Andrea Carter Featured in Forbes Business Council Expert Panel on Culture Change
Andrea D. Carter, wearing red glasses
Andrea D. Carter Accepted Into Forbes Council
Andrea D. Carter is named a Top 10 Women Disruptor to Watch in 2025. She sits on a chair with a blue jacket and blue pinstriped shirt.
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Forbes Business Council features Andrea Carter’s insight on why collaboration follows belonging, not the other way around.
In the piece, 20 Forbes Business Council members share the most common missteps leaders make when trying to change company culture. Carter’s contribution, listed as Mistake #20: “Treating Collaboration As A Solution,” challenges a widespread assumption in leadership and HR: that collaboration itself is the fix for culture.
Carter argues that collaboration is the outcome of a healthy culture, not the starting point. Real, sustainable collaboration emerges only when leaders build the underlying infrastructure of belonging inside their organizations.
According to Carter, that infrastructure is made up of five measurable indicators of belonging in the workplace:
1. Comfort
2. Connection
3. Contribution
4. Psychological safety
5. Wellbeing
“When leaders push collaboration as the solution without strengthening comfort, connection, contribution, psychological safety and wellbeing, they’re just rearranging deck chairs,” Carter explains. “The real work is building belonging first. Collaboration is what naturally happens when people feel anchored, connected and safe enough to contribute.”
This latest Forbes feature comes as Carter’s work on belonging and culture is gaining broader attention. On the same day, she published an article in The Conversation titled “The price of belonging is inconvenience. Are we still willing to pay it?” In that piece, she examines how “convenience culture” has eroded the productive inconveniences — like conflict repair, mutual need and coordinated time — that make real community possible at work and beyond.
Together, these publications underscore Carter’s central message: belonging isn’t one more initiative. It is the infrastructure that makes everything else work.
Leaders who want to improve collaboration, reduce turnover and stabilize culture, she argues, need to stop treating engagement, DEI, wellbeing and toxicity as separate problems — and start building a belonging-first operating system instead.
The full Forbes article, “20 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Shifting Company Culture,” is available on Forbes.com.
About Andrea D. Carter
Andrea D. Carter is a neuroscience-based workplace belonging expert, Adjunct Faculty in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Adler University, and CEO of Andrea Carter Consulting. She is the founder of Belonging First Methodology™, a research-backed framework that helps organizations build cultures grounded in five indicators of belonging: comfort, connection, contribution, psychological safety and wellbeing. Carter works with executives, HR leaders and ERG/BRG leaders to transform toxic, exhausted workplaces into engaged, high-performing cultures.
About Forbes Business Council
Forbes Business Council is an invitation-only community for successful business owners and leaders. Members are selected based on the depth and diversity of their experience and contribute expert insights through vetted Forbes articles and expert panels.
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