E188 – Modern Belonging In The Workplace With Letesia Gibson

 

The world of work is changing, and so is what it means to belong. Join us for a captivating conversation with Letesia Gibson, founder of New Ways, as she dives into the intricacies of modern belonging in the workplace. Letesia’s unique perspective on creating inclusive, anti-racist cultures is rooted in her varied career and personal experiences. In this episode, she discusses the challenges organizations face in fostering a sense of safety, agency, and connection, especially in today’s turbulent world. From her approach to conducting cultural audits to supporting leaders in building strong, inclusive workplaces, Letesia offers insights that will inspire you to rethink what it means to belong in the modern workplace. Tune in for an eye-opening discussion on the evolving dynamics of work and how we can create environments where everyone feels they belong.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Modern Belonging In The Workplace With Letesia Gibson

We’ve got a guest with us who I connected with on social media. There was a bit of a discussion going on. We have hit some challenges around our culture work and doing it well. I asked some questions of people saying, “Who should I talk to?” I got firmly pointed in this person’s direction. I was excited to have you talk about this because our conversation, even before we talked about the show, was interesting and helpful for me. With no further ado, this is Letesia Gibson, Founder of New Ways. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I am happy to be here.

It would be great in the World of Work tradition if you could introduce yourself to the World of Work audience and maybe tell them about you and your work.

I’m the Founder of New Ways. New Ways is a behavior change consultancy. We have been going since about 2020. I’ll tell you about how we arrived at that, but it might be quite helpful to have more of a flavor of how I ended up here. I spent several years working in research, brands, strategy, innovation, and trends. Several years ago, I had a burnout. That was a result of a dysfunctional and toxic culture. It honed my attention to be away from thinking about brands and organizations we’re doing externally, thinking about what’s happening inside an organization, and thinking about leadership and culture. I’ve been on that journey ever since.

When George Floyd’s murder happened, that became quite a focusing moment for me to think about. I’ve been looking at visions, values, and purpose. I’m thinking about how we build the foundations for a stronger culture. Here is something we’re missing. We’re not thinking enough about it. That’s when I launched New Ways. We focused a lot on supporting leaders to build anti-racist cultures. As that journey has gone on, we work more broadly, looking at how you can build a progressive, inclusive, and anti-racist organization where everybody belongs.

 

 

Belonging is a big theme of what I’m going to talk about. The way that we do that as we work is to go in and provide culture audits, understand where people are at, help them work out what an organization do they want to be, and support leaders and their teams to go on journeys of learning and unlearning to make that culture and that workplace live that vision.

Modern Belonging

From that introduction, I’ve already got more things than I had on my original list. If we get time, I’d love to come back to the idea of unlearning because it’s such an amazingly important part of cultural work. As you mentioned and you gave a trailer there, we’re going to be talking about modern belonging in the workplace. This is a phrase that I came across through you. It’s the phrase of modern belonging. A good starting point would be to understand what you mean by modern belonging, whether that’s like a well-known phrase. Is that what everyone means when they’re talking about belonging?

Modern belonging is my invention. It’s to acknowledge that we are in a different time. We can’t talk about belonging without thinking about the broader context of what’s been happening in the world and the world of work over the last several years. If we look back over the last several years, it’s been quite an intense period of change for lots of people in lots of different ways. It’s coming together with all of those forces that create a need to think about modern belonging.

If we take COVID and the impact that had on people reflecting on, “What is it that I want from work? Is working for me?” There was that phrase that wasn’t there. The great realization is that people are starting to think about, “Am I aligned with my values in the work that I’m doing?” That’s one of the first things that feels important to connect to.

I mentioned George Floyd’s murder, which was a moment when we were all on pause in the world. That has shone a light on the way that racism is at play in our society and workplaces. It also opened up questions about all the otherims. This broader focus is on EDI. That started to shift what people might be looking for or needing. It broadened our understanding of where people are at.

Hybrid and remote working is another lens of things that has shifted things. People are connecting in a more transactional way around work. We’re seeing people being a bit more disconnected or distant from colleagues, purposes, and missions of organizations. That’s something that’s impacting a sense of belonging.

