Belonging at scale is an age-old problem. When your company is just a wee startup with a few people renting desks in a coworking space, it’s easier to build a strong “esprit de corps” and feel a collective sense of belonging to a team on a mission that matters.
This starts to fall apart with growth. As Ad man David Ogilvy once said, to paraphrase, “Though I found working in a small agency more agreeable, as I wanted to work on big accounts, I had to grow the company.”
This begs the question, how do we keep personal bonds strong, even when a company grows quickly beyond all recognition?
The short answer is that you can’t. It’s impossible. The Dunbar Number exists for a reason, and there are evolutionary limits to our ability to connect.
But there is some good news. “Esprit de corps” is a French military term first used in the 1770s, and we can learn a trick or two from them.
Military leaders throughout history have faced the same problem: how do we keep everyone serving underneath us aligned with our aims, loyal and obeying orders, but at a scale far beyond what we’re evolved to do.
This is an important question to answer for them, of course, because a) troops all carry weapons and b) they outnumber leadership by a vast margin.
The British Army had a good way of addressing the problem. Instead of making everybody loyal to the entire army, they emphasized soldiers being loyal primarily to their regiment (i.e. The Black Watch, The Irish Guards, The Parachute Regiment, The SAS, The Argyll and Suthland Highlanders, etc).
To this day, each regiment has its own way of identifying itself separately from all the others. Different banners, different liveries, different traditions and customs, different drinking songs, different histories and myths.
So even if everyone is fighting on the same side, they still have a way to feel connected to something more personal and concrete.
Not unlike the way a Bostonian sees herself as supporting the Red Sox. She doesn’t support “Baseball,” even though yeah, she kinda does.
The lesson here applies to leaders in business as well. The trick is to create space for people to develop strong and effective communities that all ladder up to a singular North Star.
Military or civilian, when we do this, we unite the larger group around a common cause while creating space for people to form deeper and more meaningful connections.
In the military’s case, the Regiments may all have very different identities and rivalries between them, but they’re all fighting the same war.
