Mastering Community

We yearn for connection. But we are disconnected. We find ourselves on platforms, not in communities. It doesn’t help that many traditional sources of community have withered. In neighborhoods, kids may gather. Adults, not so much. Droves of people have stopped attending church. And far fewer people are going into a workplace. The very future of the workplace, and the sense of community we felt at work, is at risk.

Despite our deep desire to feel a sense of belonging, many of us struggle to feel a part of a team (or to find a team!). We’re on the sidelines. Stuck. The more hours we log there, the tougher it feels—our confidence plummets, our will wanes, our sense of isolation increases. We languish. We break. We numb.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can move from surviving to thriving, together. Someone in my own family showed me how.

In 2008, my brother Mike and his wife Sarah had a truly terrible, life-changing day. In the morning, a doctor informed them that their unborn child was missing a kidney and possibly other organs. That afternoon, they returned home to even more devastating news: their two-year-old daughter Annabel had a rare chromosome disorder, dup15q, and her mind would probably not develop beyond that of a five-year-old child.

Feeling lost, scared, and alone, Mike turned to Google. “I wasn’t prepared for this very rare disease that we’d never heard of,” he said. “I didn’t know how to parent a kid like this.” Most of the guidance he found online was unhelpful. But then he clicked on a PDF file containing six stories from parents whose children experienced autism, thirty to forty seizures a day, and other disabilities. These were the most powerful stories Mike had ever read, and that’s saying a lot given that he had worked as a journalist for ABC News, NBC News, and the New York Times. Containing joy and humor, they offered reason for hope. If these parents could cope with these disabilities and even find joy in the process, maybe Mike and his wife could do the same.

Mike grew more optimistic after he and his wife conquered another parenting challenge. Typically, children pick up food and other items by using their forefinger and thumbs in a “pincher grasp.” Annabel had trouble with this pincher grasp and couldn’t pick up anything, including her favorite food. Mike and Sarah turned to therapists, doctors, and other pediatric specialists, and when nothing helped, Mike again resorted to Google. He posted the pincher grasp question on a message board, and the mother of a dup15q child replied with a solution. Mike and Sarah followed her directions, cutting two tiny holes in a sock—one for Annabel’s forefinger, another for her thumb—and placed the sock-glove on her right hand. They put a normal sock on her left hand so she couldn’t “cheat” and grasp an item using her two wrists. Every day at mealtime, Annabel’s parents equipped her with the sock-gloves and placed some delicious blueberries in her dining tray, knowing how irresistible she found them. Within a month, not only had Annabel activated her pincher grasp—she’d mastered it!

Health solutions, Mike realized, can be simple, and the best ones often reflect lived experience rather than professional expertise. Family and friends are great, Mike told me, but people facing health challenges need a tribe. Instead of asking isolated questions on lone message boards, they need a network, a flesh-and-blood community, and an organized, moderated forum for discussion. He imagined a series of dinner parties, where a diverse mix of doctors, caregivers, researchers, and patients could convene in an intimate, comfortable setting to ask questions or simply seek support. Eventually these dinner parties would morph into something bigger and continuous, like a global network. Such a network had potential for global reach and impact. If well executed, he thought, it could even form a blueprint for the future of healthcare.

In 2014, Mike and Sarah bootstrapped a new venture they called The Mighty, a digital media company connecting people facing disease, disability, and disorders. Since then, The Mighty has grown from a tiny team of several dozen to the largest, most engaged healthcare community in the world. The Mighty has attracted millions in venture capital and now hosts over three million members who exchange advice and provide support in seventy-eight different languages. In 2019, after members clamored for in-person meetings, The Mighty orchestrated over one thousand nondigital meetings. Every month, The Mighty stories receive over one hundred million views and the community sends over twenty million emails to members. Many members post questions for others, like the post from a man from Portugal. After asking about his bipolar disorder, the man received feedback the next day from people in fifteen different countries, including developing African nations.

More people today find themselves feeling like Mike on the day he received the devastating diagnoses about his children: alone and disconnected. Our society is increasingly divisive and nasty, lacking the security, support, and warmth of traditional communities. A revealing study showed that the number of “close others” that Americans claimed to have in 1985 was only three. In 2004 this dropped to one, with over 25 percent of Americans saying that they have no one with whom to share a personal problem. Our well-being has declined in turn.

From 2013 to 2016, major depression rose by 33 percent, according to data from forty-one million Blue Cross Blue Shield health records.1 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of suicide in the United States increased 28 percent between 1999 and 2016.

Isolation has also damaged business performance. My colleague Tony Schwartz and I asked over twenty thousand people across diverse industries and organizations around the world about their quality of work and life. The fundamental question we sought to answer was: What stands in the way of being more satisfied and productive at work? This survey was posted on Harvard Business Review (and later on Huffington Post, where we collected a small proportion of responses). We published results in Harvard Business Review and the New York Times. Our study found that 65 percent of people don’t feel any sense of community at work. Another study found that 76 percent reported difficulty making connections with work teammates.2 Over 40 percent feel physically or emotionally isolated in the workplace.3 Lonelier workers reported lower job satisfaction, fewer promotions, more frequent job switching, and a higher likelihood of quitting their current job in the next six months.4 Lonelier employees also tend to perform worse.5 As US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy explains, “At work, loneliness reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making. For our health and our work, it is imperative that we address the loneliness epidemic quickly.”6

When people feel a sense of community at work, we found that they are 74 percent more engaged and 81 percent more likely to stay with the organization. They report 83 percent higher thriving at work and having an internal sense of being energized, alive, and growing. In another study, Gretchen Spreitzer and I looked across six different organizations from various industries and found that those thriving at work had 16 percent better performance (as reported by their managers).7 They also were far less burned out, so they missed much less work and reported significantly fewer doctor visits, which meant huge healthcare savings and less lost time for the company.

