Quotes About Community

If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?)

your cellphone, she is feeding that flame. Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

Within this accomplished group the parental-loss club turned out to be standing room only.

They did not rely on any outside structure or safety net. They were the structure, and if any of them failed, the group would fail.

This idea—that belonging needs to be continually refreshed and reinforced—is worth dwelling on for a moment. If our brains processed safety logically, we would not need this steady reminding.

I made a list: Close physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intensive, active listening Humor, laughter Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.) One more thing: I found that spending time inside these groups was almost physically addictive.

This approach extended to the raucous all-employee street hockey games in the parking lot ("No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck," recalled one player) and to the all-company Friday forums, where anyone could challenge the founders with any question under the sun, no matter how controversial—and vice versa. Like the hockey games, the Friday forums often turned into collision-filled affairs.

You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards.

belonging cues can't be reduced to an isolated moment but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship. Their function is to answer the ancient, ever-present questions glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What's our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?

Pick Up Trash:

The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build.

This is what I would call a muscular humility—a mindset of seeking simple ways to serve the group.

But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.

These groups, who by all rights should know what they stand for, devote a surprising amount of time telling their own story, reminding each other precisely what they stand for—then repeating it ad infinitum.

Close physical proximity, often in circles Profuse amounts of eye contact Physical touch (handshakes, fist bumps, hugs) Lots of short, energetic exchanges (no long speeches) High levels of mixing; everyone talks to everyone Few interruptions Lots of questions Intensive, active listening Humor, laughter Small, attentive courtesies (thank-yous, opening doors, etc.)

Every dinner, every elbow touch, every impromptu seminar on politics and history adds up to build a relational narrative: You are part of this group. This group is special. I believe you can reach those standards. In other words, Popovich's yelling works, in part, because it is not just yelling. It is delivered along with a suite of other cues that affirm and strengthen the fabric of the relationships.

Stott believed that the key to policing riots was to essentially stop policing riots.

One of the reasons it works is that it creates a high-purpose environment by delivering an unbroken array of consistent little signals. Every time an officer banters with a fan, every time a fan notices the lack of protective armor, a signal is sent: We are here to get along. Every time the police allow fans to keep kicking the ball, they reinforce that signal. By themselves, none of the signals matter. Together they build a new story.

Collisions - defined as serendipitous personal encounters - the lifeblood of any organization, the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.

We don't normally think about belonging to big groups in this way. Normally, when we think about belonging to big groups, we think about great communicators who create a vivid and compelling vision for others to follow. But that is not what's happening here. In fact, Hsieh is anticharismatic, he does not communicate particularly well, and his tools are grade school simple—Meet people, you'll figure it out. So why does it work so well?

proximity functions as a kind of connective drug. Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up. As scientists have pointed out, the Allen Curve follows evolutionary logic. For the vast majority of human history, sustained proximity has been an indicator of belonging—after all, we don't get consistently close to someone unless it's mutually safe.

The Spurs eat together approximately as often as they play basketball together.

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It's not something you are. It's something you do.