Culture of Belonging

Establishing a genuine culture of belonging takes more than signing new employees up for payroll and benefits.

What more could they possibly want? And how can executives, managers or entrepreneurs provide it?

Those are some of the things we’re going to explore with the Jonathan Stutz, co-author of Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders: A Guide to Building a Culture of Belonging.

What You’ll Discover About Building a Culture of Belonging:

* The role of leaders in supporting a culture of belonging in organizations

* How “dropping a pebble” contributes to building a culture of belonging

* Why building a culture of belonging is not the responsibility of the Human Resources Department

* Why one-on-one meetings are a massive opportunity to create connection with employees

* And much more!

Guest: Jonathan Stutz

Jonathan Stutz, M.A. (he/him/his) is the President of Global Diversity Partners, Inc.

He has over 25 years’ experience working in leadership roles at companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Zulily.

Jonathan earned his M.A. from City University of Seattle in Organizational Leadership and B.A. in Political Science from the University of Washington.

Jonathan serves on the Board of Trustees for the Bellevue, WA non-profit, Youth Eastside Services, and has served as Human Services Commissioner for the cities of Bellevue and Kirkland, WA.

Jonathan and his wife, Stacie, have been married for 42 years and have two adult daughters and a cherished English Crème Golden Retriever, Simon. They split time between Palm Desert, CA and Kirkland, WA.

Related Resources:

If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Leadership & Management episodes.

Contact Jonathan and connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Also visit his book website and Global Partners Diversity website.

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Expert Tips on How to Establish a Genuine Culture of Belonging 

Establishing a genuine culture of belonging takes more than signing new employees up for payroll and benefits. But what more could they possibly want? You might be thinking. And how can executives, managers or entrepreneurs provide it? Those are some of the things we’re going to explore when we come back, so stay tuned.

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the weekly podcast for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line.

I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and I have a super guest for you today. He’s Jonathan Stutz. Jonathan is currently the president of Global Diversity Partners, Inc. and has over 25 years of experience working in leadership roles at companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Zulily. He is also active in his community, serving on the Board of trustees for the Bellevue, Washington nonprofit Youth Eastside Services, and he served as Human Services Commissioner for the cities of Bellevue and Kirkland, Washington.

Jonathan is also the coauthor of a new book called Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders: A Guide to Building a Culture of Belonging. And you guessed it, that’s what I want to talk to him about.

So let’s have him join us now. Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Jonathan.

Thank you Hanna, it’s great to be here. Looking forward to the discussion.

Me too. Number one, congratulations on your new book, Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders. I get the sense that there’s a lot of business decision makers out there who recognize the value of having a culture of belonging and might say they have a culture of belonging in their vision, statement, or mission statement. But when it comes down to the day to day nitty gritty, they often prefer to assign that responsibility to whomever handles human resources as if they were a cruise director.

And I would love for you to share your thoughts about the role of leaders in supporting a culture of belonging in organizations.

Well, leaders are really key, and what we say is inclusive. Leadership is leadership. And I think, you know, when you think about leaders and what they’re trying to accomplish for their organizations, whether it’s for profit or nonprofit, small business, large scale operation, even companies with large as Amazon’s and your Microsoft that I’ve worked for, they all want to build a high performance team, a highly effective team.

And to do that, you really want to create a culture where everybody feels that they have that kind of founder’s mentality, that they really have ownership and can be accountable for the work and are trusted to do that, leaders need to create a relationship. They need to create an environment where each person feels seen, heard, valued, and understood. And that’s not easy to do. It’s an evolution. It takes time.

But the good thing is, through daily practices, as we talk about in the book, it can be done and it can be done as part of the rhythm of the business as things that the leaders are doing every day, all the time.

Well that’s great. And I would imagine some people are thinking to themselves, hey, I’m busy enough as it is. What am I supposed to do to foster this culture of belonging, of inclusion? Can you give us some examples?

Sure, absolutely. And the thing is, that when folks come to us and diversity professionals, people who do the work that I do, they often think they’ll come and they say, well, what are the 2 or 3 really big things I can do to, you know, change the culture, move the culture. And the thing is, it’s not 2 or 3 big things. It’s little things every day. And it may be just 2 or 3 things during a week. And the beauty of this is that it can be done through the rhythm of the business, through the employee life cycle.

