Building Belonging — Lead the Payments Squad Through an Inclusion Crisis

A four-round, intermediate inclusive-leadership simulation set inside Northlight Software Ltd, a Manchester B2B SaaS firm (GBP 46M ARR, 410 staff) that doubled headcount in 24 months without renewing its 'high-talent, high-trust' culture. You are the newly promoted leader of the 12-person Payments Platform squad, the fastest-growing revenue line, in a week where three signals converge: a quarterly pulse shows belonging and psychological safety far below average for newer and under-represented members; a high-potential engineer who joined eight months ago resigns citing 'never quite fitting in'; and a written complaint reports two members were repeatedly talked over and left out of a key design decision and the after-work channel where real decisions get made. The headline belonging score is 3.4/5 — but it masks a 4.2 core versus 2.6 for newer members; psychological safety is 58/100 overall but 41 for newcomers; ~70% of meeting airtime comes from three long-tenured voices; engagement has slid to 61; and regretted attrition runs at 22% among under-18-month joiners. A GBP 3.5M payments-compliance release is due in 10 weeks, and the in-group argues there is 'no time for soft stuff.' Over one team cycle you (1) diagnose by reading past the average to the disaggregated gap and naming the three exclusionary mechanisms; (2) select and sequence genuine inclusion interventions under an effort budget, avoiding tokenism such as a public diversity celebration; (3) personally model psychological safety and resolve the live exclusion incident — including engaging the senior engineer privately rather than humiliating them publicly — while answering the delivery-pressure objection; and (4) sustain belonging as a property of the team's system with leading indicators and embedded norms. The math rewards disaggregated diagnosis, structural over performative inclusion, leader self-modelling, private correction, and treating belonging as delivery infrastructure — and measurably punishes the five classic errors: trusting the average, performative celebration, smoothing over the incident, public confrontation, and delegating belonging while the leader's own behaviour stays unchanged. Final KPIs track Newer-Member Belonging (/5), Psychological Safety (newer, 0–100), Squad Engagement (0–100) and Regretted-Attrition Risk (%).