Ditch ‘Release from captivity’: focus on belonging

‘Release from captivity’ is the new ‘Win the war’.

Government slogans have shifted from wartime Battle of Britain and Blitz-spirit stoicism to prison-release and The Great Escape from incarceration. I wouldn’t recommend either metaphor. The extremity of the pandemic, and the panoply of people’s individual experience within it, deserves its own language. 

Cheap slogans don’t cut it. Framing with reference to past experience, war or incarceration, misses the specific challenges of now and the personal impact for individuals.

We stopped the world for a while, we need to take care with how we get back on, and how we communicate the call to action. 

We’ve been forced to separate, it was a hiatus in time but not a rift in our #belonging: the way we come back together will make as much difference to our sense of #belonging as our experience of being apart. 

And that experience is massively varied: for some a kind of quiet bubble, for some extreme loneliness in total isolation. For some a time to reconnect with their little family tribe; for others surviving severe illness, or enduring domestic abuse. And for some devastating loss and bereavement without being able to grieve with others. 

Take care for nuance, gentleness and empathy in the way you bring people back and the way you communicate. 

Avoid the big Henry V leadership speeches: a little humility goes a long way to building connections. 

Tell it straight. 

Keep it human. 

Take it in small steps. 

No one wants to hear about a ‘new normal’. 

We don’t know yet what ‘normal’ or ‘winning the war’ will look like, so don’t try.

Tell us about the immediate, reconnect everybody together, set out the first stepping stones and build confidence to go together on the journey.

Begin by reinforcing a sense of #belonging.

Show the connections and interlinking, make it easy to be connected. 

We’ve all had so much disruption that we can respond better now to small steps.

Belonging is how we share effort and resources in order to get further faster.

Strategic priorities and the practicality of what’s possible may have changed dramatically: if this needs to be put into context, do it simply and straightforwardly, with empathy for the human impact. Don’t take people for granted or dehumanise your language.

Demonstrate that while we may still have to work apart for a while, we all belong. And now is the time to be even more assiduous about inclusion and diversity - sadly, we risk greater rifts in time of fear and uncertainty, make sure to hold everybody together and include all voices.

Belonging is how we bring our individual identity into a shared identity. 

Respect that people have retreated into a much more personal existence: this is a chance to welcome everybody back into a group for who they each are, and how we can all contribute. 

Belonging is also how we gain reassurance and security in a group.

We’ve been apart for a while - show how everybody is part of the whole. So your whole organisation can reconnect into a shared sense of #belonging.

One of the big risks is splitting into small tribes - it was easier to manage in short term, but a priority now it to join it all up. 

Tempered by trauma, frozen by anxiety, fogged with depression - even so, the human spirit is designed to endure.

And most of us do it better by feeling we belong to a group - work, family, social, faith, community of practice, football, whatever. 

Reach out to those who have lost their work: displacement from group and income at such a time of acute uncertainty is agony. 

This isn’t a war, and it isn’t prison: it’s a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And it’s nowhere near over. While we’re worked around it, we can’t yet fully control it.

What’s needed now is not a celebration of release from captivity, or a call to arms, but a reaching out to connect. 

Go gently.

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I'm a culture consultant specialising in creating a sense of belonging. Drop me a line on LinkedIn if you'd like guidance on how to reconnect your people in a shared sense of belonging.

Isabel Collins