Belonging or Authenticity? Pick One.
Interview with Neha Bhatia, an Unofficial DEI Lead, for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research
Curated by Aly Hassell
This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our in-progress research that seeks to explore and answer the question: What does it mean to belong at work in a time of uncertainty? Are you interested in receiving our research insights when they’re released? Sign up here.
Meet Neha Bhatia
Neha Bhatia is a Research & Innovation Strategist and the Programming Strategy Lead for Women in Innovation. While primarily working across organizational design and brand strategy client projects, Neha has often taken on the additional (and unpaid) role of championing diversity and inclusion with her team. As a woman of color and visa holder, her personal experience of belonging at work is shaped by her perspective and pervasive feeling of not fitting into dominant work culture.
As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Neha as both an employee and as an unofficial DEI lead. Her interview touches on a few themes:
- The tradeoffs between fitting in and being yourself at work and the paradox of “authenticity”
- Why some employees might prioritize a few strong relationships over greater team belonging
- The strain of taking on DEI in an unofficial capacity
- The tipping point of diversity and inclusion
Here are a few highlights of our interview with Neha:
How do you define belonging?
“Belonging is a container that allows you to have a healthy relationship with yourself, your surroundings, and other people within it… If you have co-created that container with the people you’re connecting with, presumably, it’s a container of safety and that means you are naturally included within it.”
“Over the years, I’ve come to define belonging on a spectrum based on how interpersonal or organizational relationships impact my relationship with self, as well as the level of reciprocity I can feel from the other. This helps me determine how much effort I am going to put into belonging within [interpersonal or organizational] dynamics.”
What does belonging at work mean for you?
“It’s important for me to have strong and deep bonds. If that means being close to one or two people in an organization, but not as connected to the broader culture of the organization, that’s fine with me… I can’t expect to fit and feel connected everywhere I go.”
“When I first moved here my desire to belong was so strong and I found myself hiding or moving parts of myself around to be more palatable to the dominant culture. After 10 years of trying, I’ve started to create some boundaries that ensure I’m not trading my identity for belonging. It’s taken a while to get to this space and what stopped me before was that I didn’t give myself permission to define belonging for myself, and now I do. Now, it’s more important to fit within the individual dynamics that I build with people and to live and function within the agreements of that space.”
What changed that shifted your expectations for belonging at work?
“I kept failing at fitting in. Every time I thought I was making some progress, something would happen and it would remind me that I was never going to be fully accepted because membership to the dominant culture in our places of work and study required so much sacrifice. I would have to be ok with a lot of self-silencing, accepting of micro-aggressions that hurt in subtle but deep ways, not being able to speak up, and not being able to be my full self because it wasn’t what the culture was designed to value.
It just got to the point that it was affecting my relationship with my self-worth and self-identity. It stopped feeling worth it. I started to seek safety in smaller groups and individual relationships. Now, I place more value on those and less on a broader belonging within larger structures and groups.
This helped to fortify and build a better relationship with myself. It also allowed me to be a little bit braver in standing up for myself and for others and in larger organizing structures. I am clear on who I am and what I bring to the table and that isn’t something any organization can take away from me.”
“I am clear on who I am and what I bring to the table and that isn’t something any organization can take away from me.”
How does belonging relate to authenticity and inclusion?
“At its best, belonging allows you to be your most authentic self…
Authenticity and inclusion are really nice buzzwords that corporate America has been quick to co-opt without really understanding what it means to be authentic in the workplace. To say, ‘ you should/can bring your whole self to work’ — what does that really mean in practice? A whole self that comes to work isn’t always perky, chirpy and smiling, we are all living, breathing and constantly evolving humans.
Integral to that evolution is the ability to change and change is uncomfortable. To expect people to always be happy is incredibly damaging to their ability to show up authentically and sometimes be critical and ask ‘why’ or ‘is this necessary?’ Not being allowed to question the status quo is how we ended up with our current state of inequality, a lack of workers’ rights, and things like burnout.”
We understand that you’ve often (unofficially) led the charge for DEI within your teams. Why was that? What can companies do differently?
“At every company I’ve worked at, I’ve started DEI initiatives because I started to see how much of a platitude ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ had become. I couldn’t allow myself to be just another ‘metric’, or to check a box for their quotas. It doesn’t feel good to be just a number or face that helps these companies perform virtuosity, make more money, or gain more power while not making space at the table behind the scenes. My question is, what are you doing to support me and others like me after you bring us through the door? If I don’t use whatever little privilege I have to make a change then I am part of the problem.”
“It isn’t enough to bring people of color into a room. It starts to go somewhere when companies can create space for [POC] to grow in a way that makes sense for them, not in a way that makes sense for the norm which is modeled off a cis-het-white man. You can’t expect everybody to grow in the same way. An important step forward is when we figure out how to treat individuals as individuals? How do we meet each other where we are without judgment?”
“One of the ways that I think companies can start to [treat people as individuals] is to take the time to onboard people and make onboarding a dialogue. It shouldn’t be a one-way street where the employee is expected to adopt and merge with the values of the organization. If the goal is to set people up for success and to ensure long-term retention then it also needs to be a moment to get to know the person coming in. If you see a start date as the first day of a relationship that you are building with an employee then you need to invest in the foundation of that relationship. It might take longer but it yields long-term results because you’re creating a container of safety. You’ve started a conversation that communicates respect and trust and I am not saying anything new when I say everyone wants to be treated with respect and doing so creates a virtuous cycle. Happy people work better, we know this.”
“One of the ways that I think companies can start to [treat people as individuals] is to take the time to onboard people and make onboarding a dialogue. It shouldn’t be a one-way street where the employee is expected to adopt and merge with the values of the organization.”
How do we move forward during or after this time of uncertainty in fostering belonging at work?
“We have to reimagine what business can look like to include humans because we are part of organizations and we make them. Sure, you can keep making people redundant and finding new ones to replace them. But that’s not sustainable.”
“Diversity has been a buzzword for some time now, but there has been very little meaningful forward progress beyond platitudes. It’s hard, uncomfortable, slow work and there is no place for that when companies only measure success based on the bottom line…
I’d like to think we’re at a tipping point because of the protests and the conversations that are happening in a mainstream way now. The fact that companies are now willing to invest in a DEI lead, that’s a big step forward to me. It means we are willing to put a value on this work and not assume it can be done for free.”
Further Reading
Throughout our research, we’ll continue to share peeks into interviews and resources.
More from Neha:
- Neha recently created the Radical World Study Group, a curriculum for transformation on interpersonal, community, society and world scales
More on Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research:
