The Corner Piece of the Workplace Puzzle
You are invited to join the alumni board at your alma mater. Now imagine walking into a board room where you instantly think, “I don’t know if this is going to be the space for me.” You recognize that although you are dressed in business casual, like the email said, you “missed the memo” to wear the school colors. The board chair calls the meeting to order and says, “Okay, now remember the person who is not wearing the school colors will have to sing the alma mater.” You begin to sweat because you may have sung the song once at graduation. The group laughs and the person next to you says, “they’re just kidding,” and you offer a fake laugh.
The meeting proceeds and all new board members are asked to state their name, the years they were on campus, and why they joined the board. The first couple of new board members share that they love their alma mater, that all their family members went to the school, and how they are honored to serve. You experience another panic moment. The reason you said “yes” to serving was a classmate asked you to join, and because you come from a generation that emphasized having a seat at the table, you agreed even though your time at the school was not great, and your children experienced some of the same challenges years later.
It’s your turn to introduce yourself to the group and you say, “my classmate asked me to serve, and anyone who knows them, knows they don’t take no for an answer.” Everyone laughs in agreement. Phew, your turn is over!
A Basic, Yet Complicated Desire
Can you think of a time in which you weren’t sure if you belonged? Most of us can. I was in that room in the scenario above. As a staff member, I was there to support our volunteers. It was my ability to draw on my own belonging experiences that allowed me to be present when that new board member came to me and said, “What did I get myself into?” I empathized and asked questions that helped me understand that the challenge the board member was having was all about belonging.
During this board member’s years of service, we engaged in conversations that contributed to their self-efficacy within the space that resulted in them contributing more to conversations rather than sitting quietly in the meetings. By the end of the board member’s term, they had acquired a new wardrobe full of the school colors, right down to the socks, and left with a sense of pride in their alma mater to become a wonderful advocate for others to serve.
Belonging is a basic human desire, which has helped us survive as a species. So why is fostering belonging within our professional lives so difficult? Perhaps because it requires our emotions, and we are conditioned to think we should leave our feelings at home.
For more than 10 years, I have and continue to coach alumni volunteers, donors, and students on navigating advancement engagement experiences. Reflecting on my own belonging journey and the start of my advancement career in which I was tasked with developing and implementing programming for underserved constituents, I remember the amount of energy expended trying to learn the unspoken rules of an organizational culture and identifying and building goodwill with colleagues I needed to help me gain support for the projects I was responsible for.
Throughout the years of functioning in spaces in which I felt like an outsider based on certain aspects of my varying identities, I nurtured my capacity of belonging that was comfortable and sustainable for me. Displaying muted signals like incorporating the school colors in my braids or having select items of clothing, provided instant community acceptance at a surface level. I would participate in opportunities that allowed for relationship building with colleagues in various advancement departments and through informal conversations. Trust was built from discussing and sometimes teaching others about diverse perspectives and practical solutions to elevate our work. There were moments of anxiety and sometimes fear as I learned to trust my voice when offering dissenting strategies or proposing programming opportunities that had never been done before.
My years as an advancement practitioner provide a nuanced understanding and approach to assessing environments for inclusivity and creating opportunities for internal and external stakeholders in navigating their own belonging experiences. Transitioning from a CASE District volunteer to a full-time CASE staff member, I have brought my research knowledge, practitioner approach, and lived experiences to The OIC: CASE's Opportunity and Inclusion Center. The OIC provides curriculum and skill development experiences to build the capacity of advancement professionals utilizing the CASE Competencies Model and Career Journey Framework.
The word “belonging” is increasingly included within the framework of diversity, equity, and inclusion. That is encouraging in the sense that it shows organizations are valuing the importance of belonging in the workplace. At the same time, as DEIB becomes more commonplace, we must be vigilant that belonging doesn’t get lost in the mix. We must understand it for its own merits.
In my professional opinion belonging is an important corner piece of the workplace puzzle. It is a complex metric that can assist leaders in measuring employee productivity and morale. Organizations can positively impact their staff retention by intentionally creating and managing strategies that evoke an ongoing sense of belonging through equipping supervisors with skills that enable them to foster a culture of belonging as a partnership with their employees.
The Delicate Balance of Belonging While Being Distinct
With all things, too much of one thing can evolve into something unhealthy. According to James Clear in his bestselling book, Atomic Habits, “there is tremendous pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.”
As our advancement organizations strive to create a culture of belonging, we must also recognize when the price to be a part of the group is rigid and requires absolute loyalty over dissenting voices. This means understanding that unhealthy belonging habits can create situations in which individuals don’t feel comfortable expressing divergent opinions or feel judged when they do—or in more clinical terms, cultures of groupthink, judgmental outgroup treatment, and in-group self-silencing.
At CASE, we define belonging as when individuals feel accepted, secure, safe, and supported to be authentic and be true to who they are. This definition, although aspiring, is complex for any organization to implement. Individuals hold multiple social identities at any given time and depending on the context of the environment it may activate an individual’s need for inclusion or their need for differentiation. The balancing act of wanting to be simultaneously the same, yet different is called “optimal distinctiveness.”
Optimal Distinctiveness theory suggests that individuals strive to find balance between being similar enough to others to feel connected and belonging to a group, while also being distinct enough to feel unique and different from others. An employee's sensitivity level for a need to connect or be distinct varies and is dynamic—a one-size approach will not work. Research shows that folks who are younger in age and newer to their profession can have a greater need for optimal distinctiveness while those who are more seasoned in age and secure in their professional identities may not prioritize or need as much optimal distinctiveness in the workplace.
