Belonging is a fundamental human need, as essential as safety, nourishment and shelter. Most of us know how it feels, yet defining it is far more complex. As a long-time admirer of Kim Samuel’s work, I hold her views closely: belonging is the absence of isolation, and it is inseparable from reciprocity.
In organisations, belonging is not always an explicit ambition, but it should be.
Many organisations stop at “engagement”, treating it as a metric rather than the beginning of the more demanding and deeply collaborative work required to build resilience.
While engagement can touch aspects of belonging, it does not replace it.
Too often, belonging is relegated to specific business areas such as HR, or folded narrowly into inclusion and wellbeing initiatives, rather than recognised for what it is: a strategic imperative.
Belonging as a Strategic Principle
To create resilient organisational cultures, belonging should be woven through every aspect of strategy. In the workplace, belonging expresses itself through shared values, agency, meaning and responsibility– four dimensions that shape how people understand their role within the system, and their relationship with the whole.
What does this look like in practice? It begins with culture, extends through governance, and is reinforced by strategic clarity.
A Culture That Highlights Our Shared Humanity
A deep sense of belonging grows from a culture that is open and welcoming, and also one that is rooted in what unites us: our shared humanity.
With good intentions, organisations often choose to focus on the great tapestry of human differences alone. While diversity and difference matter profoundly, belonging flourishes when shared hopes, collective ambition and the human desire to contribute are allowed to take centre stage.
Governance That Enables Agency
Belonging is also shaped by the governance mechanisms people interact with every day. Agency matters. People need the ability to participate; to use their voice safely; to influence decisions; and to contribute to defining how organisational objectives – including financial – can be achieved with the least harm to our natural world and the greatest positive impact on all living things, human and non-human.
Agency is a cornerstone of resilience, accountability and collective intelligence.
The Strategic Triad as Fertile Ground
Organisations with a strong Strategic Triad — clear purpose, determination and shared vision (as explored in my previous article) — create fertile soil for belonging.
These principles, however, must extend beyond striving for financial resilience and must be rooted in a genuine commitment to benefit people and planet. In short, the organisation must care for – and see itself as part of – the larger ecosystem in which it operates.
A company that knows where it comes from, strives for a world worth working towards, and has the stamina to sustain the journey, offers a vision people choose to commit to.
Belonging is our Individual Responsibility
Yet belonging, as Samuel reminds us, requires reciprocity and it also requires responsibility: not compliance, but conscious participation.
Responsibility bridges belonging as a feeling and transforms it into a collective practice.
Organisations must create the conditions, but individuals must choose to step in, contribute, use their capabilities, take responsibility, commit to the collective, and remain accountable to one another.
Belonging is not passive, it requires contribution.
Each of us must take responsibility for our own sense of belonging when being a part of a team or organisation. We must learn to recognise the spaces where perhaps we do not belong, and choose to step forward and commit where we can belong, where we can give, receive, and even pay forward.
Belonging is not given, it is as much an act of reciprocity as it is an act of responsibility and commitment.
Why Belonging Still Feels Rare
Cultures where belonging is explicit and lived are not the norm.
Frequently engagement becomes a narrative – slogans, campaigns and polished language – rather than experience and shared ownership. Non-financial objectives are declared but not embedded; they sit in reports rather than in behaviours.
And yet organisations are, above all, communal spaces. Products, services, and financial results exist only because people create and deliver them. Yet as AI transforms our workplaces, the question becomes even more urgent: how do we ensure that value creation remains in service to society and the living world that sustains us?
The answers will still depend on us, people – people committed to each other, to the organisation and to the world around us.
The Future Belongs to Organisations Where People Belong
A strong sense of belonging is not a luxury. It is a condition for resilience. It keeps organisations adaptable, cohesive and aligned through uncertainty. It ensures people are willing and able to reciprocate – for the organisation, for each other and for the living world that sustains us all.
As leaders, we face a choice. We can continue to measure engagement whilst belonging remains elusive. Or we can do the deeper, more demanding work: building cultures rooted in shared values, governance structures that enable genuine agency, and strategies that invite real commitment.
In the years ahead, the organisations that thrive will be those that refuse to compromise on belonging, those striving to become the good ancestors our world desperately needs.
I’ve spent years exploring what creates genuinely resilient cultures and it always comes back to belonging. Not as a metric, but as a strategic principle embedded in culture, governance, and leadership. This work is the foundation of WE ARE CYGNUS
