This is the sixth article in my series on RECLAIM, a cultural operating system for law firms built on how human beings are actually wired. Having covered Respect, Equity, Clarity, Learning, and Autonomy, I turn this month to the I: Inclusion.
A few years ago, I coached an associate in the real estate group of a large firm. She could have written a recruiting brochure for her team without exaggerating a word.
The group did the biggest deals in the city, and they knew it. They were proud of the work, and prouder of how they did it together. No one carried more than their share. When one lawyer was buried, another picked up a file without being asked. They protected each other’s time off, so a vacation actually stayed a vacation. When there was a marketing dinner or an industry conference, they went as a group and worked the room as a group.
She told me she had never felt so much a part of something in her career.
Then she said something I have thought about many times since. She had turned down two recruiter calls in a single month without a second thought. She simply could not imagine leaving these people.
That is what inclusion buys a firm.
It is worth naming what was happening in her nervous system while she felt all of that, because it explains why belonging is so powerful and why its absence is so costly.
Why Inclusion Is Not Optional
In the RECLAIM cultural operating system, the I stands for Inclusion. Inclusion is the brain’s answer to a fast, ancient question.
Am I in, or am I out?
Social neuroscientists have shown that our brains are constantly sorting the people around us into friend or foe. This happens in a fraction of a second, below awareness, and it shapes everything that follows. When someone is read as part of our group, the brain processes them using circuits close to the ones it uses to think about ourselves. When we feel outside the group, those circuits go silent and the brain treats the situation as a threat. This is the ancient drive to belong, and it is very much alive in a modern law firm.
The scientists who study this describe findings that are sobering. Neuroscientist John Cacioppo describes safe human connection as a primary need, on the order of food and water. Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger found that social exclusion activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Being left out does not merely feel bad in a vague way. The brain registers it as an injury.
Inclusion is a performance lever. It is also a retention lever.
When people feel included, their nervous systems settle. They take risks. They ask the awkward question in the meeting. They surface a problem on a file early, while it is still fixable, instead of hoping no one notices. They stay.
When people feel excluded, the brain moves into protection. Attention narrows. Trust drops. People stop volunteering ideas and start managing their own exposure. And eventually, they leave, often for reasons a firm never fully understands.
What Inclusion Actually Means in a Law Firm
Let me clear up a common confusion first. When I talk about inclusion in the RECLAIM model, I am talking about whether the people in your firm feel connected, safe, and part of the group. This overlaps with diversity and belonging work, and a firm serious about one should be serious about the other.
Here is what Inclusion in the RECLAIM model looks like when it is present in a law firm.
Connection built into the ordinary day
The real estate group did not manufacture belonging at an annual retreat. They built it in the daily texture of the work. Picking up a colleague’s file. Walking into an event together. Knowing that a hard week would be shared rather than shouldered alone.
Belonging lives in the small, repeated interactions far more than in the big gathering. The team dinner matters. What matters more is whether someone notices you had a rough week and checks in with you. It is the partner who sees an associates hours are unusually high and asks if they can take some of the load off.
Psychological safety
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety describes an environment where people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation. This is inclusion doing its most valuable work.
The stakes are concrete. A first-year associate who feels safe will tell you they do not understand the assignment before they spend eight unbillable hours going the wrong direction. An associate who feels safe will flag the missed limitation date the moment they catch it. Silence is expensive in this profession. Safety is what buys you information while it is still useful.
Being looped in
Inclusion shows up in who gets included in the conversation. Who is copied on the email. Who is invited to the strategy call. Who has a part in the decision making process.
Exclusion does not have to be intentional to do damage. A lawyer who consistently learns about decisions that affect their work second hand will draw a conclusion about where they stand, and it will not be a generous one.
Leading with the benefit of the doubt
One of the advisers at the Flourishing Law Centre, Amy Binder, talks about leading with the benefit of the doubt. When an associate turns in work that misses the mark, the instinct is to assume they did not care enough. Before landing on that judgment, back up and assume for a moment that they were doing their best with what they had.
That assumption, held consistently, provides a central foundation for creating a sense of belonging. People can feel whether their leaders are looking for reasons to trust them or reasons to doubt them.
The Small Moments That Undermine Inclusion
Inclusion rarely collapses in one dramatic event. It erodes in ordinary moments which taken on their own seem too small to matter.
The associate left off the email chain about their own file.
The decision announced in a meeting they were not invited to.
The partner who goes silent for two weeks during a crunch, so the junior on the file has no idea whether they are doing well or badly.
The event where the same three people always get introduced to the client, and the fourth learns to stop expecting it.
The team lunch that happens to land on the day the part-time lawyer is not in.
Each of these can be explained away. Together they send a steady signal about who is inside the group and who is on its edge. Meanwhile, the brain is keeping score.
Operationalizing Inclusion
If you are a partner wondering what to do differently on Monday, start with three practices.
1. Listen for who is not speaking
In every meeting, there are voices you hear from and voices you do not. Inclusion asks you to notice the difference. Who has gone silent? Who has not been asked? Whose idea got passed over without acknowledgment?
Creating space to participate is a leadership act, not a courtesy. Belonging grows when people learn that their contribution is expected, not merely permitted.
2. Maintain connection under pressure
When a firm gets busy, connection is the first thing partners tend to drop. Heads go down. Communication shrinks to task assignments. The junior on the file hears nothing for days and fills the silence with worry.
This is exactly backwards. The need to feel connected runs highest exactly when people are under strain, so pressure is when connection matters most. Do not withdraw. Do not go dark. A two-line message acknowledging the grind, or a thirty-second check-in on how someone is holding up, does more for a team under strain than any amount of warmth once the deal has closed.
3. Build belonging into your systems, not just your personality
If inclusion depends on one charismatic partner, it leaves when that partner does. I have watched a strong culture evaporate the week its unofficial glue walked out the door.
Belonging holds when it is built into how the firm operates. Onboarding that connects a new lawyer to a real person, not just a policy binder. Mentoring pairs and small working groups where trust can actually form, since trust forms more easily in small groups than large ones. Meeting practices that reliably surface quieter voices. Distribution of client-facing opportunities so the same people are not always in the room. When belonging lives in the structure, it survives turnover.
A Final Thought
I want to return to the associate in the real estate group, because her story has a second chapter that makes the point better than I can.
Sometime later, she was assigned to a file with a new partner, and the working relationship became difficult enough that she started taking recruiter calls she would once have ignored. She began to wonder whether it was time to leave.
Because her group had built such a strong sense of belonging, she felt safe enough to bring this to her partners directly. Their response was immediate. There was plenty of work and plenty of people who worked well with that partner. They took her off those files, handled the conversation cleanly, and kept her. No hard feelings. A future leader of the group stayed.
That could have gone a hundred different ways, and most of them end with the firm losing her and never knowing why. It went the way it did because she was safe enough to have the conversation.
That is what inclusion is worth. A team whose people bring you their problems while there is still time to solve them, and who cannot picture themselves anywhere else.
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