We can’t talk about belonging without talking about the world we’re in now, what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and the Congo and Sudan as one lens, our feelings about democracy and the failings of that, and the cost of living crisis in the UK. When we put all of those together, people aren’t okay. People don’t feel like they can’t express themselves in some situations and may feel overwhelmed by the impact of those things.

When we think about modern belonging, we have to think about that bigger context because what that’s done is it started to create some different expectations of what we might want from our workplaces, what we might be expecting from our leaders, what we want our experience of work to look like and whether those expectations are a mess or not. It has an impact. People make a choice as to whether this is a place to be invested in. Are these people I can trust? Do I feel aligned with myself here? Those are all things that impact belonging.

That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. That’s why we thought about this space of modern belonging; it felt like the way that we were thinking about it previously was potentially one-dimensional when we think about looking at this in the workplace. There’s so much more into play with what’s going on in the outside world and how workplaces need to respond and evolve that we felt that it was worth starting to think about a more layered definition of belonging.

I’m in my late 40s. I’ve been in the workplace for a while now. I started quite early. You list out all of the ways that we’re experiencing an external dynamic context, which is a fancy way of saying a turbulent world. I don’t ever remember a period, and maybe that’s because I was born after the last political turbulence in the UK in the late ‘70s, but I don’t remember a time in my career pre-2017 when the world played such. The external world plays such a role in how we feel about work and how we conduct work. That complex, messy change of the political environment, COVID, lockdowns, and the changing technology.

It’s extraordinary when you think about it. It almost makes you think, “We have to rip up.” We have to rethink a lot about how we create meaningful relationships and teams and all of that work. It sounds cliche, but it’s such a different world from where we were. People are experiencing it differently in the way that it turns out. It makes good sense the idea of the modern sense of belonging.

I want to ask you about motivations because you gave us a flavor in your introduction, but this is clearly important work, and it’s clear from what you’ve described that there’s an obvious specific area that needs organizations working on it. What is it about this work that is important to you and your organization? Why this?

Belonging matters to everyone. We all know what it feels like, and it is a feeling. I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. We all know what it feels like to belong. It’s something that is quite visceral and fundamental to our sense of well-being. When I think about my own lived experience as a mixed-race, working-class woman, I’ve often been in spaces where I didn’t belong. I grew up in the ‘80s. That was a different time for thinking about a sense of belonging in society and all different kinds of spaces. What’s unique about my experience is I was always in the third space. I’m not Black enough and not White enough to fit into either of those groups.

As I went to university, I wasn’t working class enough to fit into my home community. I wasn’t middle-class enough to fit into other spaces. As a Brown woman, I didn’t have the right femininity to be the right feminine. I’ve been quite fascinated by being in the third space and feeling like I don’t quite belong in different places. Our organization feels like it’s a magnet for those kinds of associates that we work with who see themselves also being in third spaces. That is why I think about belonging as being important to me.

In my first proper job, I was lucky to land on my feet in an organization that was diverse and instinctively inclusive and was way ahead of its time. I didn’t appreciate that at the time that I was in this special company that was in a sector that was incredibly White and middle-class. I felt a sense of belonging there and felt like I had role models around me. I had people who championed my development and my growth and helped me find my place.

It wasn’t until I left there that I realized that that wasn’t. It was elsewhere. I went into different environments where I would never have belonged. I mentioned the burnout that I had, and I was a senior leader in that role, but I was in an organization that I would’ve never belonged to. I put a lot of energy into trying to fit in and trying to do well, but it was never going to happen.

That focused me on thinking about how important and what I personally could bring to this space of belonging. My fascination with trends, new things, and innovation has always stuck with me. I’m always curious about ripping up the rule book and thinking about, “What is it? What organization do we need to be to be in the world?” That’s a driver for me. I’ll share some thoughts later on. I strongly believe that there is a need to evolve that organization to where people are at. That’s also a big part of why we do what we do.

 

I’ll share this with the readers because they know quite a lot about the work James and I do. One of the things we’ve seen specifically around this topic is scaling organizations that had incredibly tight senses of belonging in the smaller origin states. People were close enough to the beginning of the journey of the organization. They feel like they belong to the founding group and environment. I was here from the beginning. As they grow, the organization has to rethink what it means to belong to that organization because otherwise, you end up with cliques and splits across the organization.

