Work Besties Who Podcast

Belonging at Work with Faith Clarke

• Work Besties Who Podcast • Season 2 • Episode 72

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What does belonging at work actually look like—beyond posters and policies? Organizational culture expert Faith Clarke (engineer-turned-people-systems strategist) joins us to unpack “yes-yes” solutions, internal vs. external motivation, and how microcultures (5–8 person teams) can transform organizations. We talk listening as leadership, practicing—not preaching—values, and why work besties aren’t just emotional support humans…they’re co-creators of culture.

Top Takeaways

  • Culture is practiced, not posted. Microcultures beat macroculture slogans.
  • “Yes-Yes” solutions: bridge tensions so both needs are met.
  • Internal > external motivation for sustainable behavior and performance.
  • Belonging = shared care + protection. People stay and thrive when they feel looked after.
  • Start small. Build skills interpersonally, then in small groups, then scale.
  • Leaders model vulnerability. Listening with curiosity (not fixing) builds trust.
  • 80/20 rule. A few changes in listening and co-creation drive most results.
  • Work friendships fuel belonging and make hard work possible.

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Work Besties! Theme Song Written by Ralph Lentini @therallyband

Faith Clarke:

Not your your yes my no. What we need is build the ability to create yes yes solutions.

Claude:

Culture is not just a policy, it's a partnership. Hi, I'm Claude and I'm Jess. We are corporate employees by day, entrepreneurs by night, and work besties for life.

Jess:

Join us as we explore how work besties lift each other up, laugh through the chaos, and thrive together in every industry. Work besties. We talk a lot about belonging at work, but what does that actually mean? How do we build cultures where conflict is handled with care? Onboarding reflects our values, and our work bestities aren't just emotional support humans, but co-creators of culture. Today's guest, Faith Clark, engineer turned organizational culture expert. He helps us design ecosystems where bipopular neurodiversity and mission-driven humans don't just survive, they lead. Stay to the end for an answer to the What does it take to build a team where you feel safe enough to be yourself and bold enough to lead with others? Welcome, faith.

Faith Clarke:

Hi, Claude and Jessica. Tell us a little bit about you. I I love humans. Regardless of what I'm doing, I moving close to where people are and listening to where they want to be and helping them take the next step. I was trained as an engineer, worked on Wall Street in computer engineering, and taught college design systems, code, and traditional techie stuff. When things shifted at home, homeschooling, the teacher in me really felt lonely when my kids stopped homeschooling. So I went back into adjunct faculty while also not recognizing that my teaching thread was really what I was doing in organizational spaces. So as colleagues and friends asked me for support in strategic planning or teamwork stuff, it's the same set of skills. I really come close, listen to what's needed. And if I'm designing whether it's learning or I'm designing strategy or tool, it's just help you take the next step. So that's my my background covers engineering and psychology and everything in between.

Jess:

You move take the step the step from engineering to psychology to what got you to where you are right now.

Faith Clarke:

It's a multi-step journey, right? But I remember the first time when I was teaching computer science, the head of department at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he was a guy who moved from cognitive science into computer science. And I was fascinated by that move. He didn't want to teach his artificial intelligence course anymore, and I was the grunt new faculty. He had handed over artificial intelligence to me. And I thought, if we're gonna be teaching artificial intelligence, we need to understand what intelligence is. So my own approach was this exploration into intelligence, which was my segue into psychology. And so that was part of what happened. The shift into the kind of psychology of human performance, which is what I studied, was just this curiosity about motivation, both founded in what's happening with my kids, because we have autism and sensory processing, anesthesia, obsessive-compulsive, executive functions across the spectrum with my three humans. So I became curious about well, if we're not gonna force them, if we're not gonna manipulate them, and if we're not gonna make them afraid, how do we facilitate their movement and their learning and their development? And those questions led me into performance psychology, which is basically the same questions that we have to explore in the workplace. If we're not gonna use a whip and carrot, then what are we doing?

Claude:

So what are we doing?

