Welcome to the Reconstructing Inclusion Podcast!
What kept surfacing was how often we conflate two things that are not the same: belonging and mattering. People can feel like they belong to a team and still not believe their perspectives are being considered. That gap is real, and the cost of it is tangible. In organizations navigating uncertainty, restructuring, and the growing presence of AI in knowledge work, it’s compounding in ways most leaders aren’t seeing yet.
When I say mattering matters, I’m not talking about morale. I’m talking about a survival instinct we’ve been ignoring at work.
The Financial Services Team and the Running Faucets
A few years ago, I worked with a financial services leadership team. Experienced people, long tenures, strong relationships. By every visible measure, they were healthy. Then pressure hit, in the form of an ambitious long-range plan with no extra resources to execute on it.
What I started picking up in the margins, during breaks and one-on-ones, was that real concerns were never making it into the room. Questions about whether the plan was realistic. Assumptions nobody had stress-tested. Their chief legal officer, probably the most vocal person on that team, told me there were things he didn’t feel he could say out loud in a meeting.
What was happening wasn’t cruelty or exclusion. It was what Gordon Flett calls “anti-mattering”: the accumulated experience of feeling invisible or insignificant. Flett’s research is clear that this is not a morale problem. It produces allostatic load, the physical toll chronic stress places on the body. And it rarely announces itself:
“Most leaders I work with genuinely care about their people. But anti-mattering is rarely the result of one dramatic moment. It builds slowly, and by the time it shows up as silence or people going adrift or disengagement, the faucet has been running for a long time.” [00:11:48]
That image comes from a story Zach Mercurio tells. A five-year-old told his mother he didn’t feel as loved as his brothers. When she asked why, he said: when my brothers talk to you, you turn off the kitchen faucet to listen. When I talk, the water keeps running.
Most of organizational life is full of running faucets. The people holding back in your meetings aren’t disengaged. They’ve just stopped believing the room needs what they have.
Belonging Gets You In. Mattering Is What Happens Next.
Belonging asks: am I welcome here? Mattering asks: am I consequential here? You can answer yes to the first and no to the second, and when that happens, something dims inside people that is hard to recover without intentional effort.
Mercurio’s indispensability test captures this well. Belonging is being picked for the team. Mattering is the felt sense that the team would be genuinely incomplete without you, specifically. Most people, if they sit honestly with that question, aren’t sure they’d pass. That uncertainty is doing real work underneath every meeting and every moment when someone had something to say and kept it to themselves.
Isaac Prilleltensky’s definition sharpens it further: mattering is feeling valued by the people around you and adding value to the people around you. It’s not about being appreciated in a general sense. It’s about clarity that you’re contributing something outcome-changing that would be missed if you weren’t there.
And we are born needing this. Mercurio talks about the grasp reflex, the instinct newborns have to reach toward someone when you put a finger out. None of us would have survived infancy without mattering enough to someone to keep us alive. It doesn’t disappear when we join organizations. It gets suppressed when the environment doesn’t meet it.
The EQ-CQ-Mattering Chain
Emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence show up in a lot of organizations’ inclusion and leadership work. What I’ve been working through is where mattering sits in relation to both.
Goleman’s EQ framework, self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills, is the internal infrastructure that makes mattering possible. But there’s a gap inside the EQ conversation we underemphasize: knowing what you bring is not the same as believing you can deploy it.
“I’ve worked with highly self-aware people who couldn’t articulate their strengths clearly and consistently held back in high-stakes rooms. They just went silent, not because they lacked insight, but because they had stopped trusting that their contribution would change anything. The awareness was intact. The agency was not.” [00:17:46]
Bandura’s work on self-efficacy explains this: when people stop believing their actions lead to outcomes, they stop acting. Right now, with uncertainty around what AI changes, many people are revising that internal evidence downward. That’s a self-efficacy crisis running underneath what looks, on the surface, like a culture or engagement problem.
Cultural intelligence adds what EQ alone can’t address. Your relational skills have to travel. What reads as empathy in one context can land as intrusive in another. CQ is what makes mattering portable, allowing you to create the conditions for others to feel significant across difference, not just within the familiar.
The chain: EQ helps you know your value and gives you the agency to bring it into the room. CQ helps you carry it across differences and deliver it in a form people can receive. Mattering is the confirmation that it landed.
In a world where machines are taking on more of what we used to call intelligence work, that chain is the most important capacity we can develop.
The “If It Weren’t for You” Practice
Mercurio identifies three things that create mattering in practice: being noticed, being affirmed, and being needed. The practice I’ve been using with teams is deceptively simple: “If it weren’t for you.”
Pick a colleague and complete the sentence with real specificity. Not “you’re a great team player.” The question to anchor on is:
“What did they do? Why did it matter? What would have been missed or lost, or maybe even could have gone off the rails without them? What’s their impact?” [00:24:57]
In a session with a financial services team, a senior researcher said to a junior colleague: “if it weren’t for you challenging my assumptions about transaction cost modeling, I would have recommended deploying a strategy with negative expected returns after costs. Your rigor saved us from a multimillion-dollar mistake.”
That is not a compliment. That is confirmation of significance. Mattering made visible.
From a life sciences team, a director to a regional salesperson: “if it weren’t for your clinical expertise and that challenging conversation with the cardiology department, we wouldn’t have secured their partnership. Your ability to translate complex science into clinical value is irreplaceable.”
Irreplaceable. That word lands in a way nothing generic ever could. It’s the direct opposite of “cog in a machine,” and it’s what people are most hungry for right now, when everything around them is asking whether they’re still needed.
Who on your team needs to hear the specific version of how they matter? Not next week. Today.
Key Takeaways
Belonging and mattering are not the same thing. Belonging asks if someone is welcome. Mattering asks if they’re consequential. Teams can score high on belonging and still be quietly losing the most valuable thing their people have to offer.
Anti-mattering builds slowly and shows up late. By the time someone goes silent or disengages, the faucet has been running for a long time.
The EQ-CQ-mattering chain is what machines can’t replicate. EQ gives people the agency to bring their value into the room. CQ helps them deliver it across difference. Mattering is the confirmation it landed.
Specificity is what makes recognition land. A clearly named consequence rebuilds self-efficacy and loosens the protective behaviors that keep people from showing up fully.
Resources:
Zach Mercurio’s work on mattering, including the “noticed, affirmed, and needed” framework
Isaac Prilleltensky on mattering as feeling valued and adding value
Cultural intelligence (CQ) framework by Soon Ang, Linn Van Dyne, and David Livermore
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