Listening to you talk about what motivates you and this idea of how we rethink what people need and want from a workplace so that we can have a good organic look. I want every organization to be successful. Sometimes, that gets misunderstood. People are like, “Organizations can’t all be perfect for everyone.” They don’t have to be perfect for everyone. You need to find ways to create meaning, purpose, and connection within the teams and the context of work appropriately so that people can do their best work.

There is evidence of how we do our best work. It is when we don’t have to do a whole load of emotional labor, contorting ourselves into different places and spaces to fit. It’s lovely to hear you talk about that. I already secretly want to be in your organization because that sounds like a group that I would want to belong to.

We are touching on the fact that this is not straightforward. By nature of the fact, we believe here at the show that most people are good people, and they want to do better. They don’t necessarily know how. They don’t do it well, but people aren’t actively seeking to create poor environments. Despite this, we know that not everyone is experiencing belonging, and this idea of creating modern belonging is much tougher than it looks. How widespread is the challenge? Where are you seeing it? What are your thoughts about what you’re seeing out there in terms of prevalence?

Current State Of Belonging

I feel like we’re seeing more of it. There is something about that old model of work and people being in a new space, but the organizations might not have caught up. It’s an attention there. That is one of the areas where the sense of not belonging happens. We have the privilege of seeing lots of moments of belonging and not belonging in quite granular ways through conversations that we have with team members all of the time.

The thing with not belonging is that it doesn’t mean that you don’t like your job. It doesn’t mean that you don’t like your colleagues. It isn’t that everything is awful and terrible within a company. It can mean that on one surface, it can look like everything is going okay, but internally, people are feeling unsafe, unseen, unheard, and undervalued. There’s a growing sense of them not believing in leadership or losing faith in what it is that we’re doing or what direction we’re going in. There’s some disconnect. I don’t know if we share the same values anymore or who I want to be aligned with.

It can end up with people feeling quite isolated. They’re not sharing. They don’t feel able to share how they’re feeling in the world, or things are happening under the surface that leadership or colleagues aren’t aware of. They might have lost trust in their efforts. We do a lot around EDI. Has anything changed? Does anyone care about that?

It can be the things that internally have an impact on someone. I don’t know if this is a moment to talk about the deep dive we’ve been having in thinking about modern belonging because it’s quite a big thing. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a lot of research and having a lot of conversations with our associates and people we connect with through our work about what belonging looks like.

Even from beginning that journey, thinking about what’s been happening in the last several months, you start to see this is something that feels important to get right. Maybe you’ve heard from other guests or your work that there is a sense of silencing or the lack of safety that people feel when speaking up in workplaces about issues that are happening on the world stage, but how that seeping into a general sense of it’s not safe to speak about things.

Belonging feels like an important thing to get because we’re at a point of risk of tipping over into more people not belonging, but we’ve been thinking about there being a number of different lenses of this, and safety is a big one. We talk about psychological safety, but that can be context-specific. Does that connect to me and my identity? Does that connect to talking about difficult things? Do I feel safe here? Is it safe to be me?

It is about agency and empowerment to see how much control people have over their workspace environments and work experience. Do they believe in the mission? Am I here for the mission? Do I have a sense of what we stand for anymore that feels important? That’s the hardest to stay connected to when we’re in remote worlds.

Some people are joining remotely. It might be a year before they even meet colleagues or leaders. That connects to the next area, which is around the real connection. If we don’t know each other, it’s hard to foster a sense of belonging because we can’t do belonging from a distance like emotional distance or physical distance. People care about being seen. Am I supported? Am I heard? Do people understand me? Are my needs being met for me as an individual?

Increasingly, we see belonging being connected to trust in the journey of EDI, anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion, or whatever phrase you want to put around that. That isn’t necessarily supercharging ahead and being amazing at that, but trust is important to us. We care about it. I can see that there are efforts and impacts resulting from that.

It has been interesting to have to acknowledge that there are quite a few layers to this. What might be a challenge for one organization might not be the same for another. Being able to understand what belonging and not belonging look like in your organization feels like quite an important thing for us to get our heads around rather than simply saying, “People say they belong here. Off we go.” It’s more nuanced and integral in thinking about how we lead and run our organizations.

