Building Belonging Through Leadership : A discussion paper for Tasmanian Leaders
When belonging is weak, wellbeing declines, innovation slows, and communities begin to fragment.
Our latest discussion paper authored by Dr Joseph Crawford reveals that belonging isn’t a soft sentiment, it is the foundation of effective leadership. It shows how leaders can create cultures of safety, trust and shared purpose that help people and organisations thrive.
Join us for Building Belonging Through Leadership, a special panel conversation and report launch in Launceston on Monday 15 December.
This free event explores one of the most pressing challenges facing our state: how to build belonging in our workplaces and communities. Despite Tasmania’s strong sense of place, many people still feel disconnected.
Be part of the conversation as we unpack these insights with a dynamic panel of Tasmanian leaders:
- The Hon. Bridget Archer MP – Minister for Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Minister for Ageing and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs
- Dr Joseph Crawford – Author and Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Tasmania
- Archana Brammall (GTLP) – Co-Owner & Director Buna Collective, Tatler Lane, Sweetbrew
Hosted by Tasmanian Leaders, with venue support from St Lukes, this launch is part of our mission to strengthen the leadership capability that underpins Tasmania’s social and economic wellbeing. It continues our series of action research exploring the forces shaping leadership in Tasmania, following earlier work on polarisation and complexity.
We look forward to welcoming you for an engaging and optimistic conversation about how belonging can become Tasmania’s leadership advantage.
Building Belonging Through Leadership : A discussion paper for Tasmanian leaders is our latest report by leading organisational behaviour academic Dr Joseph Crawford,
The report draws on insights gained from a design-thinking workshop held in late 2024 in Launceston with fourteen leaders from across Tasmania. Participants included managers and board directors from sectors spanning construction, not-for-profit, education, arts, government, and business. Further consultation was held with other leaders in Tasmania to assist in consolidating insights gained in the workshop.
The workshop asked leaders to explore when and where they most felt belonging; what belonging is – and what it is not; and how belonging might be built in workplaces and communities. Their lived experiences and insights were synthesised with contemporary research on belonging, loneliness, and social cohesion.
Building Belonging Through Leadership introduces the Tasmanian Belonging Framework, synthesising four dimensions of belonging that leaders in the workshop described and illustrates the realities of Tasmanian workplaces and communities. Recommendations include four strategies for leaders to build belonging, shaped by diverse perspectives and stress-tested across sectors, making them both contextually Tasmanian and broadly transferable.
Key takeaways:
- Tasmania faces its highest digital connectivity, and its greatest social disconnection and loneliness, with workplaces often struggling to create environments where people feel valued, connected, and productive.
- Hybrid work, transactional organisational cultures, and limited investment in evidence-based approaches mean that belonging is often left to chance. Leaders report that strategies are fragmented, with little clarity on what belonging really is, or how to foster it.
- Building belonging must be recognised as an essential leadership capability. Leaders can create spaces of psychological safety, support vulnerability, and align people with places and purposes that matter. Practical strategies from redesigned meetings to intentional rituals of care can help Tasmanian leaders embed belonging in daily practice.
About the Author
Organisational Behaviour Academic
Dr Joseph Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Tasmania. An award-winning academic and leadership-belonging consultant, he is recognised as a member of the Stanford Top 2% Scientists List for his research impact. His research focuses on belonging, leadership, and social connection in working, learning, and living. With more than 120 academic and media publications since 2019, Joey has more than 7,000 citations on Google Scholar.
Joey asks what it means to belong. Not as sentiment, but as a social condition that determines how we think, act, and thrive. He studies how belonging is built and eroded across work, learning, and life, and how human connection shapes our capacity to be well and be productive. He explores how these forces influence engagement, wellbeing, and collective resilience in workplaces. Through this work, Joey brings empirical depth to an urgent social question: how do we sustain connection in a world that fragments attention, time, and community?
His doctoral work at the University of Tasmania defined and measured authentic leadership, connecting integrity and belonging to human and organisational outcomes. Joey argues that productivity is not the opposite of humanity but its result. That people perform best when they feel safe, trusted, and aligned with purpose. His work links moral and empirical dimensions of leadership, showing how authenticity and trust create the conditions for motivation, innovation, and sustainable performance.
Joey has been published in key academic journals including Leadership Quarterly, Studies in Higher Education, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Education and Information Technologies, and Business, Strategy, and the Environment. He champions the public accessibility of knowledge as President of the Open Access Publishing Association and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice. He believes research should circulate openly between disciplines, institutions, and communities to strengthen impact and innovation.
His leadership and research in open science, doctoral education, and research governance reflects a simple conviction: knowledge is most powerful when it belongs to everyone.
Follow Joey on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joeycrawford0