Leaders and managers within advancement organizations should reflect on the intentionality around work group compositions and the effects it can have on individuals’ identities and prioritization for optimal distinctiveness. This could be accomplished by intentionally inviting those newer to the profession to participate on teams across disciplines, for instance on strategic planning sessions, in which their ideas and perspectives are valued and encouraged by senior professionals.
This is nicely exemplified by looking at CASE’s flagship training program for early-career professionals, CASE Summer Institutes. For one week advancement professionals from advancement services, alumni relations, communication and marketing, and fundraising come together for an intensive learning experience. Early career professionals engage with their peers who are a part of the same discipline to make connections around what they were learning and what challenges they were facing, along with participating in organized cross-discipline opportunities. Experienced advancement professionals serve as faculty members and cohort leaders share their knowledge and wisdom with the next generation of advancement professionals. Attendees come away with an understanding of where they fit into the profession, and that they belong to a community and diverse network in which their distinctiveness is valued. That opportunity to gather and be uplifted with others who understand the work can feed a portion of our human need to connect and belong within our profession.
Tips for Encouraging Optimal Distinctiveness:
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Seek out dissenting voices to help prevent groupthink and encourage varied perspectives. Through skills development trainings, managers can learn how to lead by example and model openness to receiving dissent and how to appreciate varied points of view.
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Conduct regular check-ins with staff to discuss their thoughts and concerns and explore if staff members are engaging in self-silencing practices in particular environments and why.
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Encourage cross-functional collaboration to break down possible barriers of in-group/out-group team behavior and build capacity for staff to collaborate with others from different teams while also building a tolerance for dissenting perspectives.
Belonging Comes Down to Partnership
Is it the organization's or the employee’s responsibility to create a culture of belonging? This is a question I often receive when facilitating conversations with advancement organizations about building their team’s capacity in creating a more inclusive organizational culture. My answer is that it is a shared responsibility. Belonging or not belonging at work is a collection of actions and behaviors that an individual will experience in their work environment.
Organizations can offer experiences and influence environments to expand their capacity of being inclusive by embracing a multitude of social norms; but an organization cannot dictate if those actions and behaviors will make a person feel like they belong. The employee has the self-agency to determine if the actions and behaviors they experience at work evoke a sense of belonging for them. Research shows that when individuals have comfort in knowing what to expect, engage in behaviors that are attractive and normal for them, have shared experiences, know they can relate with others, and know their voice and skills are valued, that’s when they feel they belong.
Fostering a culture of belonging does not have prescribed sequential steps to check off a list, instead it is an organism where an organization and their employees must work together to cultivate trusted environments and develop organizational and personal habits centered on emotional and psychological connections.
Tips for Fostering Belonging in the Workplace:
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Organizations can partner with identity-centered affinity groups to consider their thoughts, feelings, and experiences to understand what actions, policies, and organizational habits contribute or deter the outcome of belonging with the organization.
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Employees can recognize and seek support if they are holding on to previous or current workplace hurt that may be impacting their participation in activities that could lead to a sense of belonging.
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Senior leaders and human resource teams can support managers in assisting their staff to align the organization’s vision and mission with their staff’s personal values and goals.
It Takes Practice
Curating opportunities and practices to support pathways toward belonging is complex, dynamic, and necessary. There may be no universal step-by-step checklist to guarantee the result of everyone on your team feeling like they belong, but that doesn’t need to be the goal. The goal should be the practice of coming together as human partners, with a shared understanding of how it feels to be connected or not connected to a group. Through our shared human need we can look to optimal distinctiveness theory to craft agile human development plans for our staff; we can approach belonging as a partnership between the organization and employee, requiring both parties to see their role as active participants.
The need to connect in an authentic way—to build relationships—is essential for advancement professionals. That ability to connect outwardly only gets stronger when employees know they belong to a team in which they are accepted for who they are.
Learn more about the member services offered through The OIC: CASE’s Opportunity and Inclusion Center.
About the author(s)
Jessica Elmore, Ed.D. (she/her) joined CASE in 2021 and serves as Senior Director of Cross-Cultural Learnings at CASE within the CASE OIC: Opportunities and Inclusion Centerᵀᴹ. Dr. Elmore is a scholar-practitioner who is an expert in the interconnection of educational advancement and diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
Jessica develops the DEIB curriculum for CASE@Campus bespoke trainings; serves as a speaker for CASE Academy, CASE Summit, CASE Summer Institutes, along with facilitates interactive capacity building experiences for educational advancement organizations, globally. Jessica developed CASE’s first online DEIB course titled: The Journey Starts with You: DEIB in Advancement.
Dr. Elmore has over 10 years of experience creating award-winning external programming; cultivating and managing relationships with domestic multicultural and international alumni and students and developing diverse lived experience engagement strategies for alumni and donors. Jessica was a member of CASE District VI cabinet and served as a longtime volunteer including serving as lead faculty for the Diversity and Student Philanthropy Symposium.
Jessica has her doctorate in educational leadership, a master’s degree in business administration from Kansas State University, and she received her mass communication degree from Grambling State University.
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March-April Issue of Currents
DIGITAL ONLY ISSUE - Institutions are visualizing success with innovative dashboards. Plus, help for students experiencing homelessness, belonging as the corner piece of the work place puzzle, and more.