, how does a leader secure sufficient commitment from the staff and stakeholders associated with each of their many teams to deliver whatever it is they need to deliver?
Part of the answer, I believe, is to define that each team and its members in a way that creates a sense of belonging. Doing so helps meet the first of three fundamental human needs outlined by Will Schutz:
Inclusion - our need to feel significant to others, to be invited and involved, and to feel we belong
Control - our need for influence, clarity, certainty, responsibility and to believe we and others are sufficiently competent
Affection - our need for connection, to be liked, loved and understood
These three 'FIRO' needs aren't the only way of dividing up human needs, but it's the framework my colleagues, clients and I find most useful. It’s not just that it’s always easier to remember things that come in threes. It’s more that these three seem to cover most (although maybe not all) of the things people say they need. The leaders who ensure each of their teams meets people’s needs for inclusion, control and affection will generally find it easiest to secure and maintain those people’s commitment – whatever the reasons for that team’s existence. But we’re here today to focus on that first need. The need for inclusion. The need to feel significant, to feel we belong.
Like the other two FIRO needs, this need is so fundamental that it’s with us from a very young age. Its role is huge in children's development, and it’s particularly hot between the ages of 11 and 17. If you have or once had teenaged kids - or you've ever been a teenager yourself - you'll recognise the amount of energy that goes into the business of belonging. That energy might be invested in:
Finding, changing or clinging to the 'right' social group
Crafting an individual identity that aligns us with some people and distinguishes us from others - defining what makes us significant and what makes others significant to us
Managing the tensions that can emerge between our emerging individual identity and the identities and expectations of others
Transitioning from primarily 'belonging' in the family unit to primarily 'belonging' to groups of peers
This need to belong might be less 'hot' when we're adults at work, but it is still a fundamental need. Like a plant, each of us will have a different 'watering point'. I might need to feel that sense of belonging more (or less) frequently than you do. I might need it with a broader range of people, while you only need to feel you need to belong in one or two key groups. Whatever our individual 'watering points', though, if we're under-watered we'll feel starved and seek to establish an equilibrium.
That’s one reason why my colleagues and I meet so many senior leaders who feel stretched too thinly across too many teams but still say 'Yes' when asked to lead or join another. The need for belonging, remember, is all wrapped up in the need to feel significant. These leaders don't feel they truly belong in any of those teams. As a result, they’re left with a shortfall when it comes to that overarching need for significance. At a very primal, often subconscious level, they don't feel significant enough in each of those individual teams.
Similarly, because those leaders are attached to so many teams, they typically find that none of the teams on their roster plays a sufficiently significant role in their lives. Each is just one of many relatively small responsibilities, passing by on the hamster wheel of life. They can’t really get their teeth into any of them; none has much impact by itself on their overall annual performance; none gives them the immersion and satisfaction they crave.
So why do they say 'Yes' to a taking on another new team? Often it’s because they're hoping – usually subconsciously - that doing so will top up their "significance pot". Being asked in the first place puts something in that pot – as does the addition of that new team to the CV inside their head. All too often, though, the rush from that the initial ‘fix’ quickly passes and they realise their significance shortfall has increased, not lessened. By dividing their time and attention yet again, they’re left feeling even emptier.
This is just one of many situations where the need to belong can trigger and sustain less-than-helpful behaviours. We see it, too, in the creation of silos; in the trouble many leaders have in holding others to account or shifting to ‘boss’ when they were previously one of the team. We see it when a director’s peers accuse her of being a shop steward, upholding the rights of front line staff rather than fulfilling her responsibilities as ‘management’.
Which brings us back to that question of what it means to belong. We’ve at least one answer to that question already: it means to meet one of three fundamental human needs. There’s another way to answer it, though: it means different things to different people. Sounds trite, doesn’t it? A bit of a cop out? Only if we leave it there.
One way of differentiating people is to see them through the lens of personality. People with different personality traits, or types, might think of ‘belonging’ in different ways. Ask them what it takes for them to feel they belong and they’ll probably say different things – “people invite me to things”, “people remember things about me”, and so on. There’ll be a difference, too, in the way they go about finding people to belong with, and crossing the threshold from “not belonging” to that group and “belonging”. When you’re looking to increase the sense of belonging in a team, those differences will be important. How you approach it will depend on the mental model you use to describe those differences and your own capacity and comfort when it comes to that kind of work.
There’s another dimension, too, though. For every single one of us, the answer to “What does it means to belong?” evolves as we progress through various stages of development. In Upgrade, Karen Ellis and I look at those stages of development through the lens of four capacities. The capacity with the most impact on our sense of belonging is Self-relating - our capacity to observe, understand, regulate and upgrade our own thoughts, feelings and ways of making meaning.