We have a quote that we use in quite a lot of our training material around building trust. It’s from a clinical psychologist called Peter Fungate from a radio series we were listening to. It’s frustrating because it’s not written down in a book anywhere. I’d love to be able to plaster it everywhere. It’s one of those things that I heard on audio.

He talked about being understood as being at the core of our species as humans and the idea that when we are truly understood and welcome in a space, we feel like that’s one element of massively feeling like we belong. It’s like everyone says, “I see all of you, and you’re still here. I’m not throwing you out.” A lack cycle called safety is a fear. It’s a fear of rejection.

This idea is that you can truly get to know someone and connect with someone, understand and see who they are, and still be like, “You’re still one of us.” It’s important for some people. It’s important for all of us, but some of us are more sensitive to it, depending on if we’ve had experience with it in the past.

This is one of the things we talk to managers a lot about. You don’t know someone’s track history. You might know the story they choose to tell you, but you don’t know what they think is normal in a workplace because you weren’t in their previous workplaces. You have to give them that space and proactively seek out that opportunity to create space for them to feel understood and to share as much as they want.

It struck me as you were talking through all the different variables and how tough this challenge is for managers who are also overstretched and undertrained. There are loads of data out at the moment. Eighty percent of managers never intended to be. They were given a job with no training. It makes it hard. It makes the issue everywhere. If you think about how much work has to be done for this to be effective, there are lots of challenges.

There are people and teams who are finding their way through this. You are working with organizations that are championing it. We know that one of the elements fundamental influences on culture change is a leader’s attention, where leaders are spending their time and attention. There are people doing it and trying. What impact are you seeing on those organizations? What changes when you see organizations that are creating meaningful experiences of modern belonging with their people?

People feel belonging in those organizations. I’ve had leaders share with me that people have come to them and said, “This is one of the first places that I feel I belong.” It is a noticeable difference. Those cultures are able to have relationships where people can be more open. There’s more transparency. There’s a lot of listening that happens. There’s that conventional, outdated idea that you come to work, and you put in your work. Your work me on.

In those organizations, there’s a step between personal me and work me that have come together. They’ve both taken a step forward. It allows for more authentic connections and relationships. They’re able to navigate through conflict differently because there’s an underlying trust that we can figure things out. I know who you are. People feel like they can bring themselves to work in the way they want.

What you referenced earlier about fitting in feels important. I’m always struck by Brené Brown’s research. I don’t know if you’ve seen that clip where she said, “The opposite of belonging is fitting in. Fitting in is contorting yourself, assimilating, and adapting.” That’s exhausting, and it’s not how any of us want to bring ourselves to workplaces. In these spaces, it is that sense of not having to think about who I am. I can come, do the work, and bring my talents and strengths to the team. Those are some of the things that you see in organizations that have it.

 

“The opposite of belonging is fitting in.”

 

I love that speech from Brené Brown. We’ll put a link to it. It’s one of those things that stops you in your tracks because you’ve never done enough thinking about it. The minute you hear it, you’re like, “That makes total sense.” This idea that if you don’t have belonging, the chances are if you’re in a group, you can either leave the group, but if you are there and present in the way we are at work, it’s not like a friendship group you can’t leave and still do your job. You have to find a way to fit in. That labor is exhausting.

For any of you reading, whoever has to do any of that work around your family, and lots of us do. We navigate our relationships with our parents and our siblings. We have to be careful about certain things. If you are doing that all day and trying to do a job, you’re not spending all your best efforts on the job. It’s as simple as that.

There’s a lovely piece in Amy Edmondson’s work in Phyllis’s organization where she talks about. If you have a team that is experiencing a feeling like they feel included, which is some of the terminology she uses around it, she’s like, “The information sharing goes through the roof.” There’s never a concern about what someone’s going to think of me for bringing a different source in or a different place or a question.

On a simple level, it feels like a place I’d want to work. It feels like something that would be important to me if I were going to sit through hundreds of interviews people have to do these days to get a job. I’d want to know if there is some of that waiting on the other end or at least understand how people are trying to create it. Is it the same for everyone? Do people who experience it think in the same way? Do the same things get in the way of everybody, or is it different for different people?

