Belonging, Connection, and Special Operations

The military has long experience with forging connection and belonging, and with the importance of love and friendship for success. Ideas that resonate for all of us.

One of my first interviews was with a retired Admiral, a leader of special operations teams, whom I’ll call “Walt”. Since his military days, he’s worked in the investment industry and led a nonprofit. He had a lot to say about connection, belonging, tradition, and knowing yourself.

Connection vs Belonging | Like vs Love

Walt said that connection and belonging were very different ideas: akin to the difference between like and love.

He described having a connection with someone as finding some characteristics of that person that you honestly like. Those characteristics give you a genuine connection with that person and anchor the relationship.

Belonging is being on the same team, knowing that everyone on the team is dedicated to the group’s success and to each other’s wellbeing. You are accepted as you are.

Walt explained that on his special operations teams, he always had a strong sense of belonging, though there were many on those teams he felt little connection with. He drew an analogy to family. You didn’t choose them, you may not even like some of them, but you love them, you accept them, they are always family.

He felt that a sense of belonging is critical for organizational success. The group will make hundreds or thousands of decisions each day. Most done in the moment, based on instinct, culture and habit. If there isn’t that strong sense of belonging, that spirit of doing what’s best for the group, many of those decisions will be counter to each other, hampering success.

There are times however when people will do exceptional work because they have strong connections to the immediate supervisor or co-workers, even if there isn’t a sense of belonging to the larger organization. Essentially, good managers, good teams can and will do great work in bad circumstances because they won’t let each other down.

Can’t Be Rushed

I asked him what it takes to cultivate a culture of connection and belonging in organizations.

A critical component, he said, is time.

You have to have time to discover those characteristics that connect you to others, getting to know one another. Going through challenging experiences together can really help as you get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Like going through the military academy or special operations training together.

There is also time in the sense of years and decades. Belonging is deeply influenced by the organization’s history. What are the expectations of the organization, both written and unwritten, and how well and consistently are they adhered to? He noted that these things — history, tradition, expectations — have to be alive, current, and actively discussed and re-validated (and also open to change). In an environment like this, you don’t want to fail to meet those expectations, you don’t want to disrespect those that came before you — the “long gray line” of General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech at West Point.

He felt that great corporations, at least during their prime, had a similar sense of tradition, of a widely accepted and praised culture. As an example, we talked about the evolution of Hewlett Packard, their decades of success under the strong culture of the “HP Way”, the loss of that culture as the founders retired, and the organization’s subsequent decline.

You Must First Belong To Yourself

I asked Walt about the importance of self-acceptance for forming connections and for a sense of belonging. He felt this was a must. “Until you’re comfortable with who you are, and what you’re looking for, and understand your own personal expectations, it’s probably unreasonable to expect you to be profoundly comfortable in a group setting, or in a friendship. You have to be comfortable with yourself, before you can be comfortable with others.”

His comment reminded me of the first of the Marine Corps’s 11 Leadership Principles (document, page 37), which is “Know yourself and seek self improvement”. As I have come to discover from conversations with many senior military leaders, they have put in a lot of thought and practice into knowing themselves.

Walt said that what was on his mind was that what might underlie today’s problems of loneliness and disconnection with society is that people are disconnected from themselves. We discussed the possibility that perhaps this is because there is an abundance of negative messaging, a constant chiding — from advertising, from social media, from experts, from cultural commentary — of your flaws.

This then led to a question of whether there is any agreement these days on what it means to live a virtuous life. Sadly our time was up, and we’ll have to leave it for another time to get into that deep question.

Photo by Neil Cooper on Unsplash

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