STUDENT SUCCESS

Fostering Belonging: A Key to Student Success

A groundbreaking Stanford-led study underscores the power of student belonging in college completion rates. The study demonstrates a tangible uplift in academic perseverance and success by addressing students’ common concerns about belonging, especially among historically underrepresented groups.

The simple yet profound intervention involved pre-matriculation online exercises that helped students normalize and navigate their belonging concerns. Engaging with stories from peers, students reflected on the universality of these worries and the progression towards feeling more integrated over time. This brief exercise led to a notable increase in completion rates, particularly benefiting those from less traditionally represented backgrounds.

The research emphasizes the symbiosis of individual mindset shifts and the cultivation of supportive educational environments. It’s a clarion call for institutions to introspectively assess their cultural climates, ensuring they foster not just inclusivity but a genuine sense of belonging.

Key Points:

• 👩🏾‍🎓🧑🏼‍🎓 The study revealed that a brief intervention could pivot students’ sense of belonging, impacting their academic journey, especially for minority and first-generation college students.
• 🌻 It emphasizes the “seed and soil” metaphor, indicating that positive psychological interventions (seeds) thrive in supportive, inclusive environments (fertile soil).
• 📈 The intervention increased first-year full-time completion rates by two percentage points for students from underrepresented groups. (Impressive, given the online exercises only took 30 minutes to complete)
• 🏛️ Participating institutions spanned 22 colleges and universities, engaging a diverse sample of 26,911 students.
• 🇺🇸 The study’s implications could lead to over 12,000 additional students completing their first year annually across 749 four-year institutions in the U.S.

Enhancing a sense of belonging in college isn’t just beneficial; it’s necessary for student success and institutional effectiveness. Schools can:

• Implement inclusive practices that affirm every student’s place in the academic community.
• Integrate orientation modules like the one developed by Stanford, focusing on normalizing belonging concerns and offering strategies for improvement.
• Proactively create environments where diverse student identities are acknowledged, supported, and celebrated, enabling all students to thrive.

🧰 Social Belonging Download

FREE RESOURCE: The Belonging Module is a free, evidence-based program designed to support students’ sense of belonging on campus and improve their engagement, retention, and achievement.

🦁 Leadership Lessons »

Belonging is fundamental, impacting not just students but all organizational levels. It’s the bedrock of vibrant, cooperative communities where individual talents aren’t just present but are actively flourishing.

Leaders must regularly evaluate their culture, ensuring it cultivates a sense of inclusion to unlock discretionary effort and elevate collective performance. Remember, incremental numerical gains are substantial, but the exponential potential lies in nurturing human capital.

We use the Best Results Formula to convey this point for optimizing performance and outcomes for service-based organizations.

The Best Results Formula

Best Results = (Systems + Processes) × People × Culture

This conceptual formula aims to simplify organizational performance’s complexity into key manageable and actionable elements. This formula is particularly suited for service-based organizations, where the quality of human interaction and organizational culture play a critical role in shaping employee behaviors and attitudes that lead to customer satisfaction and operational excellence.

• Systems are the established methods and protocols that ensure business operations are conducted efficiently and consistently. In service organizations, systems provide a reliable framework for delivering services, managing customer interactions, and maintaining quality.
• Processes are the sequences of actions or steps to achieve particular results. Well-designed processes streamline operations, reduce errors, and ensure a consistent quality of service, which is crucial for student satisfaction.
• People are the human element central to service-based organizations. This includes team members’ skills, expertise, creativity, and emotional intelligence. People influence the customer experience profoundly; their performance, motivation, and engagement are crucial for delivering high-quality, personalized services that meet students’ needs and expectations.
• Culture represents the collective values, beliefs, and principles of the organization. It shapes the behavior of individuals within the organization, aligning them with the company’s mission, vision, and goals. A strong, positive culture fosters an environment where employees are motivated, engaged, and committed to delivering their best work. It acts as a self-reinforcing engine, guiding the organization towards continuous improvement and high performance.

As you might imagine, a sense of belonging becomes paramount in the Best Results Formula. It’s a pivotal strategy that directly influences the effectiveness of your people and the resonance of your culture, thereby amplifying overall outcomes.

🔗✨🤝 This sense of belonging acts as the glue that binds people to the organizational fabric, ensuring that their talents are not merely present but are fully engaged and harmoniously aligned with the organization’s mission, vision, and values (culture).

This last point can’t be emphasized enough. Many leaders think they can implant Level 10 Talent (people) into roles, and everything will work out. If only it were that easy.

People Without Culture Doesn’t Work

When training teams, I often say, “On the count of three, I want everyone to point north.” 1-2-3, and you see a room full of hands pointing in different directions.

So even if you have Level 10 talent and top-tier professionals aboard the ship, their efforts are scattered without a shared sense of true north. One person is rowing that way, while others are rowing the other way.

🤦‍♂️ The resulting myriad of directions visually represents the chaos of a disjointed culture, underscoring the critical need for a unified sense of purpose and direction. Belonging goes a long way toward achieving this. Because psychologically speaking, a sense of belonging is probably our most powerful drive. 👥 It’s what drove us into tribes, collaboration, and working together. This makes sense when you conceptualize the dangers of going solo without the support and protection of the group.

As a core driver, belonging becomes a universal REQUIREMENT that makes all the difference. Even at home, we first discuss belonging when counseling my 12-year-old daughter on working through conflict and challenges.

👧🏽 I ask her, “What do people want more than anything else?” She replies, “To belong,” I then ask, “Does this person feel like they belong?” Or “How can you help others feel like they belong? Nine out of ten times, she works out a solution by starting with belonging.

Even for us big kids, nurturing a culture that engenders belonging isn’t optional; it’s essential. It’s about creating an environment where everyone knows which way is true north, allowing the organization’s vision, mission, and values to become deeply ingrained in their professional ethos.

🎨 Such a culture doesn’t just attract exceptional talent; it retains, molds, and multiplies its impact. In this light, the Best Results Formula is not just a blueprint for operational success; it’s a manifesto for building a community where belonging is central, ensuring everyone can contribute to their fullest potential.

❗️By the way, culture doesn’t happen by accident. Culture requires purposeful “cultivation” by leadership. The only things that grow without effort are weeds.

So, I implore you to weed your garden, leverage the Best Results Formula, and ask how I can “cultivate” a sense of belonging to help my people connect and find a collective shared solidarity.

P.S. ~ Do this, and your institution will lead the pack because people who belong BELIEVE. And people who believe » can accomplish just about anything.

🎯 Cabinet Conversation »

• How are we fostering an environment where every member feels they belong?
• How can we enhance our cultural practices to reinforce the sense of belonging among our community?
• What measures can we introduce to monitor the ongoing effectiveness of our belonging initiatives?