The abbreviation DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has become common across all kinds of organizations, from businesses to educational institutions. The aim of these efforts is for organizations to create a broad-based team of employees who all have equal opportunity and compensation and are allowed to bring their full selves to work. These efforts benefit organizations both because they increase employees’ work satisfaction and because well-functioning diverse teams increase an organization’s ability to innovate.
Over the past few years, many DEI efforts have added “belonging” as a core element (and have sometimes been recast as DEIB). The concept of belonging focuses on an individual’s sense that they feel like a member of the community and deserve to be there.
The sense of belonging matters, because it affects how people deal with adversity. Everyone has bad days at work. You may make a mistake and cost your company money or lose a client. You may get into an argument with a colleague or have a bad interaction with your supervisor.
When something goes wrong, that can either be motivating or demotivating—and belonging plays a role in determining which it is. Motivation is driven by a combination of the importance of the goal you are pursuing and your belief that you can achieve that goal through your actions.
If you feel like you do not belong in your role or in your organization, then you may interpret bad things that happen at work as additional evidence that you should not be there. You begin to assume that your colleagues and bosses also believe that you do not belong. As a result, each setback decreases your belief that you are capable of succeeding at work. Ultimately, this decreases your motivation to work, because you feel like your actions will be ineffective.
In contrast, if you feel like you do belong in your role and in your organization, then setbacks are just part of the normal challenge of doing difficult things. Your belief in yourself creates a sense that your actions can lead to desirable outcomes. As a result, setbacks can be motivating. You feel as though you can learn from your mistakes and emerge as a stronger contributor.
So, when in a leadership role in an organization, you want to foster a sense of belonging. That involves both your explicit interactions with your employees as well as the environment you create.
Explicitly you want to reinforce that you value the people you work with and that they are an important part of the organization. You then have to follow that up with your actions. You have to listen to your team’s ideas—even if they are not ones that you feel you can implement. You have to mentor your team members and demonstrate with your time that you are invested in their success.
Finally, you have to treat the mistakes of team members as growth opportunities. You may be frustrated by a mistake or situation, but you have to be careful not to be frustrated with the person. When you direct your frustration at an individual, you are sending a message that they do not belong.
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