We cover four phases of development when it comes to this capacity. We call them ‘levels’ in the book, as each is more enabling than the last and we’re focused on helping people ‘upgrade’ to the next to enhance their effectiveness in a complex world. Each of us is capable of passing through all four, but – statistically speaking – you’ll probably find most people are currently at the first or second level. The level they’re at will play a huge role in how they approach the whole business of belonging. For example:
Level 1: I’ll seek to belong with people with similar interests and world views. My sense of identity is heavily rooted in membership of the group(s) in which I believe I belong. I take the group’s boundaries and identity very seriously. I am proud of – and loyal to - ‘our ways of doing things’. As a result, I tend to struggle when I find myself disagreeing with ‘the group’, so I’ll typically internalise any resulting conflict rather than discussing it openly.
Level 2: Belonging is becoming less of an end in itself and more of a means to get things done. I’ve developed a sound understanding of my own core beliefs and values, and how these are different to those of others with whom I feel I belong. I’m able to articulate these differences and my strong sense of clarity helps me maintain boundaries between my various activities. I’m also developing an interest in psychological models (of personality, etc), which is giving me a language for discussing those differences with others – and helping me work more effectively with conflict. However, the ways I talk about boundaries and difference can seem a bit simplistic or disconnecting to any colleagues I have who are approaching concept like the business of belonging from Level 3 or 4.
Level 3: I’m seeing belonging itself in shades of grey and recognising that I can belong in different ways in different groupings, rather than being torn betweengroups. I’m questioning what it means to belong, whether I belong where I thought I belonged. I’m working out which aspects of ‘me’ are truly ‘me’ and which of my deeply held beliefs, assumptions and values I’ve simply absorbed from the people around me. Thus, I’m becoming acutely aware of my own internal contradictions. I’m using this understanding to help me facilitate others through conflict, typically by shining a light on opportunities for compromise and co-creation. At the same time, this role in itself can leave me feeling like a bit of an outsider. In my desire to feel that sense of belonging, I am (even) more likely than I was at Level 2 to spread myself too thinly – finding my enthusiasm for new experiences leads me to ‘over-join’ and over-commit.
Level 4: I’ve absorbed the lessons of Levels 1 through 3 and am constantly making choices about where to belong based on what’s required of all of us. I’ve my own clear view of what that ‘belonging’ means to me in practice, and what the implications of my decisions will be for those around me. I’m also increasingly able to help others with their own sense of belonging; to look at the concept of belonging through the lenses of people at Levels 1, 2 and 3. I’m able to leverage this to craft narratives and ways of working that create communities of people with very different world views who – despite all their differences – still feel they belong.
Each level brings with it an entirely different set of paradigms about ourselves and our lives as social beings. Thus it’s easier to get your head around the level you’re currently ‘at’ yourself. Most of us recognise the levels below us – and sometimes fallback into them. The next one up is harder to grasp, unless we know people who operate that way or we’re finding our own current level is no longer working as well as we’d like – in which case we’re probably on the cusp of an upgrade.
So how do we apply this thinking in our roles as leaders? We acknowledge that fundamental need to belong – in ourselves and in others. Then we look for the clues that tell us at which level we and others are currently operating. When we’re looking to get others on board, we help them find a way to belong that matches their own current frame – their own way of thinking about the very nature of belonging – rather than approaching it from our own current level. We help them recognise where their own frame – their own level – might not be working for them, or for the rest of the team. And, if they’re keen to upgrade, we help them to do so.
How do we do all that? Listening and creative thinking helps. Understanding personality types helps. But the reason Karen and I wrote Upgrade is because there’s not enough practical material out there to help the average leader work with people at these different ‘levels’ with fundamental-but-oh-so-slippery topics like belonging and identity. The first step is to recognise the impact of belonging on morale, performance, commitment, well-being and attempts to increase diversity and inclusion. The next is to focus on some recent problems with delivery, strategy or change. For each of those, consider how people’s need for to belong may have contributed to delays or difficulty. You might even select a few key players and ask yourself at which of the four levels they were operating at the time.
How else might you have approached those situations, knowing what you know now? Then ask yourself what else you could do in future, to ensure ‘belonging’ is one of the factors you consider when you’re forming a team or taking it to the next level. When you’re heading into uncharted territory or attempting to merge, to integrate or innovate? When you’re facing uncertainty or any significant challenge?
If you're asking those questions and encouraging those around you to ask them, too, then you'll be leveraging the power of belonging more than the vast majority of your peers.
For further inspiration...
If you'd like to know more about the three FIRO needs in this article, check out the work of Will Schutz. They're also explored in some depth in Richard’s book, The Boss Factor: 10 lessons in managing up for mutual gain. If you'd like further info on the four levels discussed in this article, then take a look at Upgrade. You'll find its rich with case studies, thought-provoking questions and practical tools and techniques that will help you hone the four capacities mentioned above, which we all rely on in a complex, ever-changing world. Free chapters of both books are available on our BOOKS page.
