What Does Belonging At Work Really Mean? With Sebastian Buck

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2:31The Anxious Achiever: I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. What does it mean to belong, to feel a sense of belonging at work? We all know it's a wonderful thing, and it's hard to define. And my guest today says, that's okay. It is different for everyone, but we kind of know it when we feel it. And when he and his firm Enso designed the world's largest study and is now the world's largest data set on well-being at work, working in conjunction with Oxford University and Indeed.com, they found something that really surprised them, speaking of belonging. the number one driver of well-being at work is not compensation in this huge data set.

3:22The Anxious Achiever: It's belonging. Now, not to brag, but that didn't surprise me as someone who has studied work redesign for 20 years. Part of what I think is belonging is trust. It's psychological safety. it's the freedom to be yourself and be respected for being yourself. But it's also the sense that you have human agency, that your work serves a purpose, that you being there serves a purpose, that people might miss you if you weren't there, and that you have the ability to drive what you work on, obviously to different degrees given what you do. People want to feel valued. That's why we love being part of a community and that's belonging.

4:10The Anxious Achiever: Sebastian Buck, who is my guest, is a CEO who changed how he CEOs. Speaking of belonging, I asked him what his relationship is with his anxiety right now. And he said, it's a lot better than it used to be because he completely changed the way he led, structured his company. And I think a lot of it has to do with the work that he does in not just wellbeing, but designing the future. That's what he does. He has the coolest job ever. He helps organizations design their futures. This is a far-ranging, useful, and I found inspiring conversation. Sebastian is very, very inspiring. So I hope you enjoy as we dive into the real factors behind well-being at work.

4:56The Anxious Achiever: Hello, Sebastian. Hello. Thanks for having me. Oh, I'm so happy to have you. I'm going to ask you a question. Well, you can choose. I always recently have been asking my guests one of two questions. Are you ready? You can choose which one you want. The first one is, what does leadership mean to you? Or how do you define leadership? And the second one is, what's your relationship with your anxiety these days? Great question. Very much related. I'll take the first one and maybe on to the second one. I'll tell you that the journey I've been on is growing up thinking that leadership was a certain set of traits and skills.

5:39I looked at leaders and I thought, God, I wish I could do that. I wish I could have that charisma or I wish I could have that decisiveness or I wish I could have that breadth of knowledge that allowed me to make the right decision at the right time. And it wasn't until I was wrestling, struggling with living up to those expectations of being great in all situations. and I let go of that and I said actually there are some things I'm good at and there are some things I'm not good at and what that meant for me and for Enso practically was I went from being the top of a pyramid where you know the sort of conceit of any pyramid shaped organization is the toughest challenges flow to the top and the biggest decisions go from the top down and And I just let go of that and changed the structure of Enso to be instead of, at the time it was two co-founders, and we made it six partners instead.

6:44And now the six partners make all the big decisions together. We have discussions about the big things, whatever they are. And almost without fail, somebody feels a strong conviction about the answer in any particular case. And almost without fail, we discuss that person's conviction and we go with that. And so my definition of leadership has evolved from being almost like an Oracle type figure to being, you know, one that is in community with other smart, invested people and

7:26The Anxious Achiever: creating a space for that conversation. and to get to your second question about what's my relationship with anxiety I think in the prior modes that I described the sort of tip of a pyramid I was living with constant anxiety I always felt that I wasn't doing enough being enough being compelling enough in certain situations being decisive enough in certain in situations, being empathetic enough in certain situations. You know, that tip of a pyramid's construct is just set up for creating anxiety. And it wasn't until I let go of that that my anxiety could drop. And I'll tell you that part of the shift for me was I was diagnosed with stage three cancer.

8:20And so wrestling with those existential questions meant that, you know, I had to confront how much stress am I living with? And how much stress am I going to choose to continue to live with? And I chose to not live with as much stress.

8:38The Anxious Achiever: So for you, some people might hear, wow, giving up your hugely concentrated power in your decision making to a group of other people might feel more stressful to a lot of people because it must be challenging to work with all those personalities and dynamics and, you know, all that. But for you, it really felt less stressful. 100%. And I think a big part of that is getting clear on what really brings me alive. And what brings me alive is one portion of my work. It's actually about ideas and creation and insight, research into insights, and then insights into creative ideas that can come out into the world.

9:27But my old definition of my job meant that that was one thing I did. I also had to do a lot of HR things. I also had to do recruiting. I also had to do finances. I also had to do, you know, a technology oversight, you know, whatever goes into running a machine. And that meant that my joy became, let's say, 10 % of my job. And, you know, running the machine became 90%. And so actually letting go of that sort of quote unquote power freed me up to do more of what I loved and less of what sucked energy from me.