This research is very personal for me. I find myself—and others—surviving or thriving based on feeling a sense of community and belonging. At the extreme, workplaces may feel void of community, and even toxic. Instead of supportive, energizing connections, a workplace might feel draining from de-energizing ties that suck the life and siphon the spirit from us. I vividly recall walking into a hospital room outside of Cleveland to see my strong, athletic dad with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. What put him there? Work-related stress stemming from two toxic bosses.

At the time, I didn’t realize he was inaugurating a family tradition. A couple of years following this medical event, just after I’d graduated from college, I scored what I thought was my dream job, helping a global athletic brand launch a sports academy. Unfortunately, I’d stumbled into an uncivil work culture where bullying, rudeness, and other forms of disrespect ran rampant. Since then I’ve felt both the joy of working in places that embodied community as well as the sheer disappointment and frustration of working in places that lack community. These experiences inspired me to study workplace culture and how leaders might work together to make their people and organizations thrive.

Creating Communities That Thrive

I define a community as a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare. Teams or tribes tend to refer to smaller communities, and I call the people who bring teams or tribes together to create a larger community of leaders. Communities, teams, and tribes are everywhere—they can exist in families, schools, places of worship, and local municipalities. They often include duties or obligations, and members may share ideas, interests, proximity (remote or not), or any other number of things, but a distinguishing factor is caring for one another. Community, team, and tribe are subjective. They reflect an awareness of the bond existing between people.

Unfortunately, community-rooted organizations like The Mighty remain rare in today’s business landscape. Organizations consistently underestimate the value of community. Alternately, they focus on areas like employee engagement, retention, and purpose instead of on building community first and allowing these other elements to follow. Our need for affiliation, or connection, is one of our three most fundamental needs, along with autonomy and competence. Of these three, connection is arguably the most important.8

I’d like us all to form community-first businesses like Mike’s. To that end, I’ve investigated hundreds of organizations like The Mighty, trying to determine the dynamics underlying successful communities so that we can help create more of them. I’ve interviewed and surveyed hundreds of thousands of people across six continents in nearly every industry and type of organization, including start-ups, Fortune 500 giants, hospitals, nonprofits, schools, universities, sports teams, religious communities, government agencies, and community, industry, leadership, coaching, and student associations. Consulting with scores of diverse communities around the world, I’ve discovered that companies and leaders can best build communities by

• sharing information,
• unleashing people,
• creating a respectful environment,
• practicing radical candor,
• providing a sense of meaning, and
• boosting member well-being.

Part 1 of this book details these characteristics in turn, considering how they each help us build the types of communities that bring out the best in employees. I intend this section as a practical guide for leaders and managers seeking to build thriving workplaces, and for anyone trying to become more effective and influential at work. Just because you’re not leading an organization doesn’t mean you can’t make it better for everyone, including yourself. In fact, my research confirms that community matters, and that your kindness, consideration, and respect can have a potent effect, creating a positive dynamic among your colleagues. Through small actions, you can strengthen your community and lift up your organization.

Part 2 of the book reminds us that we as individuals need to control our contributions, bringing our best selves to our communities. In these chapters, I explore the basics of self-awareness, movement, nutrition, recovery, and mindset. Our muscles are like a pharmacy that pump “hope molecules” into our bodily systems, giving us a potential cure to our loneliness and isolation—but only if we get up and move. While a lack of sleep contributes to poor mental and physical health, it also contributes to loneliness. Sleep deprivation is a strong social repellant, complicating our relationships with others and leading to misunderstandings. Pay attention to your mindset and what you’re feeding yourself—literally and figuratively. The social media, music, and other entertainment we consume affect not only ourselves but also others in our personal and professional communities. What we ingest from these sources, and our social network, affects our mood and mental health, and we pass our anxiety, depression, and stress on to others.9

In effect, your body hosts a dynamic and complex inner tribe, comprising over thirty-seven trillion cells. Ask yourself: Am I and my complex inner ecosystem thriving, or am I merely surviving? Don’t settle for surviving. Start inching yourself toward thriving. A decade’s worth of data, which I’ve accumulated from tens of thousands of employees across diverse industries and roles, suggests that the vast majority of us are merely surviving. Less than 10 percent of us are managing our inner tribe—our body—well, and only 25 percent are in the reasonable range; 40 percent of us are working at a significant deficit, and nearly 25 percent are in full-fledged crisis. All told, that’s 65 percent in the danger zone.

Leaders are most effective when they encourage and model respect and care for an inner tribe. When leaders explicitly encourage employees to work in more sustainable ways and when they themselves model a sustainable way of working, their employees are 55 percent more engaged, 53 percent more focused, and much more likely to stay at the company. By creating a culture in which people can thrive, leaders and managers can help us to enjoy happier, healthier, more fulfilling lives so that we in turn can contribute to and enrich our communities.

Too many people today feel like my brother Mike did—disconnected and suffering. As a society, we’re not fractured, we’re broken. It’s time to get back to basics and prioritize human connection. We’re not meant to be alone. Community helps support people through challenges and make the good times better. I hope the powerful stories and research in this book inspire and empower you to create a thriving tribe of your own. Organizations and their leaders really do have the power to design groups that strengthen connection. These groups in turn bring out the very best in people, enabling them to elevate additional teams and communities. Put this book to use, and you’ll trigger a ripple effect that will benefit not just your own people, but also individuals and organizations across society.