Creating Belonging

The feeling of what it feels like to belong or not belong is consistent. We run an exercise at the start of some of our workshops that takes people on a visualization to go back to a time when they belonged and didn’t belong. Irrespective of background level, the job is always the same thing. The impact of not belonging is we underestimate what a big impact that is. It’s not the emotional labor but the uncertainty. You feel self-doubt, isolation, questioning, the lack of confidence, the unwillingness to take risks so that all is the same and can have quite a big impact on people’s well-being, as you’d imagine experiencing that at work.

What’s different is that some people don’t expect to belong in the same way. This was an interview with Jeremy or Harris. The playwright talks about his London play. He talked about radical inclusion and how important it is to be radically invited into some spaces. That’s true of workplaces. There are some sectors that feel maybe very White, male, middle class, or any other identity characteristic, which means that if you’re not those things, there might be a lower expectation of belonging here.

There’s dealing with that and thinking about what that means. We’ve seen through our work people talking about changing their accent to sound less or more like receive pronunciation or people hiding ADHD or autism diagnoses because they don’t feel like they’re not going to be accepted bringing that here. We hear through our work on anti-racism. People are talking about not feeling like leadership is a space. I should be in or could belong. We hear that about boardrooms. One sticks out in my mind about someone sharing that they were on a board, and there was a number of global majority colleagues, but still, there was this sense that I didn’t fit in here and I shouldn’t be here. Can I ask questions? Can I put my ideas forward?

That has quite a big impact on belonging. It’s important to understand that these experiences are different. When we think about those marginalized groups of older identities, when they see an organization prioritizing belonging or hear about it through whatever communications, it becomes such an appealing place to go and work because that expectation for it elsewhere is low.

There are 3 or 4 things popping out in my mind the readers might be interested in. One is we recorded an episode a couple of years ago with a researcher on class in the music in the heritage and museum sector. It’s a good read if anyone wants to go back and read. She collected quite a lot of data from people experiencing it. She had some interesting perspectives.

One of the things I always remember is when I was chatting with a boss of mine many years ago. He’s a good guy. We had a couple of new starters who were in their early careers. He was asking me why I had harked about my partner. For those of you reading, I’m in a same-sex relationship. I heard about my partner, specifically on day one. He was like, “I never understand you don’t do it the rest of the time. It doesn’t bother me, but I’m curious.” I said, “We have to make a statement because it’s not visible in the office whether that’s welcome or not and whether that’s a good thing. It’s easy if I can slip it in. You will ask me about how she’s doing and normalize it.” He was like, “Why would they think it wouldn’t be?” This is when these feelings aren’t based on something irrational. This is often based on actual experience.

That’s important for people to understand. It’s harder for some people to trust that an environment is going to welcome them and is going to be theirs in a place where they can belong because they’ve been places where they haven’t. Sometimes, that bit gets left behind. If you are fundamentally surrounded by good people, they may not have been in those environments because they’re like, “I’m the majority in this particular scenario. Everyone I think here is a good person. There doesn’t seem to be an issue. What should I worry about?”

I wanted to spell out that for a lot of people, because you haven’t seen or been in environments where that’s not welcome, it doesn’t mean the person that you are welcoming or bringing into an organization hasn’t. It’s based on quite a rational understanding of where they’ve been and what they’ve experienced.

For those of you who are reading, we’re recording this in the UK. There’s been some interesting stuff going on in the West End, which is our version of New York’s Broadway about a playwright and this idea of having performances for the Black community. I’ll see if I can find or dig out a link to the BBC article because it’s interesting. That phrase of radical inviting is what stuck with me. When you work with organizations, they’re trying to do the work. What’s getting in the way? They mean. What slows them down, or what stops it from happening?

Barriers To Belonging

One of the things is thinking that belonging is nice to have. It’s the icing on the cake. It’s the thing that we do when business as usual is all going well. As we know, business as usual is challenged in many sectors, and not understanding how fundamentally it affects how people not only experience work but do the work. There is a commercial connection between performance and effectiveness. Seeing it as a pink and fluffy thing that’s a nice thing as opposed to fundamental to people’s motivation and performance. That’s one of the things that make it not a priority.

