A working mom’s new book, Braving the Workplace, dives into how to belong—but not necessarily “fit in”—at work.
When Beth Kaplan GrEd’21 found out that her three-month-old baby boy had lung cancer in January 2008, she told only one person at her tech job. Each Friday for a year, she and her husband drove from West Orange, New Jersey, to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for chemotherapy, but she concealed the diagnosis from almost everyone.
“I didn’t want to have sad eyes looking at me, and then it came to a point where there was never a good time to talk,” Kaplan says. “I think it was a point of pride. … I was a top performer.”
But should employees tell their coworkers and bosses when they’re struggling? More broadly, how much personal information should someone share at work? And how much should employers be responsible for their employees’ well-being?
Kaplan has been studying corporate interactions and dynamics since winding her way through the Penn Chief Learning Officer doctoral program in the Graduate School of Education.
In her new book, Braving the Workplace: Belonging at the Breaking Point (Mango Media, 2025), she wrestles with the idea that employees often feel the need to belong at work but aren’t sure how to go about it.
Using examples from people’s workplace experiences, along with some of her own, she hopes to help employees find more ways to connect at work, and help their bosses create an environment of belonging.
“A sense of belonging can help individuals feel more confident, supported, and motivated in pursuing their goals, which can lead to greater success,” Kaplan writes. “A sense of belonging can create a supportive and motivating environment that fosters personal and professional growth.”
Kaplan’s journey to studying workplace dynamics started in childhood. Born in Florida in 1977, she grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Early on, she was drafted to help take care of her father, who had multiple sclerosis, and then her younger sister, while her mom served as the breadwinner. Nevertheless, she says, she felt that her family considered her “unlovable” and the “black sheep.”
“Developing friendships in childhood was hard but doable as long as they didn’t know what was happening at home,” she writes. “It was hard to be my true self.” Kaplan notes that she was so fearful that she “spent all of third grade silent in school.” But that changed when her fourth-grade teacher became “the first person in my entire life to encourage me to use my voice,” she says. “She cared about what I had to say.”
Kaplan attended college at the University of Pittsburgh, where she met her future husband during the first month of freshman year. But she still struggled to find a sense of belonging. After joining a sorority, she constantly felt the urge to “bring people together,” thinking it might help her connect, she says. “I didn’t necessarily have language to give to it. I just knew I felt bad with other people, like they had more in common” with each other than with her. And if a sense of belonging didn’t come easily, maybe she just needed to try harder. “I felt a lot of times in my life, the more I cared about people, the more I sacrificed, the more I’d fit in, and the more they would love me.”
But it didn’t work. “Fitting in” meant losing herself.
As she approached college graduation, her parents pressured her to be a lawyer, but she decided against it. She calls this her first “true act of rebellion,” and it led to her mom being disappointed in her, she says.
Kaplan worked in sales for a series of financial and technical companies in New York City, San Francisco, and London. She and her husband settled in New Jersey, where they started a family. It was early 2008 when she picked up her infant son at daycare and was told he had briefly stopped breathing. She noticed that his coloring and breathing still seemed abnormal.
She took him to the emergency room. X-rays showed an “unusual growth” in his chest. Emergency surgery followed. “They biopsied him and came back that it was cancer,” she says. “We had no family history. There was no rhyme or reason to it. … They told us, ‘He’ll be fine, but he’ll never run a mile.’”
During that year of weekly chemo treatments, Kaplan spent a lot of time keeping her son safe at home—and looking back on her life. “I really wasn’t having a lot of relationships where I felt like I fit in and gained confidence as a person, where I didn’t need to sacrifice myself,” she says. “I felt most [like] myself when I was with myself.”
On one visit to CHOP, her son’s alarming test results necessitated an overnight stay. Kaplan hadn’t packed clothes, so she roamed Penn’s campus to buy gear. Years later, that came to mind when she saw an ad pop up on her computer for Penn’s Chief Learning Officer doctoral program.
She enrolled, and says she surprised her classmates with insights she had gained from her 20 years’ work experience. When she talked about employees feeling out of place or like their backs were against the wall, “someone said, ‘Is that your dissertation topic?’” she recalls.
One specific experience at work led her to return to the topic over and over. During her son’s cancer treatment, she switched bosses. At one point, she told her new boss that she was depressed and “instantly regretted it,” she writes. “I felt like a sellout and guess what? It was for nothing. Not one thing changed. I don’t remember him reacting other than to tell me he had a meeting to go to.”
It was while working on her dissertation, “A Social Constructivist Approach to Understanding Belonging in the Workplace,” and interviewing people about belonging that she finally felt like she belonged herself. “I feel so much pride [talking about it],” she says. “It doesn’t require me to be anyone else. It requires me to be myself.”
In 2022, a year after she published her dissertation, she had a small ceremony to burn her Penn sweatshirt—signifying that she’d graduated from the program and that her son had no signs of cancer. (Now a rising high school senior, he has defied the odds by participating in track and field along with two other sports.) The next year, she began writing the book.
“I was inspired by the topic, by my dissertation process at Penn, from talking to people about how they construct their sense of belonging,” she says, “and the desire to help people feel less alone.”
In her book, she gives examples of language that bosses can use to improve employees’ sense of belonging. “After I noticed my first participant [in dissertation interviews] struggling with her words, I stopped her and said, ‘This is a judgment-free zone, and we are in this together,’” she writes, noting that the latter phrase caused the participant’s body language to improve.
Kaplan also explores “bravery in the workplace”—how employees can share more of themselves with coworkers, who might appreciate their vulnerability. “Human connection triggers the release of various neurochemicals in our brain, such as oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin,” she writes. “These chemicals play crucial roles in bonding, social reward, and feelings of happiness and well-being.”
But she warns that people shouldn’t necessarily try to “fit in”—which can mean hiding your true self. Some employees are “ducking,” she says—appearing calm on the surface but struggling underneath.
Kaplan has seen the workplace evolve, with younger generations demanding a better work-life balance. “This generation is holding the workplace accountable,” she says. “A sense of belonging used to come from religious institutions, community, family. We used to spend less hours at the workplace. Some employers make the workplace the main destination for belonging. If you’re going to do that, you better be prepared to deal with employees’ mental health.”
Now that the book is out, Kaplan is looking forward to giving talks at book clubs, on podcasts, and in workplaces—particularly about “being yourself in a world that tells you every day to be someone different.”
“Organizations have a unique opportunity in front of them now,” she says. “They can create an environment that encourages individuals to be authentic, take risks, and express their ideas openly.”
—Caren Lissner C’93