So you ask for a specific example. So one of them is this idea of creating a speak up culture. How do you create a culture where you actually encourage and support employees sharing their ideas, their perspective, and even, you know, pushing back and giving a, you know, contrarian opinion? So we introduced something called the pause button. And the pause button is when you hear or see something that might be, um, you don’t agree with. It might be upsetting to another person.

We say it’s best to hit the pause button and actually discuss the issue in the moment. So the pause button gives everyone permission to stop the conversation to prevent moving on to the next agenda item or topic when more conversation or introspection is really necessary.

So when a when a team member says, you know, hey, hold on, let’s hit the pause button or wait a minute, I’m hitting the pause button. It’s a cue to everyone in the room that they need to slow down and think more critically, and just with greater contemplation before moving forward. And this starts with the leaders modeling this behavior.

And we use two concepts in the book about when it’s dropping a pebble. And this is the idea that it’s a small pebble you drop and you model a behavior and somebody sees that behavior, and then they take it to the next meeting and they drop a pebble. So another example would be women get interrupted in meetings at a much higher percentage than men. University of Washington in Seattle, a bit of study, and it showed that women get interrupted much more frequently.

So let’s say you’re in a meeting and a woman’s getting interrupted, and I’m there and I’m one of the people in the room. It doesn’t have to be the leader, but it could be the leader. Role model behavior. And they drop a pebble and they say, hey, hold on a second. Hanna’s not done speaking. Let’s let her finish and then we’ll come over to you.

And we want to hear your idea too. But let’s hear Hanna’s idea. And so by modeling that behavior, that interrupting is not appropriate in our culture. Other people will go to the next leading, and they’ll feel more comfortable speaking up, especially when they see the leaders do it or other people do it, and they create a culture where interrupting is not appropriate.

Same thing’s true in, you know, we’ve all had that experience where you’re in a meeting and somebody shares an idea, and ten minutes later somebody shares almost the exact same idea, and that person gets traction and gets all the credit for the idea. And so, again, somebody can step in and say, hey, hold on a second. That’s a great idea. But it was also something that was just said ten minutes ago by Claudia. And, uh, let’s give credit where credit is due, and maybe the two of you can, you know, work well together to kind of build on that.

So you’re not throwing that second person under the bus. You’re just kind of shining the light on the person that had the original idea. And so that’s another way to evolve the culture over time in a meeting format.

I like those ideas. I can see where they could be very powerful. But what about Claudia? Shouldn’t she be the one saying, hey, wait a minute, I said that ten minutes ago? Or Hanna saying, hey, I’m talking. I’m not done yet. Why is it more powerful for a third person to say it?

Because oftentimes that first person, especially if they’re historically underrepresented in the room. So it could be an organization like in tech where you have a much higher percentage of men and women, or even persons of color study that have been historically underestimated, historically marginalized. They may not feel comfortable speaking up now.

Absolutely, if they feel comfortable speaking up and say, hey, hold on a second, I wasn’t done speaking. Then then they’re asserting themselves. But you want to ensure that there’s people in the room that have got their back. And they often call this being an ally or being an advocate or an accomplice. Uh, the idea is that there’s people in the room that have their antennas up, and they’re looking to ensure that everybody is heard. And because we really need the diversity of ideas and perspectives.

So, yeah, absolutely. You’re right. The person himself should speak up. And, and we want to encourage them to speak up that oftentimes they won’t. And so it’s great when somebody else is in the room kind of looking out for them. And, and that makes that person feel, you know, hey, this is a place where people are going to have my back. And that encourages that culture of where people want to stay. They want to grow in their careers. They feel like this is a place they can achieve their own personal goals and aspirations.

Definitely. But how do you get people to be aware of it if the culture has always allowed someone to step on someone else’s lines or allow credit to be redistributed to someone more powerful, shall we say? How do you raise that awareness in the first place, so that there is a third party in the room and hopefully the leader?

Because we can talk about the ego part there about, well, I have all these agenda items and I have to get through this and we can talk about that later where somebody just rolls over the person that’s being interrupted because they’re busy or because they don’t value their contribution.

