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Early in my career, a colleague and I made a shared commitment one summer to eat healthier. Salads. Smoothies. The full routine. Like many well-intentioned plans, our discipline began to fade after a few weeks. Eventually, we introduced what we jokingly called Grease Wednesdays, a weekly cheat day as a reward for all our good behavior. Every Wednesday, one of us would head out to grab fast food, and wed hide away in a small boardroom to indulge in our shared lack of nutritional discipline. At first, it was just the two of us, chatting with laptops closed and fries on the table. And then coworkers began peeking into whatever boardroom we were in, curious about the laughter. Eventually, someone asked if they could join. Then another. Within weeks, we had outgrown the small meeting room. Within months, we had moved into the departments largest boardroom to accommodate the growing crowd. What started as a casual indulgence became a shared ritual. And without intending to, Grease Wednesdays began to change our department culture. We all began to get to know each other as individuals, with pets and families and hobbies. The ritual also smoothed tensions between departments, built friendships between unfamiliar teammates, and helped us realize we hadnt felt all that connected before. Recent research shows the disconnection I witnessed in my own team is now part of a broader workplace trend. A 2025 survey of U.S. workers found nearly 40% report feeling lonely at work, and employees who lack social connection are significantly more likely to consider leaving their jobs because of it. When people feel they belong, trust builds, collaboration accelerates, performance rises, loyalty deepens, and well-being improves. When they dont, silos form, trust erodes, and discretionary effort fades. Take these numbers: a recent BetterUp survey found that workplace belonging leads to a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk, and a 75% decrease in employee sick days. THE PROBLEM WITH OVER-ENGINEERING CONNECTION Belonging is not accidental; its cultural. And culture is shaped, reinforced, and protected by a leaders vision, values, behavior, and accountability, including what I call positive accountability. But this is where many organizations misstep. When leaders notice disconnection, the instinct is often to formalize solutions with more engagement meetings, structured team building, and mandatory social events. Yet forced connection and fun rarely produce authentic trust. In fact, over-engineering connection can make people more guarded. For instance, research cited in a study by the University of Sydney found that when team-building activities feel mandatory, they can create resentment and pushback among employees. Belonging grows best in environments that feel natural, voluntary, and human, not observed or measured. If you want to improve connection and belonging in your workplace while avoiding forced connection, here are some steps you can take. DESIGN INTENTIONAL SPACES What made Grease Wednesdays powerful wasnt the food. It was the opportunity that a casual ritual created. We had, quite by accident, built a small, repeatable, low-pressure interaction in which familiarity could grow.Design offers a strong middle ground between compulsory team-building exercises and complete social neglect. The key here is to design small, optional, and repeatable opportunities that humanize the workplace. For in-person teams, you can host walking one-on-one meetings, Friday coffee drop-ins, no-agenda team lunches, or cross-department donut runs. For remote teams, you could host 15-minute morning online coffee drop-ins or no-agenda team virtual lunches, and share team celebrations of birthdays, anniversaries, and project completions. Keep it light; keep it optional; keep it ritual. MODEL OPENNESS Studies in organizational research find that when leaders are open, available, and accessible, employees feel more psychological safety. Psychological safety, coined by organizational psychologist Amy Edmondson, is the shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, like speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, without fear of punishment, humiliation, or retribution.To build psychological safety in teams, leaders can model openness. Do that by admitting when you dont know something, sharing a decision youve reversed (and why), and publicly thanking a team member who challenged you. Another way you can model openness is by offering positive team accountability by sharing the successes they see and are proud of within the team. For example, one leader I work with sends out an email to his team every two or three weeks. The irregularity of timing is actually effective by design, making the email feel more authentic. REWARD CONNECTION, NOT JUST OUTPUT Social psychology research shows that reciprocity in the workplace builds trust, cooperation, and positive relationships. The principle of social reciprocity, or when one recognizes and responds to positive actions, contributes to stronger workplace dynamics and mutual respectthe core components of connection and belonging.One way to do this is to shift what gets publicly praised. If the only Slack shout-outs are for revenue, speed, and delivery, people will assume that is all that matters. Instead, reward connection by recapping projects in team meetings by asking, Who helped make this possible? You can also celebrate the people who mentor, unblock, and build bridges across teams. When helping behavior is acknowledged, rewarded, and career-relevant, connection stops being invisible labor and becomes part of how success is defined. Full offices dont cure loneliness, but intentional culture does. When leaders design natural rituals, model openness, and reward connection as deliberately as they reward performance, belonging is no longer accidentaland becomes part of how work actually works.