Faith Clarke:

We're doing it poorly, whatever it is that we're doing, is what I have noted. One of the things that I really enjoyed in some of my own explorations is understanding the difference from the difference between motivation from the inside and motivation that's external. I believe that efforts to sustain our behavior that are external don't last. They're not sustainable. As human beings, we can't keep doing things for external rewards. We don't get there. And if the external or for punishment, the external thing, the punishment has to become worse and worse just to sustain the behavior. And so I think that a lot of what we've seen in a workplace has been the failure of our motivation systems. And and part of what we don't truly understand, or maybe we're not really employing, is what's where where are humans motivated? What are our core needs? What are our core motivations? What are we paying attention to? If that was being attended to, I bet we would get more collaborative solutions that are win-wins. And so what happens in power over systems and hierarchical models, like we're still trying to get away from, is that it's not my needs that are being attended to. It's not my internal motivations that are being attended to. I am being required to do something for the other because our systems and our models of work have not been built on nourishment and support and care. They've been built on extraction. And by definition, extraction is something that's it's not about me. We're just trying to get from me what you need for the system. It's about somebody else's needs. And so fundamentally, if we're doing things for somebody else's needs, it's not sustainable.

Claude:

So that's where you were referring to internal motivation and external motivation. Like, can you give an example of internal motivation, you know, versus that external motivation?

Faith Clarke:

Well, what I'll say is I'll just give a generic example first. And say, for example, let's say that you see yourself as a healthy eater. You may be internally motivated because you enjoy the taste of broccoli. You may be externally motivated because the image of healthy eating is important to you. So the external motivation of your image to eat broccoli versus the internal motivation, a love of the taste of broccoli, the both of these, on the outside, what it looks like is you're eating broccoli. But what's motivating the behavior on the inside is what's going to determine how to help this behavior be sustainable. So an example of internal motivation for me is that I really, really love talking to people. When I did work with families who cared for kids with complex needs, part of what I would say is design a business. The nine to five typically doesn't work for us if you have humans that you're caring for that have complex needs. So often these people are talking about how do I make some money. And I'd say design a business that if somebody woke you up at two in the morning, having not slept for 48 hours because your kid, whatever, you'd just be able to do it. And those things that you're able to do are likely things that are both easy for you and things that are restorative and nourishing for you. So internally motivated, it's a thing that satisfies something deep down on the inside of you, like your love for the taste of broccoli. For me, that's talking to people. I can do it. I don't need to be paid to talk to people. I will spend many hours doing it. I have many words that I can share and I listen really well. So, how how do we design our interactions with people in a workspace in ways that pay attention to how they're internally motivated? So I fundamentally don't agree with top-down implementation of any of these ideas. I don't believe that we can effectively, when people say to me, Hey Faith, how do I do this at scale? I'm like, it's the wrong question. Because when we're talking about how do we build businesses where individual human core needs are met, right? We have to build our capacity as individuals to even pay attention to those core needs in ourselves and in others, and then have those core needs met in an interaction between two people, and then in an interaction with three people and within a group. And so part of we've done a whole ton of create policies, create a statement, could do what are our values, how do we operationalize those values? But what we don't know how to do is in a group of five to eight people, how do we use the idea of the circle of concern? And what we've done is build systems where the circle of concern only has certain people in it and other people are commodities in terms of serving who's in the circle. Part of what we need to be able to do is to expand our circle of concern so that the needs of everybody in the circle are being supported. How do you build small clusters of people where everybody in the cluster both understands how to meet the core needs of the people in the group and to create the yes, yes, and to co-create work and co-create rest and care in ways that serve that group, knowing fully well that when you take one person out of that group, what you do is change the group, in which case it's the skill of understanding what's needed. As you can't create a template for that, you have to build the ability to understand how to do it in any group and then change it up. You basically need to be a good coach, like of you know, think in the sports team type of analogy. And then you're duplicating that micro model across the organization and building it that way. And so our industrial mindset doesn't work for actual humans, and we do need to move away from it and think how do I build these skills interpersonally and then in small groups, and then from there, how do I make anybody in a small group be able to move to another small group and have these same skills implemented?

Jess:

When you said yes, yes, and what did you mean by that?

Faith Clarke:

Instead of not your your yes mean my no, what we want is your yes and my yes, so it's a yes, yes. And what we have in our systems because of our relationship to power is we either have power says yes and you say no, or we have conformity, which is I shift my position to be with whoever so that we can have sameness, so that we can get what we want, even though what I'm really doing is denying myself, or power says, All right, we can have it your way. And what I'm saying is what we need to do is build the ability to create solutions that are yes, yes solutions. In research, that that's basically find the tension in the literature, which is where two ideas don't agree, and build a solution, build something that answers that, that bridges. And in our interactions in the workplace, part of what we have to do is understand why there's tension and then create a bridge that can be built that holds these two ideas together. That ability is the yes-yes ability that we need to be building.

