Building a Culture of Belonging with Shasta Nelson

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Hi, I'm Susan Drummond. Welcome to the Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. This episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. Go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. Are you curious about your own development path to enlightened leadership? Take our free 5 minute quiz@susandrum.com to discover your superpower and the roadblocks that could get in the way of effective leadership. Today we're focusing on the concept of belonging in the workplace. And I'm excited to introduce my guest, Shasta Nelson. A pioneer in belongingness, Shasta is a keynote speaker and author of three books in which she shares how to build healthy relationships, including the Business of Friendship, Making the Most of Our Relationships, where we Spend the Most of our time. For over 15 years, Shasta has been translating the science of human connection into actionable practices that lead to greater belonging in our workplaces. Her expertise has activated organizations such as Google and LinkedIn to intentionally create and accelerate the high trust relationships that lead to higher employee retention, engagement, and collaboration. She's also appeared on the Today show and the Steve Harvey Show. So welcome, Shasta.

And now I can say I've been on your show. It's fabulous. Thanks for having me. That's right.

That's right. Well, I'm so glad you're here to talk about this very important topic, but let's talk about why it's important. So why is talking about belongingness in the workplace important? I.

It's so important. Like, we've had so much research for decades now showing, like, how having, and I know these words sound so soft, but like, having friendships at work makes a difference and, and how we, how much we feel like we belong to the company, to the team, to the leader. It all just scores out into so much of our success and our customer service and our retention and our engagement. And like every single thing we say we want when we're like, struggling with the challenges, when we're trying to figure out how to solve these problems. About 70 to 80% of all of our, like, organizational challenges are rooted in strained employee relationships or fractured team dynamics or ineffective communication. So yeah, when we want to, like, solve all these other things that seem so much more urgent, like, like profitable growth and competitive advantage and all these other things really behind all of that, if you just keep peeling it back, what you want are Employees and leaders and people who feel like they belong and they have a role and they have each other's backs. And so, yeah, these relationships are key to everything.

Yes, they are key. I, I talk about it in terms of team cohesion, right?

Yes.

Well, what's the glue that's holding together? Because otherwise you're just a series of individual contributors. And that actually doesn't accelerate what could be created when you have a synergistic team that's greater than any individual could do alone. There's a magic that happens. If you've ever been on a high performance team, you know, it. What we're really talking about is this glue factor of belongingness and how people feel that sense of belonging. And, and so what are leaders not get about this topic? What's a misconception?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people, their biggest fear is that, is that why would it benefit me if my employees are friends? Or worse, does it hurt me if my employees are friends? Because we picture them just not being productive, right? We picture them talking. We picture them talking about drama and having like all these little offside conversations. And what we need to pull back and remember is like, what we're really going after here is like people feeling the psychological safety, right? Is people really feeling like they are supported, people feeling like they're noticed, that they're seen, that they're appreciated. And that comes down so much. Like, we can say that, but people have to feel it. So one of the things I do when I go into a team or into an organization is I have like an assessment that I have everybody do. And to your earlier point, like, yes, we can be a high performing team, but how does everybody feel about how involved and engaged and wanted they are on that team makes such a huge difference. So for me, I come in and evaluate, like we. The science shows that there's three areas that we can judge the health of any relationship, any team, any culture by. And so being able to come in and kind of look at how does this team, how does each person on this team experience positivity, consistency and vulnerability? Like, and those like, play out with different words and different actions and all that kind of stuff. But basically, like, what's each person's perception of how engaged they are on the team? And that will give you your overall score of how engaged that team is and therefore kind of can extrapolate the success, the high performance and be able to kind of pull back. Like, I just did an assessment with a, with a team from a Fortune 500 company. And it's fascinating because the team as a whole is like they've been hand selected to be like the people on this company that they really want working out of silos and building these relationships across silos and really trying to be the highest performers for their company, the highest influencers, the mentors for this company. And we can look at overall their happiness levels, their engagement levels, how much mission they feel like. You can look at all those different things. But then you ask one question and this is kind of crazy. This is where I lose people a little bit is. But it's like, do you have a best friend that you would say as at work? Do you have a best friend at work? And you can pull apart the data based upon about a third of those who say, yes, they have a best friend at work versus about 2/3 of people who say they don't have a best friend at work. And almost on every single question that you would want, scoring high with levels of engagement, with happiness, with a sense of wanting to stay at the job, Their score is almost double. I mean, across the board. If they have a best friend at work. Work. So we might not come in and be like, wow, I'm really losing sleep over my employees not having best friends at work. But if you could be like, this is actually a very. Like, this actually has a chance of doubling the likelihood of me retaining this talent that I'm investing in and me having them feel more creative and me having them take bigger risks and wanting to mentor people. Like, if you actually could see that that's one of the, One of the surprising, I mean, I think that's a surprise to people is they don't really think they care about their friendships. But if you care about the outcomes, the friendships are like, can double. They're like an accelerator for the outcomes that you want.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm curious to know why it's a best friend because, you know, I would think it would be a friend. Right. Do you have somebody you would consider a friend at work? I wouldn't necessarily say it would be a requirement to have a best friend at work. So tell me more about that.