Category:
E-Commerce
Being a middle manager often feels like living in two worlds at once. On one side, executives cascade big goals and sweeping strategies. On the other, teams look to you for clarity, advocacy, and daily guidance. Youre constantly reconciling top-down demands with bottom-up realities, often with too little time and too few resources to satisfy either side. The paradox of the role is stark: Middle managers carry enormous responsibility for execution but dont always have the authority to make critical decisions. Youre expected to deliver results on budgets you dont control, within structures you didnt design, and through policies you didnt write. This tension is one of the biggest sources of chronic strain. One survey found that middle managers reported higher burnout rates (36%) than non-managers, while another showed that 71% are sometimes or always overwhelmed at work. But heres the good news: The middle isnt just where pressure piles up. Its also where strategy becomes reality, where culture is lived (or lost), and where agility gets tested in real time. If you can reframe the squeeze as an opportunity, middle management becomes less a grind and more a proving ground. Here are four ways to turn the pressure into potential: BUILD YOUR COALITION If you think of your team only as your direct reports, youre missing the larger playing field. Work today is inherently cross-functional, which means your effectiveness hinges on your ability to influence sideways and upward, not just to manage downward. Peers hold the resources and expertise you need. Leaders above you control priorities, approvals, and air cover. Without credibility in those directions, even flawless execution within your own group can collapse at the edges. Research shows that misalignment between teams is one of the biggest drivers of wasted work. When priorities or interpretations differ, teams can spend weeks pulling in opposite directions. Middle managers who proactively build peer alignment surface these gaps early and save everyone time and frustration. The fix isnt complicated, but it is intentional: cultivate your network. A short, well-timed conversation with a peer or senior leader can prevent the kind of breakdowns that leave your team spinning. Think of it less as networking and more as preemptive damage control. The middle managers who thrive are the ones who invest in relationships that make the work move. MASTER THE PRACTICE OF LEADERSHIP Leadership is often packaged as a set of sweeping competencies or treated like a fixed trait you either have or dont. In reality, leadership is shaped over time, forged through daily choices, interactions, and repeated practice. While traditional leadership development focuses on broad skills taught in workshops or courseswhat we call horizontal development at Sounding Boardmany real-world challenges require something deeper. Vertical development helps managers think more complexly, adapt to evolving contexts, and lead with lasting impact, not just quick fixes. This kind of development happens through practice, not theory. Neuroscience supports it: Consistent, real-world repetition strengthens the neural pathways that anchor adaptability and retention. At BTS, weve seen that transformational leadership often hinges on unlocking specific mindset shifts, patterns where leaders typically get stuck and need to evolve to grow. So, how do you start? Find smaller moments to experiment. Instead of waiting for a performance review, try a quick debrief after a call with a direct report. Test a new communication approach in a team meeting before the next town hall. You can even name your intention to those around you. Letting others know youre trying something new sets expectations and invites helpful feedback. LEVERAGE AI FOR ON-DEMAND SUPPORT Your toughest challenges dont show up as theory; they show up in the form of messy, human situations: a disengaged direct report, a senior leader who keeps moving the goalposts, a peer who wont align. These problems dont have one-size-fits-all solutions, which is why coaching is so powerful. For decades, personalized coaching was a privilege reserved for executives. But with AI practice bots paired with guidance from real coaches, middle managers can get development thats personalized and scalable when they need it. These tools let you rehearse tough conversations, like giving feedback or delegating more effectively, in a low-stakes environment. Coaches help you translate insights into actions and longer-term mindset shifts. The result is leadership growth thats less abstract and more actionable. The smartest move? Start small. Pick one conversation youve been avoiding and rehearse it with an AI conversation bot. Youll uncover blind spots, test new approaches, and walk into the real thing with more confidence and control. MAKE UNCERTAINTY YOUR PLAYGROUND The defining condition of modern work is uncertainty. Markets swing, technologies disrupt, priorities pivot. If you wait for clarity, youll always be behind. The managers who thrive arent the ones who resist ambiguity, but those who use it as a catalyst to experiment and learn. One biopharmaceutical company I worked with recognized this when it expanded leadership development beyond senior executives to include middle managers. After providing leadership training focused on managing ambiguity and integrating AI into workflows, the company paired each manager with a coach to help translate learning into action. The result was faster decision-making and stronger cross-functional collaboration during a major pivot. When you stop treating uncertainty as a threat and start treating it as a laboratory, you shift from surviving change to shaping it. With these practices, middle management isnt a burden, but a launchpad for growth.