10:05The Anxious Achiever: Oh, God, I love that. I'll remind listeners that a recent episode with with Pat Lencioni, who wrote five dysfunctions of a team, right, is like a leadership guru. He has this thing called working genius. And Sebastian, he had almost the same experience as you, where he realized that he was the boss. He was the big dude. But so much of the skills there are just not in his. he would call it his working genius your strengths and and he you know I think he did similar things I felt I sold my small business because I felt I couldn't handle tax season one more time I think people will relate um and what's funny is sometimes that zone of genius can be confused with what on paper you are good at like for instance I went to law school I did a law degree, on paper, doing the legal side of our company should be one of my strengths and competencies.

11:11The Anxious Achiever: Yes. Turns out I've explored that path and I find it really unexciting. And it became a drag. And so I think facing up to where my actual energy was, as opposed to where on paper, I have strengths, was quite freeing. And I learned much later than I wish I had done that actually my energy is not in law. My energy is in creativity and human insight. And I probably should have done a different degree. But I had to acknowledge that I can sit through meetings with lawyers for the company, but it's not where I really should be spending my time. You wouldn't be the first lawyer on this show to say that.

12:06The Anxious Achiever: So I want to talk about your work researching well-being at work. I want to talk about the power of belonging. But first, why don't you tell people what it is that you do do for a living? Enso is a strategic and creative company. we help organizations articulate the positive future that they want to live into and then design the path to realizing that we use the language of future design for that future design is not a term that many people know and so i suppose to give some some analogies it's a little bit like a strategy consultancy like a mckinsey it's a little bit like an innovation firm like IDEO.

12:55It's a little bit like an ad agency like Widen and Kennedy, except unlike McKinsey, we don't just use logic and analysis. We think about human insight and creativity and imagination. Unlike an IDEO, we think quite holistically about what a future is, as opposed to a more discreet design challenge. You know, broadly, like what is this organization doing in the future? What does ultimate success look like for us? And then unlike an ad agency, the manifestation of all that work that we do is not just in outward facing marketing like things. It's really quite broad. It could be that the future that we come to with the leaders of an organization means that their product should evolve or that their internal culture should or that they should establish new partnerships or build a coalition or create an event series.

13:56So we try and be solution agnostic on what the answers are, unlike many creative firms that have a pretty set output, whether that's a brand design or an ad campaign or what have you. So in sum, it's strategy and creative to answer kind of big questions, particularly like what do we really want as an organization and how do we get that?

14:23The Anxious Achiever: It sounds like the best job ever. It's wonderful. I mean, it sounds absolutely, gosh, sign me up. I'd like to do that. I have a new driver in my family. And as an anxious person, who boy is it testing me? And that's why I love HeyPolo. HeyPolo is the family safety app built on trust. I want to know if my teen has arrived safely. I want to know if he's speeding or driving safely on the road. And Hey Polo lets me do all that. Let's me check in with my family members and make sure we're in touch in the way that we want to be. And that's important. It's the family safety app built on trust. Here's how.

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17:19The Anxious Achiever: That's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And Mark will send you two. So, okay. So you design futures, make the connection between workplace well-being and your work helping organizations craft the future they want. Yeah, so it started for me, actually, I was struck by some research we were doing. We set about trying to understand what do brands mean to people? there's a bunch of ways of measuring a brand health and typically people look at things like awareness or favorability we were really interested in can people identify in these organizations any kind of meaning beyond just making profit and does that resonate with them does that motivate them as we were doing that research like consumers consumers care people in the world?

18:23Like, do you see any purpose or mission inside Ford Motor Company that connects with you and what you care about? And as we were doing that research, we were asking people, you know, to what extent do your values align with your employer's values? And we found that only 14 % of Americans said that they had a strong alignment of values with their employer.

18:50The Anxious Achiever: 4%. 1-4%. And in researching that, we also came across, of course, Gallup's global engagement data. And I think not coincidentally, they were saying at the time, this was about 2018, 85 % of workers globally were not engaged in their work. So whether you articulate it as disengaged or just not seeing an alignment of values, I started to become quite obsessed with the idea that the central challenge for business and for business leaders of this generation might be creating meaningful work. because if you've got 85 % of your people that are not engaged, surely that means that the business is not living up to its full potential.