Yeah. So Gallup has been doing that question on their engagement as surveys for the last two decades. And I talked to their head scientist when I was working on my latest book, the Business of Friendship, when I was pulling together all the data for like, why it behooves us as the employee to have friends at work and why it behooves the or the organization for us to have Friends at work, pulling all that data together. And I interviewed him and he said, trust me. He said, we have tested this question with, do you feel close to people at work? Do you feel connected at work? Do you have friends at work? He said, we've tried all of them because we get so much pushback from people on the best friend that he's like, trust me, we would pull that out if we could. But for one stubborn fact, it is how people. The more they are likely to say they have a best friend, we watch their likelihood of being engaged go up seven times. And he goes, there's just no other question you can ask that, like, has that level of correlation to it. So certainly there's many other studies that show the more friends you have at work, if you feel liked at work, if you feel appreciated at work. So for sure, we want all of that. And, you know, I mean, I always kind of compare it to, like, when I'm talking to an audience, I say, how many of you have kids? You know, and would you ever send your kid to school and say, okay, so you are there for learning. So I don't want. You're not there to build friends. You're not there to build connections like this. Let's keep your friendships. And you're. You're like, learning life separate. You know, we would never, like, ask a child to, like, separate out, because we know on a very deep level that the kids who feel safest at school, who feel like they are connected, who have friends, are more likely to learn. They're more engaged, they're more successful, they're raising their hands more. They're. They're engaged in the classroom. Like, we know that their success is correlated to them having friends at work, at school. And yet somehow we get really uncomfortable. We've had this really erroneous belief build out through our business schools and our leadership styles that these are two areas of our lives that should be separate. And that just isn't true. Like, if you look historically back through, I mean, it used to be that we would be working in coal mines together, and we'd come out and we'd drink. You know, the men would drink together. I mean, we used to live in communities where we knew every person who was like, the grocery store person was also our friend. The. Like, we had community, which was relationships and work all intermingled. And it's only been the last number of decades that we've done so much damage. And it's contributing to our loneliness. It's contributing to burnout. It's contributing to, like, this high turnover. Like, we just see jobs as jobs. They're not places where we feel connected and loyal and have a community and, like, want to be there for life. Like, we just see it as one job that we can replace with another job and it's. It's costing us.

Yeah, yeah. And I think if, if you as a leader have that perspective, then you're also not going to have that type of retention that you're actually looking for. So it is important. But then how, as a leader, you know I can't control who's friends with who, right?

Yeah.

Or at least that's what a lot of leaders might say. So what is your response to that?

