The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias: Focus on Belonging
“I am speaking to you as I always have — as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award–winning author*
Cultivating connection is a two-sided endeavor. It involves the skill of building connection with others and also the value of knowing that others are cultivating connection with you. Ultimately, both sides of this enterprise impact performance. Have you ever been somewhere and felt the need to make yourself fit in? Haven’t we all felt this way to some degree? Middle school is infamous for being a time when no one fits when our bodies outpace our maturity and often our age, when we are all awkward but also not quite mature enough to be kind to one another. For many of us, our middle school years are not a time we reflect on fondly. It is a period when our brains are working desperately to feel understood and connected to those around us. It’s hard to recognize in the moment, but if you’ve spent time with a middle
schooler since, you know this desire to belong leads to some real challenges in performance. The same can be said of adults in the workplace.
This internal desire doesn’t actually change with age. Our brains are constantly trying to figure out whether we belong. Most researchers believe the need to belong is a critical psychological need. If we think about that primitive brain and the circumstances under which it developed, this makes sense. Are you more likely to be safe when you’re alone, or when you’re part of a group? Is it even possible to meet those psychological needs in isolation? We saw an extreme case of this in Tom Hanks’s film Cast Away. The main character, stranded on an island, contrived a relationship with a volleyball, Wilson, to maintain some semblance of sanity, to meet his psychological needs.
And yet, in so many ways, our workplace structures don’t cultivate belonging or promote connection. How often have you heard people use the word “fit” at work? We interview candidates and say they don’t “fit,” or someone quits and we say, “It’s for the best; they didn’t fit anyway.” We put the onus on people to mold themselves into what we need or are comfortable with, instead of building work environments where people can naturally thrive. Many organizations have mastered building talent in their own likeness instead of allowing their people to utilize their unique talents and perspectives.
How We Came to Value Belonging
Let’s begin with the basics: what is diversity and what is inclusion? “Diversity and inclusion” are often stated as if they’re one word, but they’re more akin to a doubles partnership in tennis — they’re each distinct in approach and ability and, of course, they’re better together. Diversity is about identity and representation, the composition of a workforce. The term “representation” is about parity; if you were to look at the U.S. Census and the percentages of race, national origin, gender, disability, veteran status, and other societal markers, does the workforce mirror those numbers? Is society represented in the organization’s workforce? Inclusion is the idea that instead of needing to fit into a culture, people can bring their differing perspectives and opinions to the larger group without fear of rejection. Vernā Myers, vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix and and founder of the Vernā Myers Company, states it this way: “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.”
Three other words have recently appeared in the diversity and inclusion conversation: belonging, engagement, and equity. Belonging is a human need, just like the need for food and shelter. Consider what it feels like to be unwelcome. You walk into a room and the conversation stops, or you speak up in a meeting and your boss dismisses your idea. Getting to a place of belonging, where everyone can contribute their best, is the ultimate goal of diversity and inclusion.
Engagement is ultimately about empowerment, being asked for your opinion. Simply telling people they can speak up is different from shifting the power dynamic and inviting them to speak, sincerely saying, “I want your thoughts on this idea,” or “I need your perspective on this problem.” It is not just being encouraged or asked, but actually being listened to.
Equity is about bridging the opportunity gap. Talking about equity can feel uncomfortable, due to the stratification in society that results in some people having more opportunity than others. These opportunities sometimes result from a bias in favor of a desirable trait. Think about how we associate height with power, or how attractive people are spoken to more often than unattractive people (it starts when we’re babies!). Sometimes these opportunities are affected by geography, like the enrichment activities I could access as a teenager in New York City in contrast to my peers in rural environments, or the number of free museums in Washington, D.C., as opposed to fee-charging museums in other parts of the world. And sometimes these opportunities are related to weightier characteristics like race, gender, national origin, and socioeconomics. For example, Hasan Minhaj, the host of Patriot Act, a weekly comedy show on Netflix, characterized graduating from college with debilitating student-loan debt as “starting a race, and then the guy with the starter pistol uses the gun to shoot you in the leg.”*
Equity is about acknowledging these large societal gaps exist and providing pathways to overcoming them. Equity is about bridging the opportunity gap and ensuring we’re not making decisions based on prestige or access. Instead, we’re looking at talent and capability more holistically. General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “If people don’t feel like they belong to your group, department, company, or corporation, they easily can and probably will find something else to believe in and belong to. The most important responsibility of leaders — no matter how busy they are and how many other priorities demand their attention — is to make their people feel like they belong.” *
So, what is belonging and how do we build it? Researchers R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary define belonging as “the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group or place, and as the basic fundamental drive to form and maintain lasting, positive, and significant relation- ships with others.”† Today many of us are compensated not for our ability to move something from here to there, but for our ability to think, solve problems, and achieve results through others. If we look back at what we know about the brain, we can’t possibly contribute our best ideas if we are in the primitive or even emotional parts of our brains. We need this sense of belonging to get to the High-Performance Zone, and we need to build relationships to remain there.
From THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO UNCONSCIOUS BIAS: How to Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection, and Create High-Performing Teams by Pamela Fuller, Mark Murphy, and Anne Chow. Copyright © 2020 by Franklin Covey Co. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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* Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: One World, 2015.
Patriot Act, season 2, episode 3, aired February 24, 2019. Los Gatos, CA: Netflix Studios.
* Hasan Minhaj, writer and creator; Richard A. Preuss, director. “Student Loans,”
* Martin Dempsey and Ori Brafman. Radical Inclusion: What the Post-9/11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership. Missionday, 2018.
† R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529. https://www.talentinnovation.org/publication.cfm?publi cation=1640.