One of the other things that I’m seeing more is knowing how your people are feeling. We might have an engagement survey that might run once a year or some pulse every six months, but because of the nature of work and people being overstretched and having less contact to have those informal conversations, that does feel like things can be brewing without us knowing. Not having a sense of how well people are feeling belonging is one of the things that gets in the way of getting it right.

 

You talked about the differences of experiences. One of the other watchouts is assuming that because you belong here, everyone else does. That can happen if we’re leading in some way. We forget that we’re privileged with all the information about where we’re going as an organization and what we care about. Somebody further out in the organization hasn’t got any of that sight. Acknowledging that there will be multiple experiences of belonging and almost anticipating that but not seeing that is often the thing.

More practical things like poor communication. People do not know what’s going on. They’re filling in the gaps. That’s creating a distance from each other, misunderstandings, or miscommunication about what we care about and what our values are, and that sense of not feeling connected to who we are as an organization.

I touched on earlier the more transactional nature of work. That’s one of the things I hear most often when I’m working with teams about what they want to change. When we talk about belonging, they’re like, “We want more time together. We want to have more informal ways of gathering that are not about specific project work.” It feels like there are some small wins in there. Some things might be a complex and layered topic, modern belonging, but creating belonging can be quite a simple act. It’s a combination of smaller things, bigger things, behavioral things, and structural things. There are some simple ones.

I was chatting with a CEO who would not be nearly as articulate as you about what he’s trying to do. He’s been CEO for several years. He is aware that it’s changed the way people experience the workplace and each other. He’s got a list of all his teams. They’re not a huge organization. It’s about 400 of them. For any major thing that happens, he makes sure that every team member hears directly from him on that topic within a month. It’s not quick. He’s like, “I can’t do it all at once. I’ve got many things to do.” Sometimes, that’s because they’ve been at big organizational team meetings. It’s because he’s popped into their team meeting. He spoke to one of them and asked them to pass it on.

He said the difference between the systemic approach to it and catching people when he saw them and realizing that there were whole teams he had never seen and that they were feeling slowly out of it. The example that he gave me was they’ve got an accounts team. They’re a dynamic organization delivering a product. They’re not the accounts team doing something in their own houses. They were different personalities, people, backgrounds, and experiences. They weren’t part of the bigger picture. I loved that.

He got the initials of the teams and a tick list. He ticks them off every month, rips them up, and does it again. I was like, “I admired that. That is simple and such a lovely way on one level of keeping them engaged with the business and how they’re getting off.” This is the point where we ask a lot of our guests this question. It’s one of my favorites. What would you like to be different?

Reinventing Organizations

I’m a fan of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, which you’ve talked about at some stage. He did a big piece of research classifying different kinds of organizations. He created this pyramid with different colors for each layer. At the top of the pyramid is what he calls a teal organization. That’s what I believe in, which is organizations that are led by a strong shared and clear vision of who they want to be and what they want to achieve in the world.

He gives quite a lot of autonomy but also a responsibility to people to help them achieve that vision in a way that feels aligned with who they are, what their motivations are, and what they care about. There’s a lot we can take from that when thinking about the world, what people are looking for, and how to help us grow and move forward as organizations.

As a foundation for thinking about workplace belonging, it feels quite strong to me. We all believe in the vision. I have agency and can feel empowered about how I can help the company move forward. There’s a sense of investment in that. On top of that, it is about being better listeners. As organizations, we’ve lost touch with that. That’s even me looking back with rose-tinted glasses because did we ever listen to that well when we were in office environments to everybody?

There’s something about becoming skilled at listening to each other and being able to hear all the voices and the different perspectives in the context of having different lived experiences because, without that, we can’t have respect and care. Care is another thing. We can say we care, but it’s like in those small moments that we create those micro-moments of belonging and connection. Some of those principles feel important.

 

There’s something about becoming really skilled at listening to each other and being able to hear all the voices and perspectives. Without that, we can’t have respect and care.

 

Connected to that is also being able to be transparent, which is talking about communication, but it’s also talking about being open and being able to have tricky conversations about messy topics, being courageous, and not being nice. We’re a nice people space, but we’re willing to get into some of those issues to find solutions together, even with some vulnerability. That creates trust in itself and a sense of belonging because we’re able to work through things rather than skirting around them.

