I met Amri Johnson on Substack, the way I now meet a lot of people whose thinking surprises and inspires me.
I came across a post he wrote in the Journal of Free Black Thought last year about what actually creates inclusion — not the slogans, not the frameworks with pretty acronyms, but the conditions under which real people genuinely contribute. And I thought: this person has done the work.
So I invited him to a Substack Live conversation. And I am so glad he agreed.
You can watch the entire conversation above or read the highlights below — the ideas I wish I had as a leader, and what I think every leader needs today. I’ve tried to organize them into themes, but if you want the full energy of the conversation, you need to hear Amri live.
Belonging vs. Mattering: Why the Difference Changes Everything
“You can be passive and belong. You can’t be passive and matter.”
~ Amri B. Johnson
I’ve been in rooms — many of them — where someone was technically included. They were invited to the meeting. Their name was on the email. But their actual thinking, their particular expertise, the thing only they could bring? It was either overlooked or quietly ignored.
That’s belonging without mattering. And it turns out they are not the same thing.
Amri introduced me to a framework from researcher Zach Mercurio called NAN: Noticed, Affirmed, Needed.
Noticed — Do you actually see the people around you? Do you notice what they’re working on, what they’re wrestling with, what they just accomplished?
Affirmed — Can you articulate what someone brings to the table? Not a generic compliment. Can you specifically name their value?
Needed — Do they know that without their particular contribution, the work is diminished?
The puzzle piece analogy is useful here: belonging is about whether the piece fits the puzzle. Mattering is about whether the puzzle needs that particular piece in order to be whole.
When you confuse the two, something goes wrong. I shared a story from my own time as a CEO. I remember sitting with my leadership team setting priorities, which every organization has to do.
The problem was never the priorities. The problem was how we communicated them.
We would, without quite meaning to, create a hierarchy of importance inside the company. Engineering was the most critical function right now — and somehow “most critical” became “most valued.” Everyone else could feel themselves shrinking. The sales team. The operations team. The people who were keeping things running.
That’s what Amri calls “anti-mattering.” And once it kicks in, the research is pretty clear about what happens: discretionary effort drops. Creativity drops. The willingness to ask good questions, share difficult observations, take risks — all of it goes down. People shift into survival mode. And survival mode is not the mode in which your next innovation gets built.
Take Action: This week, try the NAN audit on your team. Pick three people you haven’t directly affirmed in the last month. For each one, write down — before you reach out — the specific, concrete value they bring that no one else brings. Then tell them. The specificity is the point. Generic praise doesn’t create mattering. Seeing someone clearly does.
The Ubuntu Principle: Why Mattering Is Always Reciprocal
One of the things I appreciate most about Amri’s thinking is that he doesn’t let you stay comfortable in a top-down view of leadership. Mattering, he argues, is not something leaders dispense from above. It’s a reciprocal model.
He invoked Ubuntu: I am because you are. It’s the idea from post-apartheid South Africa, from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, that identity and value are not solo projects. They’re built in relationship. You cannot separate yourself from your organization and think you’ll build something great alone.
What this means practically is this: when you make people feel like they matter less, you are not just being unkind. You are making a strategic error. You are diminishing the part of your network that might hold the ideas you don’t yet know you need. You are cutting the “weak ties” — the people just outside your inner circle — who are, as Amri pointed out and the organizational network research backs up, often the source of the most surprising and valuable insight.
He told a story that made this vivid. A colleague of his at a major pharma company — a brilliant mind who had been quietly building an internal AI capability on the side, mapping who in the organization had machine learning skills and who was just beginning to explore them — was being ignored by his manager. The manager didn’t understand what he was building. Didn’t see its value. Eventually, his manager put him on a performance improvement plan.
Amri’s colleague left. Went to a competitor. And became one of the leading AI architects in the Cambridge biotech ecosystem.
His company lost him because no one could see what he brought.
The story is about more than a bad manager. It’s about a system that wasn’t designed to notice the right things. And systems, Amri reminds us, create behavior. Structure creates culture. If your incentive structures reward individual output over collective contribution, you shouldn’t be surprised when people optimize for themselves.
Take Action: Look at your team’s incentive structures. Not what you hope they produce — what behavior they actually reward. Ask yourself: does the way we measure and reward performance make it easier or harder for people to contribute to each other’s success? If the honest answer is harder, you have a design problem, not a people problem.
The “DEI-Allergic” Leader — and Why This Conversation Is for You Too
Amri and I deliberately named this conversation, “Mattering for the DEI-Allergic.” And yes, it didn’t land for everyone.
Some people were frustrated by the framing. I understand that. I want to address it directly, because the frustration itself is instructive.
The allergy, Amri argued, was never to the underlying principles. Nobody looks at a room full of people who are contributing brilliantly, being genuinely seen for what they bring, and says: I want less of that.
The allergy was to the way the conversation was framed — often as a moral debt to be paid, with slogans in place of substance, centering group identities and grievance above all else, and with equity defined so broadly it became operationally meaningless.
Amri was clear: he wouldn’t have put DEI on the cover of his book if it hadn’t been in vogue at the time. He would have called it inclusion. Because that’s what he actually believes in — creating the conditions for people to thrive, and for organizations to generate what he calls “thick value”: the return on intangibles that don’t show up on your P&L but absolutely show up in your valuation, your ability to retain talent, and your capacity to build anything new.
