I Know I Belong When...

Belonging does not begin at the office. It begins in the mirror, in the clothes that do or do not fit, and in whether the room was built with you in mind. On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Pamela Shainhouse, an entrepreneur, accessibility advocate, and lifelong fundraiser who spent a career proving that the people the world leaves out were never the problem. The design was.

Pamela built Canada’s first size-diverse and sustainable fashion brand years before inclusive design had a name, brought it to the runway at T...

Joy is not a personality trait handed out at birth. It is a practice, it is available in the middle of a hard season, and Rachel Bents can explain the biology of how it works.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Rachel Bents joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation about what changes when joy stops being the reward at the end of the work and becomes the thing that makes the work possible. Rachel is the founder of The Joy Collective, the author of Joy Is the Strategy, and the creator of the EN...

Belonging does not arrive with a new tool, a new title, or a new job. It arrives when people decide to make room for each other. On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Dr. Steve Yacovelli, known to many as The Gay Leadership Dude®, joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation about courage, identity, and the human side of every change.

Steve has spent more than 30 years in leadership and change management, from IBM and Disney to his own firm, TopDog Learning Group. He is the author of five books, including Pride Leadership and Your Que...

A parking lot. A lunch counter. An empty chair. A baby left with somebody who had never met him. Four moments from four lives, with nothing in common except the thing happening underneath all of them.

Season four of I Know I Belong When… brought twelve guests through twelve conversations. This recap does what the season could not do in real time. Host Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, lays it across the six arenas where a life is lived: Self, Home, Learning, Community, Work, and Society.

What comes out is a map. Belonging in...

The room where Julie Pham knew she belonged held none of her credentials. No Cambridge doctorate. No Gates scholarship. No bestseller list. It was a prison, and nobody inside knew who she was on paper.

Dr. Julie Pham is the founder and CEO of CuriosityBased, and she joins host Christopher Bylone for a conversation that travels from a refugee family’s naming decision, to a correctional facility, to a weekly team meeting where a third of the agenda goes to how everyone is actually doing. Her argument is simple and inconvenient. Curiosity is a practice rather than a...

Some people wait for a door to open. Salomão Cunha Lima decided the room needed to be built.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host, Christopher Bylone, is joined by Salomão Cunha Lima, founder and CEO of Sal&Co, a Social Architecture Lab in São Paulo, Brazil. The conversation moves through every arena of a life: self, home, community, work, and society.

Salomão calls his work social architecture rather than social impact, and the difference is structural. On one side is a company. On the other is a commun...

Belonging is not a program that gets rolled out at work. It is the durable knowledge that who you are is enough, and it has to hold at home, in your community, and in the wider society, not only in a conference room.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Darlene King Turner joins host, Christopher Bylone, for a conversation that refuses to keep belonging inside the workplace. Darlene is CEO and president of the Unity Collaborative, where she designs strategic initiatives that dismantle systemic barriers for businesses, youth, families, and whole communities at once. Sh...

Belonging does not begin at work. It begins in the people who hand you a baby at a family picnic and never think twice, in the neighbors who show up when the holidays fall apart, and in the quiet moment you finally let yourself ask for help.

On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Rebecca Taylor, a people strategy leader who has spent more than a decade in HR saying the quiet part out loud. Rebecca co-founded SkillCycle and helped scale it onto Inc's fastest growing companies list three years running, an...

Most people treat a book as a finish line. You write it, you print it, you set it on a shelf, and the work is done. Fabi Preslar spent close to three decades proving that idea backward. In her hands, a book is not where a story ends. It is where a person finally gets seen.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Fabi Preslar, founder of SPARK Publications and the nonprofit Radiant Chapters Collective, for a conversation that reaches past the workplace. Fabi came up through a high school trade sc...

Most people treat inclusion like a feeling, something you hope for and revisit once a year. Effenus Henderson spent more than forty years proving it can be something you design. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes the president and CEO of HenderWorks, the strategist who convened the international working group behind ISO 30415, the first global standard for diversity and inclusion.

This is a conversation about belonging as a whole-life reality, not a workplace perk. Effenus traces his path from a small farm in eastern North Carolina to the General Assembly of...

The most brilliant person in any room may be the one no one thought to hear. Pasha Marlowe has spent more than thirty years changing that. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Pasha joins host Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist, for a conversation about worth, design, and the quiet decision to know you belong to yourself before you ask anyone else to make room for you. 

