The Places We Belong
This week I would like to talk about the importance of belonging, and to do so I’m going to tell a true story of something that happened to me when applying for a job a few years ago and the impact that it had on me.
I’d applied for a job as a Test Practice Manager to work with the Test Community of Practice at a small but growing tech company, and at the point this story begins I was quite a long way into the interview process. I’d had a short screening call over the phone (which did not go well – I was fairly sure I’d blown it after a few minutes on the phone!), a face to face conversation with the hiring manager to find out a bit more about each other, then a somewhat formal and fairly standard interview. It was at this point that I got a call from the recruiter…
“They’ve like you so far” I was told “so they’d like to bring you in to meet the test team. Would you be able to come in for half a day and run a training session for them so they can get to see what it’d be like to work with you?”
“Yes sure” I said - which was a bit of an odd way of pronouncing ‘oh my God I can’t think of anything more terrifying’ – I really wanted the job so I was prepared to be brave for it, but come the big day I was feeling very nervous.
I’d been sent an invite with the planned agenda: the hiring manager was going to start with an ice breaker exercise, and I was then going to have an hour to run my session (as I didn’t know them I’d decided to play safe and do a session on producing test oracles – get them to tell me what they knew rather than the other way around). We’d then have some time together as a group so the community could ask me some questions and get to know me a bit more, and afterwards we’d all go and have lunch together. As someone naturally awkward in the company of others….no pressure.
So that’s how I found myself walking into their office reception at 9am on the 30th October, and that’s the moment that I realised this wasn’t going to be an ordinary day. Unbeknownst to me, the company was a big fan of Halloween and, equally unbeknownst to me, they do a company-wide fancy dress competition that due to the big day falling on a weekend had been moved to the day before. I was not warned about this, and as such I found myself doing my introductions and trying to make a good first impression to a room full of people including the grim reaper and a unicorn.
The session went about as well as I could have reasonably hoped it would. Whilst not my finest work, no one looked bored, and people seemed to be happy taking part and came across as engaged. One person told me towards the end that they “didn’t much like this approach – if you get the job I’ll teach you a better way of doing this” (they did and they were right – their approach was better and i have since copied it).
Moving on to the next stage we all went to the company breakout area and, coffee in hand, the grilling began. I was asked about which test methods I preferred. The unicorn asked lots questions about what I believed the role of a line manager was. I was asked my thoughts on the importance of test automation. It was all good natured and friendly, but the weight of answering a large group of people who I was hoping to impress and convince to give me a job hung heavy. All I could do was answer honestly and trust that my beliefs and values would match with theirs.
Group interview over, I had a brief catch up with the hiring manager before we headed to get lunch together. This part wasn’t an interview, this was just a chat with a bunch of likeminded people. We talked about meetups and conferences we’d been to that we’d enjoyed, we talked about what its like to work there, and we talked about how the air conditioner settings in the office would be a deal breaker for me whether I took the job or not. It was a really nice way to finish up.
The end of this story is that I got the job, I learned from some fantastic people who I still value years later, and I really enjoyed my time working there.
Why am I telling you this? Am I trying to convince you that a four stage interview process is really a good idea? Valid questions, but that isn’t really the point of this story. I want to talk about belonging. Belonging is the feeling of being part of something bigger than you – the sense of being welcome in a space or with a group of people. Belonging is the gold dust of any Community of Practice, as its what binds people together and helps them feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. When I got this job and arrived on my first day, the people on the reception desk recognised me and welcomed me in. I walked around the office and said hello to all the people I already knew and who already knew me. By 11 ‘o’ clock I’d wandered up to some of the testers who’d been there on that morning to ask what they’re working on, and they were demoing the products they were working on. I felt welcome there and I felt like I belonged there, and I think that helped create the immediate feeling of psychological safety that led me to do some of the work I’m most proud of in my career.
Belonging is why we make an effort to welcome new members to our communities. To ensure that they meet others and build connections that make them feel part of the group. Its why it’s important from time to time to look back at past successes and the journey you’ve all been on together. The things you’ve achieved and the challenges you’ve overcome together. Its why when someone leaves your community we know it isn’t simply transactional – we celebrate their time with us and hope for their success in the future. Particularly effective Communities of Practice will have succession plans in place – when a member or even the leader is unavailable or moves on, they leave the community in a better and stronger place than they found it.
Effective CoP leaders work hard to nurture a sense of belonging amongst their members, unashamed to think of their community as something more than just a regular meeting. We don’t know how much that connection may mean to someone in the group. It could be to them the most meaningful relationship in their professional life, and you owe it to them to do what you can to protect that. We don’t have to pretend to be a family, we don’t have to act like a cult – we simply have to treat the relationships within our communities with the respect that they deserve.
The concept of belonging is my new favourite thing to think about, largely inspired by Owen Eastwood’s book Belonging, and I’m in the process of recommending it to everyone I talk to about Communities of Practice. In all likelihood I’ll be writing about it again some time very soon, but you should definitely read it yourself – hopefully you’ll love it as much as I did!