Mattering is a different entry point into the same territory. It doesn’t ask anyone to take a political position. It asks: Does this person know what they bring? Do they know we need it? Are we building the systems that let that show up?
That’s not soft. That’s strategic.
Take Action: If you’ve been avoiding this conversation because the language felt politically loaded, try replacing the lens. Forget DEI for a moment. Ask instead: In my organization, do people know their unique contribution? Can their managers and colleagues name it? Are our structures designed for that value to surface? Start there.
The Structural Reality: How Leaders Actually Create (or Destroy) Mattering
Here’s what I will hold onto going forward: mattering is not a feeling you inspire with a good speech. Mattering is a condition you build — or fail to build — through the decisions you make every day.
Amri put it simply. Structure is a set of behaviors that creates a different tenor or condition for others to mirror. When your direct reports see you notice the person two levels below you and write them a specific, handwritten note about something they did well — that becomes a norm. Norms become rituals. Rituals become culture.
He made the point about senior leaders writing personal notes — not email, not Slack, but actual notes, four or five a week, to people outside their direct report line. When they see something, they write it down. Then they send it. He calculated: if you do that two or three times a week, times 52 weeks — you’ve touched over 100 people with a specific, genuine act of recognition.
That’s structure. Most people wouldn’t call it that. But it is.
I shared some of my own limitations here, and I want to be honest about it. When I was a CEO, I wanted to create the conditions where people genuinely mattered. I didn’t always have the language for it, but that was the intent. And then the sales pipeline would fall behind, or the marketing campaign would stall, or we’d be in the middle of building out an entirely new evaluation system, and the intention would get crowded out.
Looking back, I don’t think it was entirely an intentionality problem. It was partly a knowledge problem — I didn’t have the specific, concrete tools that Amri gave me in this conversation. And partly it was a capacity problem. I couldn’t do everything.
So I asked him: What does the overwhelmed leader actually do? And he said, without hesitation: One thing. Consistently.
Pick one behavior. Do it every week. Let it become a habit. Ask your direct reports to do the same. Let the habit become structure.
It’s not complicated. But you do have to commit.
Take Action: Choose your one thing. Amri’s suggestion is personal notes — two to three a week, to people outside your direct report line, naming something specific you noticed. Set a reminder. Do it for eight weeks. See what shifts.
The Ask as an Act of Mattering
I love this one. I first learned about it as a trust-building exercise from David Brooks in his book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. It still blows my mind.
Asking someone for help — genuinely asking, not assigning, not delegating, but saying “I’ve been wrestling with this, what do you think?” — is itself an act of mattering.
Amri connected this to Marshall Goldsmith’s Feed Forward practice: instead of giving feedback on what happened, you ask for input on what you’re thinking through. There’s no evaluation involved. Just: here’s a direction I’m considering, what do you see?
It works, Amri said, because it gives people the opportunity to add value without judgment. And when people add value, they feel like they matter. And they do because their input adds to your thinking. It’s a loop. A good one.
The same logic explains why research indicates that employee volunteering is the only employee benefit outside of healthcare that truly makes a difference in employee engagement. Once you understand mattering, it’s obvious.
Volunteering is one of the cleanest expressions of mattering that exists: you contribute based on your choice, you see the direct impact, and you do it as a whole person, not a job title, and if you do it with your colleagues, you’re seeing the power of collective work. Of course, it moves the needle on engagement more than free lunches or office massages. It’s the one benefit that is entirely focused on people mattering.
Take Action: In your next one-on-one or team meeting, replace one piece of feedback with a Feed Forward ask. Share a challenge you’re genuinely thinking through. Ask the person what they see. Then listen without defending. Notice what it does to the quality of the conversation and the energy of the room.
Timestamp Guide
If you’d like to go straight to a specific section of the conversation, here’s where to find it:
00:00 — 04:00 | Opening: Introductions and frames the “DEI-allergic” framing
04:00 — 15:15 | Amri’s background: Topeka, Morehouse, epidemiology, Atlanta, Cook Ross, and how he got into this work
15:20 — 19:30 | The mattering construct: where it comes from, how it differs from belonging
19:30 — 23:00 | Noticed, Affirmed, Needed — the NAN framework
23:00 — 28:00 | Ubuntu and interdependence; how anti-mattering cascades through an organization
28:00 — 36:00 | Layoffs, weak ties, and the story of the AI genius who was lost
36:00 — 41:30 | Incentive structures: what happens when rewards don’t align with mattering
41:30 — 45:00 | The “DEI-allergic” framing unpacked; what the allergy is really about
45:00 — 49:00 | Volunteering research; asking for help as an act of mattering
49:00 — 53:00 | What the overwhelmed leader does: one thing, consistently
53:00 — 58:34 | Closing: Amri’s resources and where to find him
Stay Connected with Amri Johnson
If this conversation sparked something for you, Amri’s thinking goes much deeper than one hour could cover.
On Substack: Find him at Reconstructing Inclusion.
On LinkedIn: Amri Johnson
His book: Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable — worth your time if you want the full framework, not just the highlights.
His company: Inclusion Wins, at inclusionwins.com. He runs a course on building the mattering habit — practical, structured, something you can start immediately. If you’re a leader who wants specific tools, not just concepts, it’s a good place to start.
I met Amri on Substack. This was his first live. I will not forget it — and I hope you won’t either.
And if our conversation landed for you, consider sharing it with a friend or giving it a ❤️. That will help more people access these valuable insights.
May you lead without limits,
