Belonging: Who Gets To Speak?

In this episode, Kate and Maddie dive into belonging: why it matters so much to individuals and organisations, what it actually looks and feels like in practice, and how you can start building it in your team today. Spoiler: it's not about writing a policy. It's about the small stuff.

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What We Cover

1. Belonging beyond a slogan We talk about why belonging is so fundamental, to individuals and to organisations. Kate shares insights from Helen Beedham's new book People Glue, which looks at what makes organisations sticky: the kind that people want to join, stay in, and bring their best selves to. We explore the neuroscience of exclusion (yes, it literally hurts), why belonging is a collective responsibility, and why it takes more than one "inclusion month" to make it real.

2. Belonging vs inclusion vs fit There's an important distinction between diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and there's one word that comes up constantly in hiring that we really don't like. We look at why "cultural fit" is a lazy shorthand that often just means "like me," how it quietly blocks difference, and what a better question to be asking might be. We also take a small detour into the nine-box grid. Kate has feelings.

3. Designing belonging without erasing difference Diverse teams genuinely outperform, but only when they're well supported. We look at Randall Peterson's research on what helps diverse teams thrive, including building trust deliberately, guarding against coordination failures, and making decision-making transparent. We also talk about amplification, a simple but powerful practice that came out of the Obama administration's female staffers and still holds up brilliantly today.

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Things to Try

Share who you are, not just what you do. As a leader, try telling your team something about yourself that has nothing to do with work. You're modelling that there's room here for full humans, not just job titles. It's a small act that signals a lot.

Start your next meeting with a check-in. Two words, one to ten, a mood thermometer, a llama picture: pick your format. The point is acknowledging that people arrive as whole people, not just resources. It also gives you useful information as a leader about who might need a bit more support.

Watch who has airtime. Run yourself a quiet experiment this week: observe who speaks in meetings, whose ideas land, and whose get talked over. Then deliberately invite in the quieter voices. Notice what shifts.

Try amplification. When someone's idea gets echoed by someone else, name the originator: "As Kate was saying..." It's simple, it's effective, and it changes the texture of a room over time.

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Find Out More

• People Glue by Helen Beedham
• No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
• Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown (or her podcast, for her thinking on belonging specifically)
• Time to Think by Nancy Kline (on the Thinking Environment and equality of voice in meetings)
• Randall Peterson's research on diversity and team performance https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/four-ways-get-best-out-diverse-teams-randall-s-peterson/ 

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Agony Aunt/Culture Clinic

Got a culture challenge you'd like Kate and Maddie to think through? We're collecting questions for our Agony Aunt episodes at the end of this series. Send yours to hello@acuriousspacepodcast.com

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Thanks to our producer Tim Fox and music creator Richard Flindell for making A Curious Space sound the way it does.