Pasha is a global speaker on neuroinclusion and relational intelligence, a mental health professional, and the author of Creating Cultures of Neuroinclusion. Her work has reached teams at Microsoft, IBM...

What happens when a capable person stops asking what is wrong with them and starts asking what is wrong with the room around them? That question anchors this conversation, and it reaches far past any office. 

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Grant Harris, MBA, Certified Diversity Executive, neuro-inclusive speaker, human-centered performance strategist, and founder of GTH Consulting. Grant is known for one deceptively simple charge to leaders: fix your process, not your people. He is also a late-diagnosed autistic leader, a three-time author, a Hall of Fame athlete, and a m...

There is a story we tell ourselves about high-performance work: that winning costs you the people, that greatness and humanity cannot share the same room. In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, HR executive, coach, and founder Kate McKinnon shows that the choice itself was never real. Across more than 15 years in human resources, most recently as head of people inside the pressure-cooked world of sports, Kate built cultures people refused to leave, earning recognition as both a Most Loved Workplace and one of the Best Employers in Sports. Host, Christopher Bylone, joins her to trace how be...

Most of us were taught to earn joy. Land the results, hit the numbers, and then maybe you get to feel good. Greg De Koker spent a career proving that this is backward.

On this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Christopher Bylone sits down with Greg De Koker, a brand and culture transformation expert, a bestselling co-author, and the mind behind the forthcoming book Joy Squared: The Hidden Power of Joy in Leadership. 

Greg carries a mission with a number attached to it: forty-four million people living, working, and leading with more joy, on...

Belonging is bigger than any office. It begins in the quiet knowledge that who you are is already enough, and it follows you into every room you walk into for the rest of your life. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Öykü Api, a thought leader in inclusion, change, and leadership whose story stretches across self, home, community, and work.

Öykü spent twenty years inside corporate finance and walked out with three published books, a Cornell credential in women’s leadership and diversity, a law degree, and a passpo...

What does it mean to lead so that everyone in the room knows they belong? Our guest has spent more than 25 years answering that question, and his answer reshapes how we think about people, work, and life.

Meet Dean Carter. He has served as chief human resources officer four separate times, at Fossil, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, and Guild, earning national recognition for reinventing the future of work. His book, "Employee Experience Design: How to Co-Create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive," became an Amazon number one bestseller. Now he leads Instill, an AI-native culture operating system...

Belonging is not built at the office. It is built wherever a person is, at the dinner table, inside a circle of friends, in the places we worship and organize, and at work too. Season 3 of I Know I Belong When… proved that twelve times over.

In this special season 3 recap, host Christopher Bylone, Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased, brings every guest from the season back together to examine what it takes to be fully inclusive. Twelve guests. Six behaviors. One question asked again and again: what does it actually look like to build a place where pe...

What happens when you combine a lifelong storyteller, a lifelong protester, and a leader who runs toward the work when everyone else is running away from it?

You get Chris Jones.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Chris, co-founder of Spectra Diversity and a social justice warrior since 1970, to discuss authentic leadership in turbulent times. Chris has spent more than four decades writing in other people's voices, from documentaries on PBS and National Geographic to scientific work for Mayo Clinic and General Dynamics. Now she is...

What happens when you take fifteen years of startup chaos, a front row seat to the exact moment culture either takes root or falls apart, and a leader who gets excited about the hard conversations most people run from? You get this conversation with Brooke Sullivan, Director of People and Talent at Banyan Software, and a leader building belonging inside fast-moving companies.

Brooke has spent her career inside software startups, building people functions from zero, from the "we do not even have an org chart yet" phase, and turning that scrappiness into something real. She has a...

Most leadership advice about artificial intelligence promises the machine will solve your people problems. Sarah A. Scala is in the other room telling executives the opposite. Artificial intelligence will expose them, and she is staying long enough to help fix what surfaces. That is the conversation that Christopher Bylone, host of I Know I Belong When, has on this episode.

Sarah is an award-winning diverse supplier, a global speaker, and a leadership consultant who has spent more than two decades turning inclusion into measurable performance. Not aspirational. Not vibes. Measurable. Fortune 10 companies have hired her. Out and...

What if everything you have been told about accessibility, inclusion, and the so-called trade-off between doing good and doing well is wrong?