19:37And surely that means that hundreds of millions of people are not being able to live into their full potential. So I wrote a piece in Fast Company around 2018 titled The Business Challenge of Our Time is Creating Meaningful Work. By coincidence, one of our clients from Google left and joined Indeed, the world's largest job platform. And in conversations with him, we started talking about what if Indeed wasn't just a place where you could find a next job, but what if this was where you could find work that really led you to the work, to the life that you wanted, work that enabled a good life. And so we set about that as a research agenda and we spoke to lots of the folks that you would know, the folks in positive psychology, Martin Seligman, Sonia Lubomirsky, Laurie Santos, and folks like that.

20:34And we really were trying to understand, is there a rubric that we could come to as to what good work looks like, as distinct from everyday work that you can find anywhere? And we came to a rubric that essentially is for drivers of well-being and 16 dimensions that support those drivers. And then we said, what if we changed on the Indeed platform how people review their current employer? So it used to be a five-star rating. You know, I feel four out of five stars for about this company. We changed it to the things that actually matter. Like, do I feel happy? Am I satisfied? Does my work have a clear sense of purpose?

21:20Do I feel stressed at work? these kinds of dimensions that actually got at people's real well-being which gave us incredible data on how people were doing at work and we boiled all that data up into a thing that's called the work well-being score and so now when a job seeker can look at a job they can say not only what are they going to pay me but how are people doing at that company is this a place where people thrive? Ultimately, that's become the world's largest data set on well-being at work. And it's led to a lot of insights about what's creating well-being and what's the financial impact of that and other things that we could talk about.

22:05But that was the journey for me. It was beginning with this sort of shock that only 85 % of people were finding any, sorry, 85 % of people were disengaged in their work and following that thread to come to what actually creates well-being and engagement and connection.

22:24The Anxious Achiever: I'm going to read from one of your articles. And it was really interesting that you may have assumed that the most powerful driver of well-being at work would be economic security, fair pay. But your data showed that it's actually belonging. So define belonging and tell us what, and actually the data has shown that for years, although the data that I was first introduced to from the, I think it was the American Study of employees, I can't remember, was that more important to workers than compensation was a sense of agency and respect. But I don't know if that's related to belonging. Sorry, I'm off on a tangent.

23:18The Anxious Achiever: So define belonging. And were you surprised by that? So belonging, I think, is somewhat hard to define. And I think the reason it's hard to define is it is a feeling. And therefore, or it is subjective. And so it might mean different things to different people. What we have discovered in our investigations of belonging is it very much relates to, can my voice be heard? Is this a place where I can succeed? And that is an interesting sort of paradox. In some ways, it's about personal agency and personal ability to affect change or progress. And that's what relates to our social connectedness. So there's this interesting sort of duality of like feeling like a strong, capable, powerful individual.

24:16Well, that's actually what creates a sense of strong connectedness. and so it's it it can feel you know hard to sort of pin down but I don't think it's actually incredibly hard to design for it we need to design spaces where people can be heard where goals are not just shared top down here's what we're doing but there is some discussion about, you know, what should our goals be and how might we achieve them? And people feeling that ability to put their fingerprints on what is happening and what they are working on is transformative in terms of how people feel about that company. Was it surprising?

25:09Absolutely. Because when you research, when you ask people what drives your well-being at work, you know, as you said, number one, it's compensation, it's pay me well. And number two, give me time off, give me the flexibility to have time off. People dramatically underestimate the extent to which the social dimensions really are what drives our being. So in our work, we found that belonging, inclusion, feeling supported, feeling trusted, feeling appreciated, feeling supported by managers, those social dynamics are the most important measures of whether somebody will have well-being at work. And so there's this funny cultural narrative that we need to sort of undo.

26:05I think each of us need to undo in ourselves that, you know, the pursuit of money will create a healthy career or will create a healthy company. when actually there's this other major lever that we are neglecting in our own lives and in our companies.

26:24The Anxious Achiever: Not to sound difficult, but I don't think that's news to anybody in the workplace design space. I mean, we've known that data for 40 years. So my question to you is, why is it so damn hard? And why is it getting harder right now when you look at people's sense of trust, engagement, and well-being at work? It's a wonderful question, and it's something I've grappled with a lot. This is known science, and yet culturally we are not acting on the known science. If you ask leaders, is well-being important? They say absolutely. And then you ask leaders, do you have a well-being strategy? No. So why is that?

27:18My guess is it's a couple of things. One is we have a generation of business leaders who grew up in an environment before positive psychology, before behavioral economics, where business was seen as a rational science, where we made rational, intellect-driven decisions, and we ignored the fact that humans make emotional decisions

27:48The Anxious Achiever: and are driven by emotions. I think we have a generation of business leaders for whom that was not the core of their education. We had Chicago School of Economics that said the business is profit. and so that in many ways was an incredibly simple management directive. We make rational choices towards profit and if you can't see a direct bright line between a choice and profit, you don't do it and there is a much harder direct line between belonging and profit. So that's where the work that we did with Oxford and Professor Yann-Emmanuel Demiv comes in. We worked with him throughout that Indeed well-being work.