I mean, there’s a lot of little dynamics going on here that really requires a sense of awareness by somebody with some level of authority to hit the pause button and then for the rest of the crew to respect it.

Yeah, absolutely. And this gets back to your initial question because it’s not a responsibility of human resources. Certainly, human resources in the human resource function can help enable it. But it really does start with the leaders.

And the leaders need to model the behaviors that actually create the behaviors that you expect from your employees. When leaders speak up and share their values and even when they make mistakes and they interrupt somebody because they’re excited and just energized that they actually say, hey, you know what? I screwed up. I shouldn’t have been interrupting you or let me give credit where credit’s due, because that was an idea that I actually heard from so-and-so.

So it does absolutely start with a leader. And the leaders need to model that behavior. And then that sends a message to everybody in the room. They’re dropping pebbles, that this is the right, this is the paper we expect. These are the values of this organization and one of the most powerful ways to create the connection with employees. So to your point, employees feel that they’re safe speaking up and saying, you know, hey, I was speaking or that was my idea or pushing back is the one on one meeting.

So this is another daily practice we take for granted the one-on-one meetings that managers have with their employees. And I think it’s a massive opportunity to create connection with employees. So we talk about in our book, The Visible and Invisible Dimensions of Diversity, and we use this idea of a diversity tree.

And the leaves and the branches represent the visible dimensions. And these would be the things you see when you meet somebody, whether it be their gender, their race, their physical abilities. How they dress culturally, right?

And then there’s these invisible dimensions that takes time to get to know somebody at a deeper level. Could be their education level, could be their military experience, could be their values, could be sexual orientation, lots of things. So we encourage managers when they’re meeting with their employees to get to know their people at a deeper level, and not just use the meeting to go through an agenda status on projects, but actually get to know them and what they’re challenged with, what they’re struggling with, and even using it as an opportunity for the managers to be vulnerable, to share what they’re struggling with and ask their employees for feedback or input or ideas.

And so this is a great way to create connection with employees is using the one-on-one. And we say, you know, it doesn’t always have to be in the office. Take a walk around the block, or go for coffee or lunch and see how they’re doing in their in their personal life, “how are how are you doing?” How’s things going? I want to make sure you’re getting balanced between the workload you have and your responsibilities outside of work, just showing you care and having empathy.

Because we say that managers who demonstrate empathy, that’s the path to inclusion. And then being an inclusive leader is the path to creating this culture of belonging. But it really starts with the leaders demonstrating empathy and caring for their for their people. And then that’ll show up in those meetings where they can they feel like, wow, my manager gets me, they’ve got my back. And I feel comfortable speaking up because I know they’re going to be there for me.

I can definitely see how that trickles down. And those are all certainly very useful tips. There are situations where a new CEO comes into a company, and maybe it’s a midsize company, maybe it’s a bigger one, and they realize that there’s a level of toxicity associated with the in-group and the outgroup, where there certainly could be a benefit to having a more inclusive environment where people feel like they belong, because maybe the retention levels aren’t where they would like them to be.

And people are walking out the door saying, hey, this is just not a good fit. Then that’s kind of code for I don’t belong here. And it rarely has anything to do with they’re not paying me enough. It has to do with all of these other relationship factors. And so the CEO is open minded. But a lot of the senior management that’s already there, they’re still old school. They’re still of a different mindset. How do you approach a situation like that?

I think it’s a lot of coaching of employees. I mean, you have to, again, as a leader, is working with their direct reports to understand their people and ask where they’re coming from, why they believe what they believe. And just asking a lot of questions.

We use the metaphor in the book of Lead with your ears. And a lot of leadership is listening and getting to know your people and, and where they’re coming from and where their perspectives are, because that in-group outgroup and that toxic environment can really undermine the performance of an organization. We encourage employees to spend time with people different than themselves so they get to know folks. And yet we know from business that different actually brings new perspectives and ideas.

And we’re dealing with some of the most challenging problems in business today. You think about artificial intelligence and the challenges of security and privacy and even bad actors misusing the technology. These are really tough problems. We call them adaptive learning problems where no one person has the answer. So this in-group outgroup culture is really going to undermine our ability to solve these adaptive learning problems, where we really need to work as a team and coalesce.