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Daniel Hodges — lawyer by training, nonprofit founder by calling, and living proof that when someone tells you no road exists, that is simply the opening line of your comeback story. As a kid, Daniel was functionally illiterate. A so-called Blindness Professional once told him the best he could hope for was canning chairs for a living. He went on to ea...

"What does authentic leadership look like when the person in the corner office decides that the boldest move available is telling the truth about who she is? In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Katherine Dudtschak, former president and CEO of Home Equity Bank and former executive vice president at RBC, to explore what happens when more than thirty years of elite corporate performance meet a choice to integrate rather than fragment.

Katherine is the creator of the Sincerely framework and a conscious leadership advisor who guides executives and...

Last week, you met the father. This week, meet the son who did not just inherit a mission. He built his own lane inside of it.

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, Christopher sits down with Jake Ross, founder and CEO of Belong Together, banjo player, former COO of an AI startup, and co-author of the second edition of Everyday Bias with his father, Howard J. Ross. Jake holds a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley in interdisciplinary studies, a master's in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a thesis called Building...

What if belonging is not a program or slogan, but the daily discipline of honoring humanity even when the cultural winds shift against it?

In this episode of I Know I Belong When, Christopher sits down with Howard J. Ross, writer, facilitator, meditation teacher, musician, and one of the most influential voices on unconscious bias and belonging alive today. Howard is the author of Everyday Bias and Our Search for Belonging, and he is co-writing the second edition of Everyday Bias with his son, Jake Ross, who joins the show next week in part two of this...

What does it really take to create belonging in the workplace when pressure rises, resistance shows up, and silence feels safer than speaking up?

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Mike Davis, a global diversity and inclusion executive with nearly three decades of experience navigating the hardest conversations organizations avoid. This is not a surface-level conversation about inclusion. It is an honest exploration of moral courage, authentic leadership, and what it means to build inclusive culture when the stakes are real.

Mike brings storytelling, lived experience, an...

What happens when a leader walks onto a stage to accept an award and walks off holding a tie because no one imagined a woman could be leading the company? In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Simona Scarpaleggia, former CEO of IKEA Switzerland, United Nations co-chair, author, and a leader whose career has redefined authentic leadership when the room was not built with you in mind.

Through first-person storytelling, Simona shares how her grandmother’s words, “if you want to lead, you need to learn, and anything can be lea...

What if the clearest blueprint for belonging in the workplace did not come from corporate playbooks, leadership models, or culture decks, but from a global movement rooted in creativity, community, and care?

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Manny Faces—award-winning journalist, cultural strategist, TEDx speaker, and founder of the Hip Hop Can Save America! ecosystem—to explore how Hip Hop culture offers leaders practical language for belonging and insight into creating a sense of belonging at work.

This conversation reframes belonging vs inclusion, positioning belonging as the...

What if the reason your culture initiatives are stalling has nothing to do with motivation, engagement, or vibes, and everything to do with systems, accountability, and how leaders show up every single day?

In this episode of I Know I Belong When…, Christopher Bylone is joined by Joe Machicote, retired CHRO, organizational culture engineer, executive coach, and author of Own Thy Stuff. Joe brings more than three decades of leadership experience into a deeply human conversation about belonging in the workplace, building belonging, and why culture only becomes inclusive when it is designed, practiced, and owned.

What does it actually mean to feel valued at work, not in theory, not in policy language, but in lived experience? In this deeply human episode of I Know I Belong When…, host Christopher Bylone sits down with Dr. Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, a pioneering legal scholar, educator, and culture shaper whose life’s work helped define how organizations understand fairness, dignity, and people’s experiences.

From creating the first employment law course in colleges of business to shaping global DEI standards, Dr. Bennett-Alexander has spent decades translating justice into everyday practice. This conversation explores how workplace belonging is bui...

The belonging movement starts here: Bold voices, curious stories, and the future of inclusive culture

Tune into "I Know I Belong When..." Season 3, and be a part of the movement.

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What does inclusive leadership look like when performance drops, language gets honest, and ordinary moments become the measure of everything?

That is the question Season 2 of I Know I Belong When… answered across twelve extraordinary voices who shared something rare: their receipts, their scars, and their strategies. Together, they offer a masterclass in what it actually looks like to live and lead in ways that make belonging in the workplace real, repeatable, and rooted in daily behavior.

In this Season 2 recap, host Christopher Bylone — Principal Strategist at Innovation Unbiased — brings the most powerful voices back into f...

