Designing for Belonging
A deeper look at how we design The Grand Quest to create belonging and deliver joy
Hi Grand Fam,
This comment comes from a member of The Grand Quest community, who is a VP at a growth-stage startup and runs a large engineering team. Professional development programs are rarely described as a bright spot in a long week, or something that makes your "heart so happyyy". So how do we do it with The Grand Quest? Today's post is a deeper look at how we designed Quest to create belonging and deliver joy.
What is belonging?
Here is one of my favorite definitions from the leaders at Sacred Design Lab.
"Belonging is giving and receiving the experience of being deeply known and loved. The felt experience of belonging changes the way we show up. It stimulates loyalty, compassion, and joy, and diminishes anxiety, loneliness, and fear."
Why does belonging matter at work?
A high sense of belonging is linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance and a 50% drop in turnover risk. For a 10,000-person company, this results in annual savings of more than $52M. (HBR)
As we've all shifted to remote work as a result of COVID-19, forming meaningful connections has become the biggest challenge of working life. Sense of belonging is down significantly (Slack).
How do you design for belonging?
This is the question that I've been fascinated with my entire career. There's no silver bullet, you can't engineer belonging, but you can design an environment and teach behaviors that fosters belonging.
Design an environment that fosters belonging
Provide a consistent time and structure — One issue I've seen with most professional development programs is that they're short lived or episodic. You aren't able to learn everything you need to become an effective manager in a 3-day bootcamp. Often times, you don't even know what situations you're going to face until you encounter them. The Grand Quest provides a consistent structure for our members to meet every two weeks over the course of multiple months. Meeting consistently allows our members to discuss new challenges as they naturally arise.
Curate groups around shared experiences — Real connection stems from lived, felt experience. We instantly connect with someone who's in the same situation. It's harder to relate to a professional, who hasn't been there before. That's one point we hear from our community over and over again. It's meaningful to be amongst peers and to tangibly see you're not the only one. A coach or mentor may tell you, "you're not alone, everyone struggles with the same problem", but it's exponentially more powerful to hear a member of your group articulate the exact sentiment you've been feeling out loud.
Teach behaviors that fosters belonging
Practice empathetic listening — In June I wrote a post about asking for help, which included this tweet "So much of good management is so simple: recognizing when your people need a challenge vs. when they need help." Recognizing what your people need begins with learning how to listen. Many of us are taught to constantly evaluate and analyze, and listen critically. Empathetic listening is a skill we teach, practice, and hone in The Grand Quest. It enables us to better notice what a person is experiencing, and what they may need.
So you're telling me if I join The Grand Quest, I'll be less anxious and more joyful?
In the spirit of showing not telling 🙃 here's a testimonial from one of our members, Andy Rapista, community builder at Notion.
Applications to join The Grand Quest close in 4 days. I’m looking forward to reading yours.
💌
Rei