28:40And once we had a big data set, he set about trying to understand what is the connectivity between a company with high well-being and their business results, their financial results. And what he found, no surprise, is that high well-being companies have higher return on assets, higher profitability, higher valuations and outperform on the stock market. So I don't think that kind of data is going to change overnight business culture. But I think over time, the drumbeat of that kind of proof that caring about people drives results will change business culture. And I think business culture will take years, decades to evolve to a more enlightened state.

29:33But I think that's what we're up against. We're up against entrenched norms and a sort of set of default assumptions about how business is done.

29:42The Anxious Achiever: So you're a believer. I'm a believer and I'm an optimist. I do believe that people can evolve and cultures can evolve. And sometimes it happens much faster than others. We have seen instances in culture where cultural norms flipped, you know, after decades, centuries of work, cultural norms can flip quite fast. Like COVID, 40 years of workplace flexibility, business case banging down doors. COVID made the business case overnight, you know, that we could work from home. So, yes. This episode is brought to you by Vinted, a secondhand marketplace app. You know, I love clothes. And I love when the seasons change to spend a good amount of time, you know, moving out, reviewing my summer stuff, bringing in my fall stuff.

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33:31The Anxious Achiever: the belief that we are aligned to a cause, that we respect each other, that we help each other, and that we trust each other. And to me, the erosion of trust at many, many large companies has been so profound. I don't know. I don't know how you create belonging from that. And these companies have the best wellness programs there are. And you and I have both consulted for them. They have everything. They have therapy, they have workout, they have food, they have meditation, they have green space. You're 100 % right. And yeah, my optimism has me focusing on the opportunity and the path forward. But I think it's very fair to critique, are we really seeing proof that business leaders are earnestly, authentically engaging in the well-being of their people?

34:37And in too many cases, the answer is no. And I've been reflecting a lot on why is that? And I do think partly it's related to the level of success of a corporate leader today at the highest level leads to a lifestyle where in their daily reality, a lot of friction is removed. They live very pleasant lives, quite disconnected from the realities of daily social interaction, daily work, daily challenges in their community. and my understanding of you know the Aristotle Plato Socrates school of thought is that virtue is formed through friction through struggle through interacting with people through doing the hard work it's not a birthright virtue is not a birthright it's sort of earned And if you live in an existence where every friction is removed for you by teams of people, then perhaps the tendency is away from virtue and more towards a bigger egoic sense of yourself.

36:04And that leads to potentially less compassion for people. That said, it's clearly not a card encoded rule. And I think that often the challenge is that many choices are made because of default assumptions about what a CEO should do or what a company... You had one.

36:28The Anxious Achiever: You had a default assumption. I had a default assumption, yeah. And so in many cases, I think it's about giving those leaders the space to imagine. What do you really want? How do you want to be remembered? What do you want your career or life to add up to? I actually am shocked that when we have those kinds of conversations with leaders, they often say things to us like, this was amazing. This felt like therapy. And it's because they're not having conversations about the things that matter. What is success? What does it look like? How might we get there? With people every day, they're having much more micro conversations about how do we make this incremental progress on technology or financially or culturally.

37:10The conversations are how do we move forward in the next week or month and then not having these bigger zoomed out conversations. And I think given that space, I think the leaders I've come across, they're kind of yearning for that opportunity.

37:27The Anxious Achiever: I totally agree. And I think that leaders, typically, although leaders seem to me getting younger and younger, maybe I'm just getting older and older, but you sort of, you take on more leadership at a time when your life becomes also more complex. And often when you become the boss, you're asking the really big questions, as you did. And the concept, do you know Megan Reitz's concept of spaciousness? No, tell me. Oh God, you would love it. You would love it. She's a professor in the UK and You know, she researches how to help people get space, space to be a human being, not just a human doing.

38:13The Anxious Achiever: And I also find that when I work with leaders and just sometimes even ask them silly questions, like I will always almost ask a room, what would you do every day if no one paid you to do? And then I ask them, what do people expect you to be? How did your body feel different when you answered those two questions? And they'll often say, well, with the first question, I felt it was fun. I felt some joy. I was like, I got out of my body for a minute. And then what do people expect from me? The tightness happens. So maybe the answer, I don't know how we do it, is space. 100%. I was asked a similar, slightly different question recently, which was, when do you feel free?