Psychological safety is often treated as a feeling. This episode turns it into a leadership practice you can name, measure, and repeat.

In this episode, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Mike Lynch, founder of MJL Consulting Group and author of From Ally to All In, for a human, leadership-credible conversation on belonging in the workplace and what it takes to move from supportive intentions to creating belonging at work through visible impact.

Together, they explore building belonging as the outcome of IDEA work: not a slogan, not a checkbox, and not performative inclusion. You will hear...

Belonging in the workplace is not a slogan. It is the lived experience of being invited, seen, heard, and needed. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits with Dr. Cornell Verdeja-Woodson, former head of DEIB and talent development at Pixar Animation Studios and an organizational change leader. Together, they turn workplace belonging into leadership practices you can repeat: honor names, clarify values, set boundaries, and still deliver results.

If you have searched for synonyms of belonging or another word for belong, you are not alone. People want language for belonging, especially...

You are not alone if you have searched for another word for belong or for synonyms of belonging. You are trying to name the feeling that drives workplace belonging. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone welcomes Courtney Turich, med tech executive, certified coach, and the voice behind “be bold, be confident, be you,” to give you language for belonging you can use immediately.

Courtney shares bold moves from solo backpacking across Australia to leading in a male-dominated medical device world, including her Shark Tank pitch for the Monkey Mat and what it t...

When headlines say one thing and lived experience says another, leadership starts with repair. In this episode, host Christopher Bylone sits with Nancy Levine Stearns, journalist and founder of Impactivize, to name what is really happening behind the noise. If you are seeking language for belonging in the workplace, this conversation also delivers it through first-person storytelling and boardroom evidence.

Nancy Levine Stearns traces how “DEI is dead” narratives erode when you read proxy statements, track shareholder votes, and listen to leaders describe diversity, equity, and inclusion as a strategic imperative. You will hear how building workplace belo...

Repair is leadership, and it is how belonging becomes real. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone sits with Denitresse Ferrell (Deni) to move beyond hope and hustle and into accountable, human-centered innovation that builds trust on purpose. Deni is a culture architect and CEO of Culture Refinery, and her stories give listeners language for belonging that leaders can use in the moments that matter most. If you are building or creating belonging at work, this conversation translates values into daily practice

Deni shares what she scans for when culture stalls: who...

What if the most radical act of leadership is learning to trust yourself again? In this powerful episode of "I Know I Belong When...", host Christopher Bylone sits with Dr. Jade Singleton, culture strategist, researcher, and systems-change architect, to explore how belonging in the workplace is shaped not only by policies and practices, but also by our inner world.

This conversation moves beyond surface-level inclusion to name what many struggle to describe: workplace gaslighting, erosion of self-trust, and the pressure to perform rather than belong. Dr. Singleton brings clarity and grounded leadership insight to help listeners recognize...

Belonging at work is not created by good intentions. It is created through decisions, accountability, and everyday actions that either invite people in or push them out. In this episode of I Know I Belong When, host Christopher Bylone is joined by Stacey Gordon, globally recognized bias disruptor, author of UNBIAS, and a trusted voice in authentic leadership and people experience design.

This conversation goes beyond performative inclusion to explore what it truly means to build belonging in the workplace. Stacey brings clarity and credibility to questions many leaders avoid: How do we create psychological safety without...

Joy is not a distraction from the work of inclusion; joy is the work. In this energizing conversation, Vernon Wall invites leaders to treat joy as protest, community as strategy, and belonging as a practice. From his decades shaping inclusive culture in higher education to real‑time lessons from Semester at Sea, Vernon offers language for belonging that is honest and actionable. Listeners will hear how authentic leadership transforms people’s experience, why storytelling powers human‑centered innovation, and how to create belonging in the workplace when the climate feels hostile.  

Christopher and Vernon translate campus wisdom to team...

What if creating belonging in the workplace begins with a laugh—and a promise to learn your name the way you say it? In this episode of "I Know I Belong When...", Global Head of HR Chris Courneen joins host Christopher Bylone to translate a first-person story into leadership practice. From stagecraft to strategy, Chris shows how humor, trust, and authentic leadership unlock voice and performance in an inclusive culture. He reveals how learning every name signals dignity, why “I know I belong when…” gives people language for belonging, and how human-centered innovation turns people’s experience into measurable outcomes.<...