Belonging by Owen Eastwood Book Review

Book Review — Belonging by Owen Eastwood

A few winters ago I was out doing street outreach on one of those nights where the cold stops being weather and starts being a personal insult.

That was with City Street Outreach, here in Toronto. We help the city’s most vulnerable people.

And I noticed something I’ve never been able to un-notice.

There was a group of guys sitting together, and they had a leader. Nobody appointed him. There’d been no interview, no LinkedIn endorsement, no offsite with a flip chart. But every single person there knew exactly who he was.

And it wasn’t the biggest guy. It wasn’t the loudest one.

It was the funny one.

These were people with almost nothing between them and the floor, and the person holding that little community together was the one who could still make the others laugh. His sense of humour hadn’t made him popular. It had, quite literally, kept him going, and it had built him a group of people who looked out for him.

I’ve thought about that man in every boardroom I’ve walked into since.

So when I picked up Belonging by Owen Eastwood, I was expecting a sports book.

What I got was that sidewalk, explained.

Owen Eastwood is a performance coach, and his client list is ridiculous. The England football team. NATO’s command group. The South African cricket team. The Royal Ballet. Every England player was handed a copy of this book when they showed up for the Euros, which is a lot more pressure than I put on my podcast listeners.

But here’s the thing. It isn’t really a sports book at all.

The “ancient code” in the title is the heart of it. For almost all of human history, belonging to the group was how you survived. Get pushed out of the tribe and you were on your own, and on your own did not end well. Eastwood’s point is that our brains never got the memo that things have changed. We still walk into every meeting quietly checking: am I in, or am I out?

It’s about the oldest question we’ve got.

Do I matter here?

And whether you work in a hospital, on a construction site, in a call centre, or from your kitchen table in a lovely blouse and pyjama bottoms during a Zoom call (I see you, and your secret’s safe with me), that question is humming away underneath everything else you do all day.

Eastwood builds the book around what a group has to get right for people to feel they belong:

• Finding your identity story
• Defining a shared purpose
• Picturing what future success looks like
• Sharing ownership
• Understanding the “silent dance” that plays out in every group
• Setting the conditions for talent to thrive
• Turning diversity into an advantage

That’s the whole menu. Here are the five takeaways that stuck with me.

Takeaway #5: Culture Doesn’t Happen at the Retreat. It Happens on a Tuesday.

We spend a fortune on culture.

The offsite. The values workshop. The framed poster in reception with a mountain range on it, which I’ve always found odd, because I’ve worked with a lot of companies and not one of them has ever needed anybody to climb a mountain.

And then everybody goes back to the office, and culture gets built anyway. By whether somebody says good morning.

Eastwood talks about the “silent dance” that plays out in every group. My reading of it: all the tiny signals about who’s in and who’s out that nobody ever says out loud. That’s the part of the book I’ve come to believe most. The silent dance is saying hello to the new person whose name you’ve already forgotten. It’s thanking the one who stayed late. It’s putting the phone away, and I mean away, not face down, because everybody in the world knows face down is still a phone.

None of that looks like anything. It’s four seconds.

And then one day it’s just how it is around here.

I find that genuinely freeing, because it means you don’t need a budget and you don’t need permission. You don’t have to be the CEO to change the temperature of a room. You just have to be the person who does the four-second thing on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody’s watching and there is no chocolate fountain.

(Although if there IS a chocolate fountain, I’m attending. I’m not made of stone.)

Takeaway #4: Fitting In and Belonging Are Opposites Wearing the Same Lanyard

This is the distinction I wish somebody had handed me thirty years ago.

Fitting in is changing who you are so the room will have you.

Belonging is the room not asking you to.

One of those costs you something every single day. The other one gives you something back.

Fitting in is changing who you are so the room will have you. Belonging is the room not asking you to.

And after a couple of decades of standing in front of corporate audiences, I can tell you that you can see which one a room is running on. A room that’s fitting in laughs about half a second late, because everyone’s checking whether it’s allowed. A room that belongs laughs on time.

I’ve done rooms where the boss was in the front row and three hundred people waited to see his face before they’d let themselves enjoy anything. Spoiler alert: he was having a lovely time. Nobody told them.

This is where Eastwood is at his strongest. One of the big ideas in the book is turning a group’s diversity into an advantage, and he doesn’t mean a poster in the lunchroom.

He’s worked with the South African cricket team, which he calls “the most diverse team in world sport.” On any given day, he says, their eleven players cover six different ethnicities and religions. And they don’t treat that as something to manage around. As he told Bruce Daisley on the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast, they name it out loud: “we are looking at our strength, the diversity of this group.”

And there’s a line of his I’d put on every HR department’s wall: “There isn’t one model.” No single template makes a great team, so you have to actually get to know the people in front of you.

In HR language, I’d call that culture-add over culture-fit. Hire for what somebody brings that you haven’t already got, instead of for how neatly they match the people you’ve already hired.

Because think about what “culture fit” is actually asking. Is she like us?

Congratulations. You’ve now hired the same person eleven times, and your brainstorms have all the range of a KFC menu. It’s chicken. It’s all chicken.

Takeaway #3: Everybody Wants to Know They Matter. Almost Nobody Gets Told.