That needs a particular leadership mindset and culture that’s invested in learning, as we talked about. We’ve got the cultural intelligence to navigate the world but the emotional intelligence to bring ourselves into an adult-to-adult dynamic. It’s about us acknowledging that we’re people. All the people things are important in order for us to grow as professionals and have an impact as an organization. It’s going back to that.

There are lots of brilliant and useful things in there that people can start thinking about as leaders of organizations and people in organizations in positions of influence. We always talk about the idea of narrating your leadership. It’s okay if you’re not there yet, but let people know the journey you want to go on with this because that will buy you a bit more time because they’ll be like, “The intent is right.” They’ll help. They’ll get on board and support you when you don’t necessarily have all the answers straight away.

It’s a difficult question, but do you think there are things that people can do? People in bigger organizations have less visibility of what’s going on at the top level. They know the organization cares, but they also know it’s not working. Is there anything that they can do in their teams or for the people around them that maybe they would contribute to at least their immediate peer’s experience of it?

That’s a great question because when I go into organizations and run belonging workshops, I do sometimes get a sense that people think belonging is going to happen to them magically. Somehow, leaders are going to do something, and they’re going to experience something different. They have an awakening in the workshop, which is, “It means that I have to do something different to create this sense of belonging for us.” There’s that shift of thinking that belonging happens to us, and belonging happens because of us. Everyone can do something to help with this in a way that is a helpful mindset to have in any organization.

I talked about the adult to adult. We all need to do something different because it’s all about how we interact and relate to each other. Improving a sense of belonging in a one-to-one dynamic is as important as it happening on a scale and perhaps even more because those are people we’re interacting with every day and having quite a big impact on each other’s experience of work.

I mentioned earlier about the work I and the personal me need to take a step forward together. That is what it is. It’s about moving beyond. How are you doing? I’m fine. We move on. That’s a bit of a missed opportunity to say, “I’m not fine. This is going on. I’m struggling with this.” It creates an opportunity to deepen that relationship and connect. That’s a big part of building that safety and that sense of belonging. It’s about reaching out and showing that we care and getting to know each other. These are the simple things of belonging.

 

It’s about reaching out and showing that we care and getting to know each other. These are the simple things of belonging.

 

I was watching TV, and it was a US dating show. I’m sure our readers will shout at me for not knowing the name of it because they’ll be like, “It’s this.” It was focused on neurodiverse individuals. Some of them were having a bit of coaching to help them have conversations. There was one young autistic woman. She had an autism coach who was also identified as autistic. She was teaching her the twos and fros of a conversation to keep it going. This is simple stuff. It doesn’t even have to be a question, but how do you always leave the door open for it to be a to and fro so that it doesn’t finish? That’s the whole point of the activity.

As I was watching it, it struck me how often I let alone, and I have control over my own time. Let alone other people. How often do I enter conversations in a workplace to close them? In a nice way, I’m like, “How fast can I get out of this conversation and move on to what I’m doing while also letting the person know that I’m happy that they checked in.”

That’s not a helpful mindset. It struck me as you’re talking it through. I’m like, “That’s not me doing that bit. Is it at all?” What I’m doing is not leaving a door open. I’m not leaving an invitation to say, “Come and join me in this conversation if you’ve got time. Let’s explore it together.” That’s one for me to take on the chin because it struck me as if you were saying that.

We are running on time, but I’m letting it go along because it’s such an interesting topic and such a great conversation to hear from you. What would your advice be? We are lucky on the show. We have readers who care about this stuff, but we hear from them, they’re like, “Yeah, I want to, but I don’t know how. I don’t know what. I’m getting it wrong.” We have a large number of senior leaders in smaller organizations who maybe don’t have HR teams. They don’t have the budget. What would your advice to them be?

I have a few thoughts on that. I don’t know if it’s a thing that’s on my mind a lot at the moment, but listening to your people feels like an easy thing that we can do. It is opening the door to understanding people’s different experiences. Doing more of that feels helpful, and being ready to hear people not feeling great about their sense of belonging for whatever reasons, approaching that with some curiosity because the clues are going to start to emerge as to what we need to do to shift that. Listening would be my first big one.