Jess:

I think that's an amazing mindset to go into any type of solution-based, especially within the work environment. Everyone comes into these debates or these topics that you're trying to solve through with your very definitive, this is what I need to get done. So it's me versus the we. And I think that's an interesting way to go about it. How can we come both come out of this with a yes?

Faith Clarke:

There's a redefining of we so that our we includes us both. And my the fundamental idea of of inclusion is about the meeting of everybody's core needs. Nobody needs to be sacrificed. There is the understanding of what's needed for there to be co-creation of things that actually meet what everybody needs.

Claude:

Isn't it so complicated? After a bigger group, I mean, when you're like two or three, it's kind of easy to have everybody's, I mean, easier to have everybody meet their needs. But when you're in a bigger group, there's even more difficulty for everybody to meet. So do you is there like the leader that is going to try? Like, how do you define and who is going to define that bridge that you were talking about?

Faith Clarke:

It's not defined, it's co-created. I hear what you're saying about the difficulty, but the difficulty is a is a difficulty in skill, not a difficulty in because it's complex. Because it is complex, but every time I um, you know, people say to me, Faith, this is so hard. And I was like, we have robots on Mars though. So human beings have no difficulty with complex solutions. The way we got robots on Mars is that we stayed with it until we understood how to do it. Part of what needs to happen in our workspaces is that our ideas around efficiency limit our ability to stay with things long enough. So, yes, we do have too many meetings, but many of our meetings could be emails. And instead of using time for data handing over, we can be using our time to be with each other and figure some of this out. And yes, it may not be figured out initially in five minutes, but the more we engage in figuring out the human-to-human differences and our relationship to difference.

Jess:

Thinking about this in the corporate environment, the old model of conformity, everybody just falls in line because that's what's being told, has shifted. And now you see the companies that are more successful have a high-functioning team that respect everyone's opinions and bring everybody to the table versus the hierarchical approach. Maybe it started first with a certain number of people and then they just kept expanding. So there is power in business results based off of that too.

Faith Clarke:

So business results have always been clear, but there's there's also more at stake in terms of when when relationship to power has to shift, it's hard. And there's more than just money that makes it hard. Yeah, engagement more than doubles, innovation massively increases. The revolving door that so many people experience, so many organizations experience drops when we are able to build shared power systems where people experience the belonging and feel included and feel the value of their contribution because it's co-created. All of those systems are so much more stable. And we do get stuck with how do we build it because the old models are in our head, even in our new businesses, where I need to prove that I'm productive, I need to prove that all of these pressures of proving certain things and making that visible makes it look like you're wasting time when you're spending a couple hours figuring out how to navigate different on your team so that you're not in conflict situations that become intractable and people leave. And if you're doing that, it might be, yeah, but you're not working. And is that what we're supposed to be doing? Are we supposed to be working? Are we doing woo-woo taking care of people stuff? Not recognizing other teams, such as our sports teams, there's so much time spent understanding an athlete's body, an athlete's emotions, an athlete's interactions with the other player. Other teams get this, and even if they're not applying it in terms of super holistic, they get the fact that the individual and understanding the individual holistically is what's needed to build an effective team. But in the workplace, we've made that be other rules to execute on our organizational objectives.

Claude:

So, how can we change that now?

Faith Clarke:

I think we change it in all the pockets where we have influence. So, what I say to people is about restorative team culture. A culture is really the habitual thoughts and behaviors and meaning making of a group of people. And microcultures are much easier to implement than change in massive macro cultures. External culture is pretty stable. A culture that's created with five people and eight people, you can see the results of that quite quickly. When you have the proof case, that's so much easier to go and invite other people into that. And so I invite team leaders and like instead of just thinking of it as information dissemination, think about creating a microculture where certain values are actually practiced. People are much more likely to feel they have permission to implement something if they are on the experiencing side of it. Some of these elements of belonging are how are they helping each other feel cared for? How are they helping each other feel protected? How are they paying attention to what's happening for the actual individuals on that team? That will translate into how those leaders create micropockets with their direct reports.

Jess:

Do you feel like it can start at any level or any part of the organization, or do you feel like it needs to start with the executive level?