I see this at every single keynote, and it doesn’t matter what the industry is.

I speak at a lot of health and safety conferences. Rooms full of people whose entire job is stopping other people from getting hurt. And even there, the thing that lands hardest isn’t the safety statistic. It’s the moment somebody realises their work has been noticed.

It hardly ever takes a promotion. It usually takes about eleven words. “I saw what you did with that client. That mattered. Thank you.”

Eastwood talks about setting the conditions to unleash talent. I’d put it more simply: people do their best work when they know somebody noticed.

And here’s where I think laughter comes in, because people assume comedy is about jokes.

It isn’t. Not the kind that counts.

A shared laugh is the fastest way human beings have ever invented of saying you’re one of us. It’s the whole reason I’ve been able to make a living at this. When a room laughs together, for about a second and a half nobody in it is a stranger. And you cannot fake it in a group, which is exactly why it works.

That’s not a nice thought. That’s a mechanism. And it’s free.

Takeaway #2: The Best Teams Look Outward, Not Upward

Two of Eastwood’s big ideas are a shared purpose and shared ownership of it. Not the boss’s mission that everyone else is renting, but one the whole team owns. His teams don’t burn their energy climbing over each other. They spend it on each other, and on the thing they’re all pointed at.

This is the one where I have to declare an interest, because it’s most of my life when I’m not on a stage.

Over the past 25 years I’ve created, hosted and helped raise money for all kinds of charities. That includes more than $650,000 for breast cancer research: Laughlines, for Princess Margaret Hospital, and Stand Up For The Girls, for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.

And the thing that still gets me isn’t the total. It’s who turns up.

People and businesses who got absolutely nothing out of it. No logo on anything. No press release. No clever tax angle. They said yes because somebody they knew asked them to.

Take the pet food. I look after the pet portfolio for City Street Outreach, which means driving out to suppliers like Freedom Pet Food in Cambridge once a month. All in, I pick up about 70,000 pounds of pet food a year. (My car has opinions about this.)

Then the van rentals started getting expensive. So I mentioned it to my friend Henry Chu, who’s been kind enough to come to my fundraisers. His brother-in-law, John Donald, is Chairman and COO of XYZ Storage in Toronto. Henry spoke to John, and now XYZ lends us a van whenever we need one.

Then there are the socks. My friend Val Bibb and her brother Carlo Rodrigo, with their families, have donated clothing and dry goods to City Street Outreach for years. The Journal of Rheumatology buys socks through a distributor called Sock Rocket, which donates three pairs for every pair purchased, and every year the extras go to charity. This year, they chose to send 600 pairs to City Street Outreach.

I’ve watched complete strangers turn into friends over hundreds of volunteer hours. I’ve watched laughter take down barriers that money couldn’t touch. And every single time, the same thing was true.

Nobody in the room was asking what they were getting out of it. Funnily enough, that’s usually when people get the most out of something.

Takeaway #1: What Are You Going to Leave Behind?

My favourite thing in the book turns out to be older than the book.

The idea comes out of the All Blacks, the New Zealand rugby side, and Eastwood, who has Māori heritage himself, builds it out of whakapapa: the idea that you’re one link in a chain that started long before you and carries on long after you.

His own story is the best bit. When he was twelve, after his father died, he got in touch with his Māori tribe, Ngāi Tahu, and they sent him a document with the names of twenty generations of his ancestors. Imagine holding that at twelve. You can feel that page in everything he writes.

He knows the All Blacks from the inside, too. Back in 2008, Adidas hired him to review the team’s culture. And James Kerr, who wrote the book on the All Blacks, Legacy, calls Belonging “one of the wisest books about winning you’ll ever read.”

The jersey you’re wearing isn’t yours. You’re only borrowing it.

Somebody wore that number before you. Somebody will wear it after you.

So your job was never to fit the jersey. Your job is to leave it in a better place than you found it.

I love that, and not because of the sport.

Because you’re wearing one too. Yours might say Human Resources. It might say Sales, or Nursing, or Facilities, or Mum. Mine says Comedian, which sounds considerably more glamorous than it is. There are far fewer dressing rooms and far more banquet chicken than anybody imagines.

And it changes the question you walk in with.

Not what can I get out of this place?

What am I going to leave behind in it?

Can I leave one person feeling like they’re not invisible? Can I make the new person feel included on their first morning instead of their fourth month? Can I be one of the reasons somebody doesn’t dread Monday?

That’s a legacy. It doesn’t need a plaque.

So, should you read it?

Absolutely, and especially if you lead people, hire people, or have ever sat in a meeting wondering whether you’re the only one who feels like a guest.

Not because it’ll teach you to build a championship team. Because it’ll remind you that the word we use for the place we work is company — and that word has been trying to tell us something the whole time.

It’s Latin. Com and panis. Together, and bread. A companion was originally just somebody you shared your food with.

Somewhere between the Latin and the org chart, we lost the bread.

The good news is it isn’t gone. It’s a good morning, a thank you, a phone put away. It’s free, and it’s available to every single person reading this on an ordinary Tuesday, from exactly the chair you’re already sitting in.

And that man on the sidewalk knew it long before the rest of us did.

Grab a copy. And then go and say good morning to somebody.

Until next time folks, laugh long and prosper.