So, sometimes we use, I mentioned that dropping the pebbles concept. And the second one is this idea of rocking the boat. You want to rock the boat and drive change in the organization, and you want to walk rock it really hard, but you don’t want to rock it so hard that you knock yourself out of the boat.

So you want to work within the cultural norms, but you also want to drive that change. And like I said, create a speak up culture. Drive the values you expect, model the values you expect as a leader.

But then there are times when we want to rock the boat so hard that yet sometimes have to knock some people out. And if you have some folks that can’t adapt and change to the new culture of a culture of belonging, after working with them for extensive period of time, or their behavior is so inappropriate and toxic, sometimes you do need to knock them out of the boat.

Another daily practice we talk about is this calling in versus calling out. And we all know calling out. You call somebody out when they do something really inappropriate. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Because if somebody says something that’s really sexist, racist, or anti-Semitic, wholly inappropriate, and really, uh, you know, uncalled for, in some ways it is a cause for termination.

If you’re in a meeting and somebody says a really inappropriate joke or makes a comment, I don’t know if it is appropriate to model the behavior to say that is an okay here. That is not okay. You need to apologize and really call them out.

But there are other times, and this is a judgment call by not only the leader but the people in the room is to call them in, because sometimes it’s appropriate when people are creating that in-group outgroup culture with what they say and how they behave and who they call on and who gets credit, who’s mentored, who’s coached, sometimes just being diplomatic and educating folks in the moment is also a great way.

So calling them in and helping them, lifting them up and helping them, seeing a different perspective from what they’re seeing can be really valuable as well. And that that’s good in person, in agreements like in a meeting. But it also can be very valuable just going to their office afterwards and saying, hey, help me understand more about that. That comment you made, I’d like to understand it better and then slowly guide them to see how it is impacting.

And we talk about intent versus impact in the book. People often have really good intentions, but the impact of what they’re doing is really offensive to somebody and really hurtful. And when you have that, it can be demotivating. It can hurt the employee loyalty, their ability to just want to stay with the company. And so that needs to be dealt with in the moment. And so we use this concept of calling in versus calling out and using your judgment to know when it’s appropriate to call somebody in or it’s so inappropriate.

You need to call them out and model that behavior. And doing that is actually another pebble you’re dropping to model the behavior that that type of behavior that’s not valued here. And in fact, it’s toxic. And we’re not going to, we’re not going to stand for it.

These are all great tips, Jonathan. I really appreciate them. Wondering though, because for somebody in a leadership position to sort of shift gears and embrace inclusion the way you’ve outlined, I think it’s a little bit like undertaking any kind of new program or developing a new habit, whether it’s exercise or eating better.

It’s a shiny new object. And we start off with good intentions, but it’s so easy to slide back into old habits and basically stop nurturing that culture of belonging that you really want to or intend to. What do you recommend to keep people on track?

There’s several really unique things about the book, and one of them is that we’ve organized the book. The first half of the book is set the foundation where we talk about the inclusive leader has heart, they have courage and they have wisdom, and we go through that. You know, heart is about having empathy and compassion. And we talk about that. And actually, we lead each of those first foundational chapters off with a profile of an inclusive leader. So it’s very practical down there. And these are people we know we’ve worked with, and they come from small business, they come from a large business.

And the second half of the book is actually organized by the employee life cycle. So this makes it super easy. And that’s why we call it a guide, is that we expect this book to be on leaders desktop, dogeared and post-it notes and the different pages, because it actually goes through the recruiting stage and then hiring and then talent development and talent management and promotions and then so you can literally go when you’re working, let’s say in recruiting, you can go to that chapter and find specific, intentional, easy steps.

You can do it as part of your job. So it’s not a heavy lift. It’s not added to a leader’s already busy plate. And so it makes the practice. That’s why, again, we call it a practice. Daily practices a routine. It’s something you go to and regularly and like any muscle you’re building, if you’re doing it on a daily basis, you’re going to get stronger and it just becomes habitual.

It becomes a habit. It becomes something you just do tying it to something you’re already doing. The studies have shown that if you want to begin a new habit, you tie it to an existing habit. So if you’re doing recruiting, you’re already doing it you can add these steps to the hiring process. This is actually kind of the transition between the two is when you’re bringing candidates in for interviews and you have a panel of interviewers to ensure you have a diverse interview panel.

