From the course: Daniel Pink on Motivation

How to promote purpose: Building belonging

From the course: Daniel Pink on Motivation

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How to promote purpose: Building belonging

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- One way to deepen people's sense of purpose is to strengthen their sense of belonging. The belief that they're connected to each other, that they're all in it together. So how do you do that? How do you promote belonging in organizations? Our instinct sometimes is to impose belonging from the top, but what I think is a better strategy is to let belonging emerge from the bottom. Let me tell you what I mean by that. A few years ago, I decided to study an organization, and I decided to study it in a somewhat offbeat way. Instead of interviewing people, I had them take photographs of the best part about working at this place and the worst part about working at this place, and then we assembled the photographs and I had them explain them to me, and what I got was an enormous, bizarre number of photographs of pies. What? Pies. Here's what was going on. There was a guy in the office named Reggie. On Thursday nights, every Thursday night, Reggie would bake a pie. He would bring it into the office break room on Fridays. People loved those pies, but they thought they were the only ones. They loved the taste of the pie, of course, but here's what they really loved. They loved the gesture he was making toward his teammates. They loved the idea that people would come in and talk and have a cup of coffee and eat the pie together. That what was going on here wasn't fun and posed from the top, it was a sense of belonging that emerged from the people in the group. So sometimes our instinct, when we want to foster belonging is forced fun, right? Mandatory happy hours, mandatory softball teams. Don't worry so much about that. Instead, be a good observer. Look for the self-organized rituals that are going on in your organization. Don't get in their way, and where you can, nurture them. Those kinds of rituals are the things that really foster belonging and your job as a manager is to help them reach full flower.

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