Category:
E-Commerce
We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between go to school and get a job, work became the central node of our livesthe very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness. That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isnt found in the busyness of the grindrather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has greater meaning, we change our relationship with it and, more importantly, with ourselves. On our latest episode of the From the Culture podcast, we spoke with Lenore Skenazy, cofounder and president of the nonprofit Let Grow, about finding meaning at work. And she offered a unique framing for how to rethink work and find alignment. In response to the public backlash she received after penning a 2008 column in the New York Daily News about letting her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone, Skenazy founded Let Grow with NYU business school professor Jonathan Haidt to help parents rethink the job of parenting. In our venture to become parents, we didnt imagine our job would be that of a supervisor or a concierge to our children. Instead, we imagined ourselves as guardians who would help our children grow. For Skenazy, the meaning of parenting is to prepare our children for adulthood, not to protect them from it. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} A deep rethink Although this may seem like a simple repositioning, its actually a profound recontextualization. When we think about parenting as a job of preparation as opposed to protection, it gives our work new meaning and, as a result, we engage in it differently. As Skenazy argues, when the work of parenting is about preparation, we grant our children freedom and independence to navigate the world on their own. Not in a way that endangers them but, rather, challenges them. When this happens, not only do they grow into more resilient humans who will likely be better prepared for the world, but weas parentsget more fulfillment from our work. The benefit of this recontextualization also applies to our professional work. When we reframe the meaning of work, we change our alignment with it. The result of this framing not only improves our well-being but also improves the work. The behavioral science is unambiguous to this fact. When work is more meaningful, were more engaged, more committed, and more satisfied. Moreover, these effects produce greater productivity and higher effort because were more willing to go the extra mile when we feel more fulfilled. A win-win This phenomenon happens on the individual level but scales when we consider the greater work of the organization. When workers collaborate in shared meanings, their collective outputs are optimized, and the organization is more likely to flourish because of it. This isnt about touchy-feely, woo-woo vibes to make people feel good. This is a renegotiation of work that empirically changes how we work, the impact of our work on the organization, and its impact on us. Its a win-win across the board. But thats not the world of work we occupy. Instead, our current framing of work is one that valorizes grind and prioritizes compensationwhich is transactional at best, but in most cases adversarial. Thats not to say that labor should not be sufficiently compensated, but that the exchange between wages and work should be more than just monetary. They should be meaningful as well. Suffice it to say that work is in desperate need of work. Not more grind, more hours, or more late nights, but more meaning. The best part about it is that meaning is socially negotiated and, therefore, we can change it ourselves. It doesnt require permission or approvaljust rethinking. We explore this in greater depth with Skenazy on our latest episode of From the Culture, available here or wherever you get your podcasts. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_16-9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/studio_square_thumbnail.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"FROM THE CULTURE","dek":"FROM THE CULTURE is a podcast that explores the inner workings of organizational culture that enable companies to thrive, teams to win, and brands to succeed. If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then this is the most important conversation in business that you arent having.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Listen","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLvojPSJ6Iy0T4VojdtGsZ8Q4eAJ6mzr2h","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91470870,"imageMobileId":91470866,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
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