Faith Clarke:

It can start anywhere. And there are challenges regardless of where it starts. I think at the executive level, there's the perception of risk and loss of power and so on with the stakeholders is hard to deal with. But it's so much more effective if you can do it at the executive level. Other levels of the organization, what you end up having the potential to have is grassroots movement, things springing up across the organization because people you can see change quickly and people can catch it.

Claude:

So, what are some of the tools to create that five to eight team?

Faith Clarke:

Rather than tools, I think they're practices. Um, so it's not often people say to me, Hey Faith, can you create a workshop to help people? And I was like, it's not a workshop, it's not training, it's practice. Often people already know that they should insert whatever it is. So, one, there are practices of how to co-create solutions. It's organizational specific. At the very bottom of it, it's really listening, it's really knowing that humans have core needs and what are they? I think the expert on who and what my core needs are is me. So, really listening to me. Fundamentally, humans have relationship needs, they want to feel deep connection, they want to feel competent, they have competency needs. So I want to feel like my expertise is valued and shared in the space. I have autonomy needs. I don't want to be controlled, I want to be able to give into the space in the ways that feel really good for me. And the ways that that shows up, it's listening. And then I think there is a skill of bridge building. Just how do I connect what I hear from two people, that's leadership skill, into the thing that is the yes, yes. And that's first of all, believing that there is a possible yes, yes. Often people say to me, it's not possible. And I'm like, and then we can't find it. If you believe it's not possible, we definitely can't find it. So there is that commitment to doing it that's required, and then there's building space to practice that. So if we are trying to figure out how to get team communications, is a fake favorite one because it's always a place where there's so much difference. And instead of just demanding that everybody be at the morning meeting at eight o'clock and it's primarily primarily audio, just have a conversation about what's the preference, why, how does that work, and then notice all the differences. Feel the discomfort with the difference and the practice of actually recognizing that your discomfort isn't gonna kill you, and we can actually just be with this in the moment, it's not a sign of your poor leadership. How do we take people who are so different and co-create a communication practice that says yes to the fact that I might be more auditory than you are, and not only that, but meetings of this sort don't work for me, but they work for you. And how do we solve that problem? I think once we take the actual problems that a team has, notice what the practices are that are needed, create time to practice. So make sure that in every meeting we're practicing the skills that we need. Over time, what we'll start to see is it'll just become automatic. People will automatically share power, people will automatically say, Oh, so you're saying this and we're saying that. What connects these two? People start to do their bridge building practice. People will be like, Oh, I feel uncomfortable with that thing. I think I have a story about your difference, but that's about me. It's not that you're wrong. People will start to do those things and I will start to see those automatic practices will, you know, show themselves up and won't take as much time.

Jess:

Faith, in your um implementation, working with teams on practicing these things, has there ever been a case or an example where somebody is just not along the journey?

Faith Clarke:

The luxury of being the consultant, as I can call it out, I'm often working both with the leader and then with the team. If I see somebody being particularly unable to engage, whether that's because of unable to see their own blind spot or unable to engage with the practices because values-wise they disagree, I am going one-to-one. Um, and then I'm with the leader, trying to help the leader build their ability to require the practices, meaning create a culture where that practice is just the norm, even if that person doesn't uh feel able to engage. The belief I try to sell is that 80% of all behavioral issues are systemic and system and context. Only 20% is really the individual. You put people in a different environment and they behave differently. So there is an opportunity here to build an environment that will make it easier for that person to practice. What are the things that we need to do to make that happen? So I work with the leader around that, work with a team about their practices, and I go to the other person one-to-one because I'm trying to understand where's the issue. So I build trust. Part of how I teach teams to work is to focus on trust building. It's trust building and trust building, and then it's trust building. I am trust building with that person as well. And usually I'm able to help hear what the issue is and help the leader know it may not happen that the person is able to engage, but what's really going on under here? People don't really just want to throw spokes into the wheels. That's not how we are as humans. I love the 80-20 year old. And 80% of the solution, like 80% of the results, will really come from this 20% anyway, of strategy, of tools. So people think that oh, you need a whole new no, you need if you can change a few things in how you're listening and how you're engaging and how you're creating work together. If you can just shift from um doing to co-creating, it'll show up in 80% of the change in terms of how people are engaging with each other.

Claude:

We are all about work friendship, work besties, right? Have you seen a correlation of this group of yes and yes when you have this work friendship between people?