Yeah, we don't need to control who we're. Who's friends with who. What we need to be doing is saying, are we creating an environment where those friendships can happen? And first and foremost, like, when I do a lot of research, I'll ask people, like, do you have a best friend at work? Do you think it's appropriate to have a best friend at work? Do you think your supervisor wants you to have a friend at work? Do you think your organization wants you to have a friend at work? And it's fascinating to watch those numbers just drop. So, like, the truth of the matter is work is the number one place adults make friends. Like, so we can be uncomfortable with it, we can think it's kind of awkward, but it is happening. Yes, yes. Like, this is our school, this is where we're hanging out. Like, this is who we're interacting with. And so, yes, it is happening. But then it starts dropping exponentially where we ask, like, does your leader want you to have a friend at will? I don't know. I don't actually think they do. Like, it was kind of the proverbial, like, if we're talking around the water cooler and our boss starts walking up, we're going to quickly change the subject to, like, sound more productive and work related, you know, because we don't want to be caught talking. And so, but so number one, as a leader, like, am I telling my workforce that I want them to have friends at work? Am I making it a safe place? Is. Am I making sure they know it's appropriate? Do I. Am I showing them that I trust the research? Like, there is so much research right now. I mean, there's just so much research that our number one factor for job satisfaction is who we work with, you know, and whether, when we think about our jobs of like, retention, like, there's so much research that we can all kind of be like, well, I was taught that you should keep them separate. And I've had my own experience where this didn't work out well. And I'm like, at some point, you just have to be like, do I trust the research? And if so, then what am I saying? Doing modeling to tell people like, a. We want this to be a place where you want to be. Therefore, we want this to be a place where you feel supported. Therefore, we want you to have this be a place where you have friends. We want you excited to come to work. We want you excited to cover for each other. We want you comfortable, like, brainstorming and dreaming and creating and taking risks. Like, yes, we want you to enjoy being here and have friends while you're here. And so am I communicating that? Am I making it where they know where they can do that and they don't have to hide it? And, like. Like, am I talking about my friends? Am I talking about what. How my friendships have helped me as being a leader? Like, yeah, I just. You're getting me on my soapbox now. But I'm like, one of my keynotes is called the connected leader. And it's so important, because if leaders are lonely. And they are. But if a lo. If a leader is lonely, like, we know that loneliness creates less empathy. We know that people who are lonely see more threats. We know that loneliness. People who are lonely, like, get jealous more and get kind of more catty, take things more personally. Like, when we know that we are functioning from a place of loneliness, and we always have that thing, like, it's lonely at the top. And I'm just like, it doesn't have to be. If there's anybody. If there's anybody in our organizations that we need to make sure are not functioning from a lonely place, it's our leaders. Like, we need connected leaders. We need leaders who are feeling supported, appreciated, and seen. And then we need leaders who are making sure that the people are under them and around them are also getting those needs met. So we definitely. The way of leadership in the past may have been to keep a distance. It may have been to, like, kind of like. Like, b. I know. I have all the answers. Like, there may have been this hierarchical sense of leadership in the past, but that's not the leadership of going forward. That's not the present leadership that works for us as leaders or for our team. So we really have to, like, be willing to look at this differently and say, okay, how do I show up and live A connected life. And I can't live a connected life if I'm lonely at work. Like, that's the big takeaway from this, Susan. Like, I come at this from a loneliness. Like, I've been in the friendship space and loneliness space for 15 years, studying and researching all of this. And it is. You have a 1% chance of having a connected life. Like, not being among the lonely people in our culture right now. And it's an epidemic. So over 60% of us are lonely on a regular basis. So when we look at the 40% who are living connected lives, they only have a 1% chance of being in that spot without having a best friend at work or having close friends at work. So it's almost virtually impossible to be lonely in your job and make it up, you know, in your app, in your off hours. So this just is good humanity and good business.

Yes.

Yeah.

And. And at the end of the day, it's required in order for that retention and.

Yeah.

Our house team to come together. Now, what is a leader supposed to do specifically to create the environments where friendships can flourish?

Yeah. So first of all, it's giving the permission. It's modeling. You know, every time we get together as a team, it should be. We should be taking time to be talking about things that we. I'm putting, like, quote marks, air quotes in the air, like, personal things, but, like, recognizing that we're all humans, we all have other things going on in our lives besides just work, but helping facilitate some of those conversations, helping normalize those conversations, you know, so I'm a big fan of when it's a small team getting together, just making sure we all have the chance to kind of share what was a highlight from the weekend for everybody. It can be as simple as that. It can also be, if you've got a bigger team, it can be breaking people into groups of twos and threes. And this can happen hybrid. It can happen. You know, if you're a. Managing a nursing comp. Nursing floor, like, as we're kind of team gathering before the shift starts, it can happen in any kinds of context. The question is, am I helping facilitate and being like, you know what, get in groups of three right now and let's just share with each other. Like, what is one thing you hope for from our shift today? Like, what's one feeling you'd love to feel? Or like, what's one thing that you're really proud of from yesterday at the end of our shift today? You know, like, like before we all go home today? Like, what's one thing that you feel really good about what you did today? But it's like helping ask the question and give the space and give the time and the permission for people to kind of start having these conversations. And so I have a list of questions that I'm always like, here's. Pick a question. Like, I'm not. I worry less about what the exact question is. And like, are you holding space? Are you providing the time? Are you giving the permission? You know, and also in all of our companies, it's going to look different. Like, for some of us, it's. Do I actually have a. A space where people congregate? Is, do I have a place, like, sometimes it's an issue of actual architecture of like, do I have a place like a break room, so to speak, where people are hanging out? Am I actually telling them it's okay to go on break at the same time, like, what kind of an environment am I creating where people are actually connecting? So we really have to be responsible as leaders of like saying, what am I doing to help facilitate that, normalize it and give the expectation that it should be happening.