So this does a couple of things. First of all, it helps for better decision making. You’ll get better candidate acceptance rate. And what happens is, is these candidates that come in, they see that diversity. They say, ah, I see especially if you’re bringing in women in an organization that’s underrepresented with women or a discipline that is or less people of color, they see somebody like themselves as part of the interview panel.

They feel like, oh, this company values diversity, or they have people here that that look like me. So I feel like this is a place I’m going to. I’m going to fit in. I’m going to be comfortable working here. So diverse interview panels, easy thing to do just to ensure that you have that diversity of folks on the panel that are doing the interviews can be super valuable. And that’s again where knowing the daily practices that people can easily implement.

Good. That second part of the book sounds really great as far as an individual guide and tying it to the employee life cycle, that’s really important, really is. What are some mistakes that you’ve seen leaders make when trying to be inclusive and establish a genuine culture of belonging?

I think one of the things that companies will do is they’ll often start off with thinking, oh, we need to publish an equity statement on our website to state our value. And that actually can be or doing a lot of outreach on social media about their commitment to diversity or to inclusion or building this culture of belonging.

And it’s really best to focus on substantive work to actually do the work. And that’s why in our book we use we call it inclusion, diversity, and equity.

We really intentionally prioritize the I and focus on inclusion because if you think about it, when you have people to your home, Hanna you might do some cleaning first or you might cook some good brownies or cookies for the house to smell really good, or make something good, your special dishes that you like to make. So when people come into the home, they feel welcome. They feel to warm place that they’re safe and can be themselves and they want to stay focus on inclusion first because the home is very much like a company.

People come into a company and they want to feel safe and welcome, and they want to feel like this is the place that they want to stay and be really supported there. When you don’t do that, a mistake people make is they focus on what they call performative diversity, which is like the public statements you make, but there’s nothing under the covers. Once you pull back and look at their metrics or what their program that they’re doing.

And if you’re focusing on just hiring and recruiting diversity without focusing on inclusion first. They come in through that front door, but they go right back out the back door and we call that a leaky bucket. And that’ll show up in the metrics that, yeah, you’re do really good at recruiting underrepresented groups or just the diversity of talent from around the world, whatever it might be.

But if they’re not staying, you’ve probably not focused on creating that culture of belonging, which is really critical to helping everyone feel that they belong and they want to stay and that they can not only help the company achieve its goals, but help themselves achieve their own personal goals and aspirations. Those are a couple examples of what could go wrong.

And by the way, we have a whole chapter. It’s not just about inclusion versus equity. It really ties into the whole business that we’re really all in. And that’s change management and organizations. So there’s a whole chapter on overcoming obstacles in the process. And so we’ve taken our combined 50 years of experience at these companies. And I’ve been in small businesses with small thirty people all the way up to your Amazon’s and your Microsoft.

And so we’ve really put all these obstacles that people face in doing change at scale and including them and how to overcome them. There’s a whole chapter on that. And then for HR folks that are listening, there’s a whole chapter on how to be a partner in the in the in this work as well.

Terrific. Jonathan, what would be the most important thing you’d want readers to take away from your book Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders A Guide to Building a Culture of Belonging?

The most important thing is this is not a heavy lift added to their already busy plates, that they don’t have to look at this and think that it’s like, oh my gosh, I’ve got so much going on, I really don’t have time for this. This is not what this is about. This is about easy, intentional steps that you can take, you know, a couple three times a week and build it into the work you’re already doing to evolve the culture into one where you’re going to have higher retention rates, higher productivity, more creativity, innovation in the workplace.

And you’ll get a reputation as an inclusive employer so that it’ll be easier to attract talent and it’ll be easier to retain the great talent you’ve worked so hard to recruit. I think that’s the big takeaway from our book, that inclusive leadership really is leadership.

I love it, this has been great. Jonathan, I appreciate your time and all you do to help organizations establish and maintain a culture of belonging.

So if you’re listening and you’d like to know more about Jonathan Stutz his book Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders A Guide to Building a Culture of Belonging, that information, as well as a transcript of this interview, can be found in the show notes at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential Now. So until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.

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