39:07The Anxious Achiever: Yes. And it was an interesting one. I'd never really contemplated it. And I thought about the sensation of like really feeling free. It's when I'm on my bike. And I think that connects for me to a bunch of childhood memories of exploring my BMX. But when I'm on my bike, I'm not striving. I'm not grinding. I'm not looking at stats I'm just head up floating taking you know taking the path that seems compelling at the time and I think in that sense I'm tuning in more than tuning out actually and then the next question the person who asked me that said to me is so you know how much are you doing that and I said well not enough clearly not enough um so yeah i i think finding those the time for spaciousness for freedom it's um tough i think in this culture because it feels like it's not quote-unquote productive no whereas of course it is the most productive space to actually tune into what you want I mean, we have such moral judgments on time, certainly in the US, and that's why it's really hard.

40:31The Anxious Achiever: I mean, I believe also, and what I try to also help people understand is that we're truly free when we're free from being bound to our emotions. and I think what you said about how your anxiety level changed when you changed how you led I think that is true for so many leaders too they are they are bound by their anxiety and their stress and all the strong emotions and that has that makes us really stuck not free you know yeah and I I like to believe that you know my frame of reference for everything pretty much a story. Like, you know, the words you speak become the house you live in. And so the story we tell ourselves about what leadership is, the story we tell ourselves about what productivity is, the story we tell ourselves about what a goods company is, or what this company does.

41:33Once you see them as stories, it feels incredibly liberating, because you can edit and rewrite stories quite easily.

41:40The Anxious Achiever: You sure can. And oftentimes they're made up. And they're made up. They're all made up. Totally. And, you know, we fed them as this is the way it is. This is what best in class looks like. Or this is what good leadership is. Or this is what. Well, this is what my mentor did or my boss did, right? Or the former CEO, yeah. Yeah, so that always feels like it comes with a level of gravitas and a certain authority that means that you have to sort of obey it. And I think what future design really is about is letting go of a lot of the default assumptions and saying, if we could design the future, what would we design?

42:34You know, design is really just an act of like taking agency for what we do and how we do it and where we go. As we close, although I could talk to you forever,

42:44The Anxious Achiever: but I have to go pick up my son who smashed his knee. What do companies commonly get wrong when they try to address belonging? And how would you help them design a future that would get it more right? Lovely question. I think the problem with belonging design, if it's even designed at all, I think primarily it's not designed, but if it is designed, it's designed in quite artificial contexts. Let's have the offsite. Let's have the barbecue. Let's have the employee town hall. I was just going to say the employee down hall. Which in many ways sort of reinforces the idea of like, there's somebody on stage and you have to sit and listen, which is not necessarily how you actually feel great belonging or agency.

43:37The Anxious Achiever: Even worse, there might be someone like me on stage and you have to sit and listen. Yeah. Whereas I think belonging in many ways comes through the practice of listening, really hearing people as a culture, not sending diktats, but asking questions, asking big questions, asking the most important questions. You know, as I know, you talk a lot about sharing vulnerability. I mean, I've always thought about Google's Project Aristotle, where they found the most effective teams have vulnerability. Psychological safety. Psychological safety. and, you know, sharing, you know, I shared my cancer diagnosis on, you know, as it unfolded and all the uncertainty and the unknowing that went through that journey.

44:32I feel like I had amazing real conversations with the ENSO team members throughout that process in a way that no amount of sort of rafting or town hall kind of presentations could have connected us. And so I think that is truly how belonging happens.

45:03Does it happen enough? No. I think for all the reasons that you kind of get at, like emotional vulnerability feels like vulnerability and that feels uncomfortable in our culture. But it's not too tough to make a different choice. And it costs a lot less money than people think about. You know, like, okay, we can't afford the gym and the meditation sessions and what have you. But you know what we can do is have really honest, authentic conversations as a team. I will tell you, I was lucky to start my career in London and we literally had a pub downstairs. And so there wasn't a conversation about like, should we meet up in the pub?

45:52We met up in the

45:52The Anxious Achiever: pub just by default. And what was incredible is like, that was a relaxed environment where people could be really honest about how today was, is what I'm wrestling with, is what we're going to do. So that helps. Oh gosh, I love that so much. I love that so much, you know, But that has so much academic grounding in social capital theory and, of course, in community. It's the community. It's the community with weak ties. It's the loose ties. It's the place where we just let our guard down just a little bit. Although I did live in Britain for four years. And as an American, I was like, whoa, there's a lot of corporate drinking going on.

46:35There's a lot of corporate drinking. Much of it not healthy, but some of it. Some of it is good. Very useful for belonging.

46:42The Anxious Achiever: Oh, Sebastian, thank you so much. This was such a good conversation. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks for doing what you do. Thank you.

46:57The Anxious Achiever: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.