Yeah. And maybe the underlying judgment, like, if everybody's hanging out in the. Oh, they're not doing work all the time. Yes, yes, obviously it is a balance, but I think, you know, there's an inherent. Oh, I shouldn't be doing that. And if you can encourage that, that's okay, you know, to take a break in the middle of your day, which you need for resilience purposes anyway. Totally, totally able to do that. And totally. And have that experience. I know with our team, one of the things that we do is when we have an hands meeting there, we always start with one question that someone is curious about. We rotate who's going to ask the question.

Oh, great question.

Can be anything. Like, what is. What's a favorite pet that you've had? Tell us about that pet.

Yes.

And bring a picture of them. Right.

And love it.

And people just. I mean, that question in particular, people just lit up and you learn there's always something more that you can learn about your colleagues. And so I think that that's important. And I think also obviously, really understanding people's motivations, leadership styles. That's why we do all the work we do using the enneagram with teams. So people really get a deep sense of motivation or pet peeves, things like that. And we even in. In companies will group them by leadership style to have a discussion. And they certainly form bonds with people that they didn't know in other departments that actually have very similar worldviews and that brings people together. So there's lots of sort of organized things you can do. And obviously I would assume the, the informal environments. Right. The, the, the happy hours, the golf, you know, golf kind of outing that allows people to connect outside of work and really bring it potentially a different side of themselves and potentially more real relaxed.

Yep. And what you're talking about is we are human and we all have various elements of what makes us us. And certainly learning about what we do and how we work and how we can work well together and all that stuff is so valuable and such a big part of it. But sometimes it's the little things like the pet and the kind of like, how did you know? How did you get into this job? And like some of those kinds of things that are a little bit more around that help us. That's when we talk about bonding, when we look at the science of bonding. So I was mentioning this a little bit earlier and I can kind of hit it a tiny bit more. And is that we can look at every single study that's ever been done on what builds trust, what builds healthy marriage, what builds a healthy team, Anything that's like social relationship. You can look and these three things are present and we can use different words for them, but every other thing we say we want in a relationship is an example of these three things, a synonym of these three things or an outcome of these three things. And that is positive emotion, consistent time together, and vulnerable vulnerability, which is ultimately incremental sharing. And so what we need to have in every. When we look at like psychological safety on a team, it's how much am I creating these three factors, how much am I providing at the space for consistency. That one's sometimes the easiest one in a workplace because we're more consistent with the people we work with than we are usually our friends outside of work. We're often seeing them talking to them more often we're paid to be together. So that one's often easier. That one I, I do a lot more with remote workforce and hybrid now because that one is not as natural happening as naturally as it used to for a lot of companies. But the consistency one happens. But you know, those are issues of how frequently do we get together, am running team meetings, am I making sure that we are spending time talking during those times, are we, are we doing memorable things together every once in a while, are we making memories and going and doing something fun? So consistency is like the hours we're logging and the spending of time together. But then positive emotion, interestingly enough, is often the one that scores the lowest on organizational cultural assessments that I do. But that one's about how much pleasant emotion is somebody feeling at work. And that is doing gratitude and inspiration and hope and joy and laughter and, and all those things. And we can't feel those things if we don't like the people around us. We can't feel like even if we succeed, we're not like pleasant emotions. We want them high fiving each other, we want them feeling like their sense of accomplishment together. We want them feeling proud, we want them celebrating like, and they have to like each other. They have to feel close to each other to be doing some of those things. So, like, learning how to really create more pleasant emotions and giving space for all of that is so, so, so important. And one of my, you know, one of the favorite questions we can do and like, when you're talking about your team meetings is going around the circ being like, let's go around and each share with each other, like, where do you go for inspiration, you know, or what are the things that bring you joy? And like, just even naming a pleasant emotion and asking people to like, talk about it is helps raise the pleasant emotions and also tells people, oh, they care that I'm hopeful. Oh, they care that I'm inspired. Oh, they care that I'm proud. That's great. So just asking the question sometimes can move you so far forward as a leader. And then that vulnerability, and that's one of the things you're speaking to. And we're not talking vulnerability about disclosure here, we're talking about vulnerability of like just feeling like we're seen in the different elements of our lives that we can have an opinion, that we can throw out a solution for a problem that we can say, I don't know if, I don't know if we can say, I need help if I can say. But like, yeah, talking about my pet is like a small act of vulnerability. And every time we're learning a little something about somebody else, it's giving us glue to your earlier word. It's helping us have something else to feel close to you. It's helping us feel like we know you and we can't feel close to somebody that we don't feel like we know. And so that act of vulnerability, of sharing those things, they might seem insignificant or silly even to some people, but that's the stuff that helps us feel like, oh, I know something about you. Or like, oh yeah, that's so interesting. And we like resonate with each other. We like feel emotions when we hear those things. And so those aren't nothing. Those are big deals. Like you cannot bond, you cannot create team cohesion without giving people these little pieces of gathering information for us to feel known by each other.

