WIT Updates the Culture Code: Snippet #4: Design for Belonging

This month we will continue exploring the first of Daniel Coyle's (The Culture Code) three big skills that create successful groups:

1. Build Safety,
2. Share Vulnerability, and
3. Establish Purpose.

Safety is created through a steady stream of belonging clues, which are regular interpersonal indications that the group values each member. Within a safe environment colleagues then start safely sharing vulnerable moments, addressing issues, and creating opportunities for everyone to grow.

In Chapter 5, Coyle tells a story of Tony Hsieh and his remarkable entrepreneurial history with companies and with communities. Tony Hsieh's life ended in tragedy in 2020, and several of his projects were unsuccessful, nonetheless, there is still a lot to learn from his path. His success in creating powerful belonging clues was a critical component of all his success according to Coyle. And further, Coyle connected the details of Tony's strategies to a research-based successful project pattern published in the 1970s by MIT researcher Thomas Allen known as the Allen Curve. Essentially, the Allen Curve shows a powerful positive relationship between close physical working location and the frequency of communication and interaction. Frequent interaction and communication were directly correlated with more positive project outcomes. And, that frequency "rapidly decayed" when colleagues were moved to different floors. "It turns out that vertical separation is a very serious thing. If you're on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country." Coyle summarizes it like this on p.72, "proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up."

Tony founded the software company Link Exchange after graduating from Harvard and sold that for millions to Microsoft in 1998. He then remade the struggling online retailer ShoeSite.com into the successful company Zappos, which reached $1.1 billion in revenue in 2009 when he sold it to Amazon. He then set up a huge urban community project to bring life and commerce back to a 28-acre block of the Las Vegas community surrounding the Zappos headquarters. Coyle described a walk with Tony through this area with a sense that he was a "human version of a social app" connecting with everyone he met and connecting them with each other. His tools are "grade school simple" = " Meet people, You'll figure it out".

Could proximity regulated connection-driven success really be that simple? Even if it is, the reality of our SUNY organizations- our distributed locations, our buildings, our remote and hybrid workers, and the size of our organizations mean that we can't immediately change things. There are resources dedicated to spaces that encourage engagement, the impact of the Allen Curve on remote work, and careful research into the complexities of workspace preferences and needs that make it clear that there is no simple answer here.

Nonetheless, we can consider designing our spaces for more psychological safety and connection whenever we have renovation opportunities. We can set aside time for team communications. We can work to mitigate the social differences between in-person and remote work experiences. And we can recognize and value interpersonal connections for their contributions to our wellbeing and our productivity.