From the May 2026 issue Culture

Belonging Is Performance Infrastructure, Not a “People Initiative”

For years, workplace belonging has been treated like a nice-to-have: an HR-adjacent concept, a feel-good initiative, a softer cousin of employee engagement. But Andrea Carter, organizational scientist, workplace belonging expert, and CEO of Belonging First, has a far more operational definition.

Belonging, she argues, is infrastructure — not the inspirational kind. The kind that determines whether your organization can handle volatility without breaking, whether your people can think, collaborate, and execute under pressure without slipping into self-protection, silence, and burnout.

If you’re a CEO who cares about output, speed, quality, retention, and resilience, you should care about belonging for one simple reason: the absence of belonging quietly taxes performance every day.

The CFO Question That Changed the Conversation

Carter recalls a moment that reshaped how she talks about belonging, because it forced the concept out of “culture talk” and into measurable business performance.

She was presenting results from a belonging assessment to the executive team of a mid-size manufacturing company. The CEO and CHRO were tracking. The CFO wasn’t. Arms crossed, leaning back, he finally cut in: “This sounds very nice, but how does it connect to whether we hit production targets?”

Carter didn’t argue. She pulled up the data, because in this organization, belonging wasn’t measured in isolation. They tracked belonging indicators alongside operational and behavioral metrics tied to performance.

The company had two plants with similar equipment, product lines, and scale. The difference wasn’t machinery. It was belonging. Plant A showed strong belonging across five indicators. The business outcomes weren’t abstract:

Plant B had fractured belonging, and what looked like “performance” was really what Carter calls extraction performance: managers pushing harder to compensate for chaos. Plant B technically “hit numbers,” but inconsistently. Employees executed tasks, but didn’t think critically. They didn’t speak up when they saw problems, because speaking up felt risky. Downtime lasted longer. Collaboration was weak. Turnover was 28%.

Then Carter asked a question that CEOs should tattoo on their dashboards: “Would you go above and beyond during a crunch?” Plant A: 82% said yes. Plant B: 34%. That gap landed.

The CFO’s response was the turning point: “So belonging is about whether my infrastructure can handle volatility.” Exactly.

Why Belonging Drives Performance (Neuroscience Has Entered the Chat)

Carter’s framing is blunt: when belonging infrastructure is missing, people default to threat responses. Instead of putting energy into problem-solving, innovation, and execution, their nervous system burns fuel scanning for danger: Am I safe here? Can I trust these people? Does my work matter? Will I be punished if I speak up? Am I going to burn out?

That state is expensive, cognitively and behaviorally. It slows decisions and reduces creativity. It shrinks discretionary effort, increases errors and silence. Eventually, it drives turnover — or something worse.

The Quiet Crisis: “The Great Detachment”

Turnover is visible. What’s emerging now, Carter warns, is more dangerous because it hides in plain sight. People stay, but belonging has collapsed.

They do the minimum. They stop volunteering. They stop offering ideas. They stop raising flags early. They stop caring. Half their brain is either job searching or emotionally checked out.

The language is coded. Leaders hear phrases like: “We’re doing our best with what we have.” “There’s only so much I can do here.” “You keep asking us to do more with less.” Translation: I’m detached. I’m protecting myself. Don’t expect discretionary effort.

The Five Indicators of Belonging You Can Actually Measure

Carter isn’t talking about belonging as a vague sentiment. Her work breaks belonging into five measurable indicators:

Want sample survey items that map to these? Carter shared examples in plain language: “Success factors for my role are clear.” “I know my colleagues beyond what they do at work.” “I matter here.” “I can admit a mistake without being punished.” “I’m not expected to rebound on my own. There’s support.”

Most organizations stop at averages (for example, “We scored 72% on comfort”). Carter says that’s where leaders fool themselves. The people who don’t belong are rarely reflected in the average. They show up in the outliers. If you don’t analyze belonging across intersections of identity (function, seniority, demographic experience, team location, role type), you can miss the fracture completely.

Her example from mining was telling: in a male-dominated industry, average belonging looked strong until they isolated groups by role and identity. Engineering backgrounds increased belonging. HR and compliance decreased it. The culture wasn’t universally healthy. It was uneven. And uneven cultures break under stress.

Belonging vs. Engagement: The Difference CEOs Miss

Engagement asks: “Are you willing to work hard here?” Belonging asks: “Can you perform at your best here?”

That distinction matters because effort can be driven by fear, briefly. But fear is not a long-term performance engine. Remove the pressure and output drops, or people burn out, or your best talent exits. Belonging is what allows sustained excellence without constant managerial force.

Carter points to a sports analogy: the best teams are disciplined even when supervision is absent. Peers self-correct because accountability isn’t top-down. It’s shared. That aligns with Carter’s research: most organizations operate in fitting-in cultures, where individuals bear 100% of the responsibility to conform to one version of “success.” Belonging cultures operate on 50/50 accountability: people are responsible to each other, and leaders are responsible for designing conditions that let performance emerge sustainably.

How Leaders Should Start (Without Getting Overwhelmed)

Even CEOs who agree with all of this often think: This is huge. Where do we begin? Carter’s answer: start with comfort.

Comfort is clarity and predictability, and it regulates the nervous system. It lowers cortisol. It reduces ambiguity. It frees the brain to do higher-value work. Her practical example was painfully relatable: meetings without agendas. No outcomes. No decision owner. No structure. One person dominates the conversation. Everyone leaves drained. Nothing moves. Comfort is the opposite.

If you want a simple leadership behavior that moves belonging immediately, Carter offers this:

Not in a document no one reads. Do it at the start of the meeting.

A Belonging Dashboard Changes What You Reward

Carter shared one of the most operationally aggressive moves she’s seen work: making belonging non-negotiable in leadership evaluation. At a global beverage and spirits company where she redesigned the listening system, they built what she calls a Manager Impact Index, combining survey analytics, open-ended sentiment, and behavioral metrics (one-on-one frequency, span of control, responsiveness to feedback).

This changed the question leaders were measured by. It was not, “Did you hit targets?” It was, “Did you create conditions for sustainable performance?”

What they found made executives uncomfortable. Some leaders celebrated as high performers were quietly destroying belonging. Wellbeing was bottoming out. Trust was collapsing. People were leaving or disengaging. They were “winning” quarters while eroding long-term capacity. Meanwhile, other leaders with less flashy quarterly numbers had consistent belonging, and over time, their teams outperformed because they retained talent, moved faster, raised issues earlier, and innovated more.

So they did what most companies only talk about: they put belonging into scoreboards, built it into succession conversations, tied it to compensation, and required leaders to prove they could build sustainable conditions, not just extract results. The payoff wasn’t mysterious: higher engagement, lower turnover, better decision quality, and fewer crises because people surfaced problems earlier.

The One Thing Carter Wants CEOs to Stop Doing

If Carter could give only one piece of advice, it’s this: stop treating belonging as separate from performance.

Belonging isn’t a “people initiative” sitting beside strategy. It’s part of the machine that makes strategy executable, especially when volatility hits. When comfort, connection, contribution, psychological safety, and wellbeing are present, people move through friction productively instead of defaulting to fight, flight, or freeze.

That isn’t soft. That’s how work gets done.