What veterans teach businesses about belonging

The business of belonging

From Google’s deep analysis of high-performing teams, to Gallup’s studies of millions of workers, and MIT’s behavioural mapping of workplace interactions—the same pattern keeps surfacing:

The quality of relationships between coworkers is one of the most powerful predictors of performance we have.

These studies show that teams built on trust consistently produce more prosperous results: greater retention, happier customers, and significantly more profit.

Gallup found that those who report having a “best friend at work” are seven times more likely to be engaged in their position.

Google discovered that the highest-performing workplaces were those built around psychological safety—environments where coworkers could speak openly, take risks, and depend on one another delivered superior outcomes overall, consistently outpacing talent-only teams.

MIT’s research revealed that thriving units share specific social dynamics: frequent informal check-ins, balanced turn-taking, energetic face-to-face communication, and dense webs of side-conversations that knit people together.

These findings point to a simple conclusion:

Colleague cohesion is the central mechanism through which companies succeed.

Belonging is fostered when folks feel they have a place.

Mark remembers his turning point vividly: “In the early days, I made the mistake of almost trying to morph myself into a civilian, when actually what my team have helped me do is say, well, actually, the skills you bring from the services—that’s why you’re here.”

Camaraderie is the closeness that grows through shared moments of connection.

Belonging roots us, and camaraderie binds us to one another.

Lesson one: Mutual Reliance is more powerful than individual resilience

Modern workplaces often celebrate individual resilience.
Push harder. Bounce back. Hold it together.

But the veterans at Sage learned something very different long before they arrived in corporate life: it’s not the lone individual who endures—it’s the group. Not grit alone, but the people around you.

If you want to understand mutual reliance, you only need to look at what happens when people choose to do something difficult together.

In August 2025, the three of them—Ross, Mark and Andy—along with around twenty other colleagues who joined for parts of the route, decided to take on a challenge many would consider impossible:

Running the full 106 kilometres (65 miles) of Hadrian’s Wall in a single day, to raise money for The Not Forgotten, a charity supporting wounded and sick veterans.

In the run up to the event, Andy grins when he talks about it:

“I’ve always liked to challenge myself, that comes from a bit of that military type-two fun.”

It’s a habit he never unlearned—the instinct to lean into difficulty.

But he knew that the heart of the challenge wasn’t really the enormous mileage.

When people take on something hard together, the real test is whether the group can carry one another through the moments where any individual falters.

That shift from private endurance to shared effort—the “me” to “we”—is exactly what Ross names:

“Everyone’s going to have a bad moment on the run, you need the support, the camaraderie: it’s about the team.”

This is the lesson the military teaches better than any leadership book: people endure more, and do more, when they’re able to lean on one another.

Sociologists call this mutual reliance.
Psychologists studying high-performing groups call it interdependence.
In military doctrine, it’s the foundation of unit cohesion.

In business it’s the engine behind high-performing teams.

Lesson two: Prosocial Motivation fuels high-performing cultures

One of the most consistently replicated findings in organisational psychology is that people work harder and stay longer when their effort benefits someone else.

This is prosocial motivation—the instinct to contribute beyond oneself.

In many corporate environments, purpose is often framed as something personal: find your purpose, own your purpose, what motivates you?

The military treats purpose as collective.

You work toward the same mission, and your actions matter because they support others.

Motivation is anchored in interdependence, not individual goals. People show up for the person beside them.

That shared orientation carries directly into the Veterans Colleague Success Network at Sage.

It reflects the instinct these veterans lived with for years: if you’ve walked a hard road, you help the next person walk it with less friction.

You can hear it in the way they describe the Hadrian’s Wall challenge. While the distance was an extraordinary personal test, the meaning was collective.

This mission was a way of raising money for charity, a purpose beyond the self, expressed through shared effort.

It’s fitting that the charity they chose, The Not Forgotten, reflects the same ethos. It focuses on reducing isolation by creating social connection, supporting more than 10,000 sick or injured veterans and serving personnel across the UK.

At the heart of TNF’s mission is restoring community: giving people living with lasting injury or illness the chance to feel part of something again. Day-trips, respite breaks, challenge holidays, concerts, lunches and events are offered free of charge for beneficiaries, who are bonded by these experiences.

Prosocial motivation is a persistent predictor of long-term organisational health, far more powerful than individual ambition alone.

When people are working for something larger than themselves, they carry each other further.

And if prosocial, community-oriented behaviour becomes your company norm, the culture naturally shifts to sustain it.

Lesson three: Connection thrives where structure exists

In many workplaces, belonging is left to chance, unplanned and assumed to arise on its own.

Veterans understand it as something far more deliberate—it’s a structure you build, a rhythm you keep.

In the military, connection is engineered into the day.

Morning check-ins. Shared routines. Informal rhythms. Predictable rituals. A common language that makes coordination effortless.

These elements are implemented structurally; the sentimentality is a bonus.

They create the conditions in which people can steadily settle into the identity of the group.

And the value of shared routines and rituals isn’t confined to the military. Any organisation can use these structures to create steadier, more connected teams, if it chooses to.

That recognition from Ross, Andy, and Mark was what shaped the creation of our Veterans Colleague Success Network.

For leaders, this is the practical lesson veterans offer:

Camaraderie can be cultivated with a system. Community-minded cultures create continuous-growth companies.

It compounds when rituals give colleagues built-in touchpoints for belonging.

When leaders design these structures—even modest ones—something powerful happens. Connection stops being an aspiration and becomes part of the organisation’s operating system.

And over time, that system begins to behave like a living organism: Knowledge moves through it like circulation, reaching the places it’s needed without silos. Support becomes reflexive—people step in before anyone has to ask.

New members are folded in quickly, stabilised by patterns that show them how things work and who they can turn to. Cohesion spreads outward, drawing people in at the edges until the whole organisation feels connected by the same pulse.

This is the deeper lesson the veterans carry with them into corporate life:
belonging isn’t the by-product of a good culture—it’s the outcome of deliberate design.