Faith Clarke:

Yes, I did some informal research on belonging just through socials, and I basically just said, Hey, I want to talk about belonging. Get on my calendar. 30 people just jumped on in a day. One person talked about the relationships at work and how they facilitated her feeling of belonging at work. She built the relationships at work, and as they left, she started to feel like she belonged less and less, and her work actually became less meaningful to her. Her ability to perform at work shifted. It's interesting that when we feel like we belong, which means when we feel like our care isn't just our responsibility, when we feel like other people are protecting our needs and will go to bat for us when damage happens without us having to advocate for it. That belonging creates the energy to build bridges, to do hard things, which is what's needed when we are going to change our practices around anything.

Claude:

And how do you foster this sense of belonging?

Faith Clarke:

So, belonging isn't something that we can make sure another person feels. There's a ton of humility. It's hard for us to foster something we can only create the environment, right? So, at work, number one is to know that I can't make you feel like you belong, but I'm gonna do my darnest to build an environment where your needs are centered. Number two is to acknowledge that we are in a system that has met the needs of certain people and not others. So it's to understand whose needs aren't being met. There is a roadway here, and some people aren't on it, and there are barriers to some people, but if I am not the some people, then I don't know what those barriers are. And part of building belonging is to the ability to know what the barriers are and not just make it the responsibility of the person who has them. There's a whole awareness piece that means understanding people, and the people who are facing the barriers have built in lack of trust of people who don't have those barriers. So it's in the workplace knowing that it's a low-trust environment. People don't believe that the other people who don't know about these barriers really are really committed. And how do we then show that we're committed to overcome to understanding and overcoming the barriers? That's a lot of individual work on the part of the leader who may or may not be experiencing those barriers. But once we're willing to kind of say, hey, I don't know, and I want to understand that, and you won't be penalized for sharing what your barriers are. And I'm willing to do my own research to find out outside of this space and to come to you and say, I've understood this or how can I? But so far, so being willing to say that fostering belonging is a long game because you're gonna have to overcome the lack of trust that's built in the environment, and you're gonna have to make yourself vulnerable to the barriers that you are engaging right now. Facilitating has to be first, I'm doing this, I'm gonna do it because it's the right thing to do. So I say this it's a moral issue or ethical issue, and then it's knowing the power differentials across the team and in the group so that the people with more power are willing to expose and be more vulnerable because they recognize that there's higher risk for people who traditionally have less power in the system, so they can build that understanding of what the barriers are because then overcoming the barriers with people is part of the care that's going to create the belonging.

Jess:

So it all starts with listening because you have to listen to what your people are saying, thinking, feeling, and what they bring to work or them as themselves.

Faith Clarke:

It starts with listening for cute just for the sake of curiosity, not listening to solve, to fix, to manipulate. I want to understand who you are, and I recognize that your good impacts my good. And so I know that we're creating a feedback system of good that means I want to hear so that I can offer you care in the ways that I can in the system that I have influence.

Jess:

What does it take to build a team where you feel safe enough to be yourself and bold enough to lead with others?

Faith Clarke:

Just start with starting with us as leaders. It's accepting the maybe calling to greater vulnerability. It's accepting that calling to vulnerability so that you can model how do we engage with our real selves, shifting away from I'm here as leader to help you, to together we create space where we all are safe. And I'm gonna let myself be held by you. And then I invite you to let me hold you. Starting with that premise and figuring out how that how to do that, inviting help in. Because when you have a team where you're trying to do that work, it's hard to be both the person who is thinking through strategy and the person who's letting themselves be vulnerable. So having people come in to just do the holding so that the team can connect.

Jess:

Faith, you've provided us some great examples, giving our teams that space they can feel seen, safe, supported.

Claude:

And you helped us remember the power of the people behind, you know, beside us, the colleague who holds space, the work bestie who reminds us we belong. Culture is not just a policy, it's a partnership.

Faith Clarke:

The policy doesn't create the culture. It's the it's often women, invisible labor that's creating whatever belonging we already do have. And we want to recognize it.

Jess:

So work bestie is out there. If this episode gave you a open, please share it to your team, boss, or work bestie.

Claude:

Until next time, stay human, stay connected, and never underestimate the power of one good teammate.

Jess:

Remember, whether you're swapping snacks in the break room, rescuing each other from endless meetings, or just sending that perfectly timed meme. Having a work bestie is like having your own personal hype squad.

Claude:

So keep lifting each other up, laughing through the chaos, and of course. And let's just keep supporting each other.

People on this episode

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Claude F

Co-host
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Jess K

Co-host