We should focus on communication and make sure that we’ve got plenty of opportunities to have a dialogue about who we are, where we’re going, why we’re doing things, and what we care about. The need to restate that and invite conversation around that feels important will start to engender different feelings about belonging here that we’re perhaps overlooking and assuming they’re happening and they’re here. They must all be aligned with us.

 

There’s something about bringing more humanity. I love what you shared about that example of the CEO going and making time to speak to everybody. That feels like a human experience. It’s been a tough world for news and events, particularly in Gaza, and acknowledging some of those things and the effect that it might be having on people’s well-being moments like that can be poignant in strengthening a sense of belonging.

The final thing is thinking about opportunities to bring people together. In this new hybrid remote world, that is the world they’re in. We can get a bit lost in not seeing the sense of disconnection that people are feeling and not maybe appreciating the value they might get even from coming together. I’m not talking about a pub social because that’s not inclusive for everybody, but meaningful ways are coming together that strengthen those bonds and give us more of an opportunity to know each other.

Those things all sound like soft things. They are, and that feels important. There are structural things that we can do that enable belonging and feel important. How we might recognize or talk about diversity and appreciating all of the diversity we’ve got within an organization feels important. What’s our internal comms around that? How do we talk about different events that are happening? It’s a combination of some of those more human-centric things but also has some of that belonging baked into the way that we do things, like our rituals and how we come together. It’s those two things.

One of my reflections as I moved through management and got more humble about what I didn’t know was that every time someone joined a team, we had to recreate from scratch some of those rituals. Otherwise, no matter who they were, they wouldn’t feel like they belonged because they would be the person who came after we started doing things.

It became a bit of a thing where we would ask people once they’d settled in, we’d have like, “Let’s look at how we work as a team and what we could do differently.” Sometimes, it was too early for them to have any opinion, but it didn’t matter because they were part of that process, and they knew that process would change again.

It stops people from getting too entrenched in one particular perspective of a team. That can sometimes be a real barrier. People don’t mean to. They love their work, and they love who they work with. Someone else joins, and they forget. That can feel isolating at that moment. There is a lot of good advice there about things like rituals and some of the more structural stuff we do, as well as soft skills.

That brings us sadly to the end of this conversation. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface. I have a whole load of questions about unlearning that we didn’t even have time to cover. People are going to be reading, they’re going to be like, “This is interesting.” Are you open to people getting in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to understand more about your work that we haven’t tried to cover?

Reach Letesia

They can find me on LinkedIn, under Letesia Gibson, or on our website, TimeForNewWays.com. They can email me directly at [email protected]. This is a passionate topic of ours. I’m open to having conversations and hearing about people’s experiences. It feels important to talk about it and also learn from each other about what’s working and helping to create a community around how we make this more the norm.

That feels like a good thing to want to try it. We have readers that we speak to quite a lot. There’s an appetite for community work. Whether it’s a formal or an informal conversation, there’s a need and a want to try and share more together how we can do this better and how we can help other people do it better.

Thank you so much for your time. Unfortunately, that brings us to the end. Thank you so much for your time, Letesia. It’s been a pleasure. The reason I’m pausing is because I normally share a reflection of my own conversation. I have all these things going on in my head about all the different ways the work that we’ve seen in people’s experience.

The one thing I would take is the kind gentleness with which you talk about trying to make change. This is a journey. The people can try this and learn. We can work together. It’s not some big switch that you’re going to turn on and off loads of investment. It’s about making these small human connections and helping other people to prioritize those things. That’s been something that I will take away. Thanks for staying with us to the end. You can find out more about Letesia on the webpage and the links that we’ve talked about in the notes. Otherwise, it’s a massive thank you for me and a goodbye. Until next time.

 

Important Links

• New Ways
• Reinventing Organizations
• Letesia Gibson – LinkedIn
• [email protected]

 

About Letesia Gibson

Letesia has enjoyed a 20-year career working in research, future trends, consultancy, and coaching. During this time, she has created and led her own agencies and been an engaging leader in prominent consultancies working with clients all around the world on meaty, challenges and complex change projects.