Yes. And those little bits of information for vulnerability. But I would also include how you deal with mistakes and failures as that vulnerability piece. I've worked lately with a lot of teams who are, you know, we want to learn from mistakes, but they're a bit harsh. And so there's CYA mentality that you don't, you're not creating any sort of safety, psychological safety in that. So I think you want to really look as a leader. Often I say it's really about how are you, how do you treat yourself when you make a mistake? Because I guarantee the way that you treat yourself is the way you are going to treat others when they make one. And I know for myself, I used to be very hard on myself for making a mistake. And it has been a journey to relax that and see it as an opportunity for learning and growth. And as I do that, then I relax the standard for others to make sure we get the learning. Obviously we need to know that and drilling in on that, but it's all in the energetic way you're approaching it. And so that last piece I think is really important. How does the organization hold risk taking, mistake making and failure?

Yes. So I. So when I teach these three requirements, I teach them on a triangle and positive emotion is the foundation. And then the two arms up the triangle are consistency and vulnerability. And all three of these things have to keep cycling. And a relationship and a culture is nothing but the group's relationship. Right. So we can talk about a relationship between you and me and judge the health of our relationship by how much we practice these three things. And we can judge the health of a culture, of an organization based upon how the collective practices these three things. So what you're describing is so perfect because like we have to have that positive emotion for us to want to show up and be consistent. And when we're slightly consistent, then we are going to want to learn a little bit about each other. So every time we interact, we're hopefully taking in information and practicing a little bit of vulnerability and then it has to go right back around and do those three things all over again. So the very most important response after vulnerability and to be to your point so well made, vulnerability is taking risks it's throwing out an idea. Just brainstorming takes incredible vulnerability. Just like suggesting something like saying, let's try this. Innovating all those things we want is incredible vulnerability. And if we don't want to break the cycle of bonding, the very next thing we have to go back to is positivity, which is pleasant. Emotions, which is how do we make sure somebody feels accepted and loved after that act of vulnerability? How do we make sure that somebody feels appreciated and cheered for and celebrated, no matter whether that was failure or success? How do we normalize that? When somebody does something brave and vulnerable, we reward it. We leave that person knowing they are accepted still, like, that's our greatest fear is rejection, not being accepted. Like, thinking that we put our neck out there too far. Like, you know, and so that we have to come back to that positive emotion because then we're going to be more likely to want to repeat that experience and try again, which is the consistency. And every time we try, it's vulnerable. These three things have to keep working. And to your point, every relationship stalls out when one of those three things starts lagging. And so if we can't respond to vulnerability with affirmation and some verbal way of expressing acceptance, we will break down our culture and we will not have psychological safety, that is the ability to show up and throw out a crazy idea. And no, we won't be held, you know, we won't be punished for it. And that only comes when you can practice these three things over and over and over and over.

Yes, yes. Now, what is one thing that you would suggest leaders try tomorrow to improve the ability of their team to form friendships?

Yeah, it's a beautiful question. I would actually even back it up one step further. And I would say, what can a. What would I give to a leader to say, how connected are you personally right now? So to your earlier point of, like, check in with yourself first, because if you're not a connected leader, you're going to. Everything else is just going to be, like, trying to go through the motions and you're not going to be able to build a connected team. So I always say start with an honest assessment. Like, take a scale of 1 to 10. 10 being. I feel so supported, I feel so connected. I feel so appreciated. I feel like I have the people around me that I need. And A1 is like, I'm starving, I'm lonely. I don't feel like I've got the support. I feel like I'm giving to everyone else. I don't feel like anyone's giving to me. And, like, where are.