A recent survey from the recruitment website Indeed highlights how nearly half of younger workers would be willing to leave their jobs if the political view of their leader differed significantly from their own. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that previous research, from ESMT, found a strong desire among employees for business leaders to be politically engaged.
The researchers surveyed 40 leaders of large companies from across Europe. An overwhelming 77.5% of them said that leaders should be taking a stand on political issues, with 62.5% of them saying they are willing to express themselves in sociopolitical terms. The primary motivation for this was to make a positive contribution to society, but there was also a strong belief that speaking up helped to express corporate values.
Staying together
“In this election year, workplace cultures could easily become as divided as society,” says Colin Ellis, author of Detox Your Culture. “This happened at 37 Signals in 2021, when a ban on political talk led to a toxic culture and the loss of a third of their workforce. To avoid this, leaders should balance expressing values with maintaining neutrality, prevent conflicts from escalating, and find common ground to unite employees.”
Managing this territory can require exceptional diplomacy skills, so there’s perhaps no better person to advise us on managing the minefield than The University of Texas-Austin’s Steven Collis, who is one of the foremost experts on civil discourse. In his recent book, Habits of a Peacemaker, he outlines a number of ways we can dial down the temperature on potentially toxic conversations and have healthier dialogues with our peers and colleagues.
The first habit he advocates is to show a degree of intellectual humility. This is especially important for leaders, who are often expected to be experts in every subject and masters of every domain. More broadly, Collis explains that we are encouraged to assume the little knowledge we have is sufficient to hold court on all manner of subjects
Getting to the heart of the matter
It’s also important for us to build on this intellectual humility and try to seek real learning wherever possible. This involves an acceptance that learning tends to come when we learn from those around us, while also accepting that the technologies and algorithms that so often feed us content today are designed to stoke division rather than inform us.
This feeds into a need to assume the best of those around us. The social media platforms that form such a large part of our lives are designed to create echo chambers that can not only make it difficult to see things from other people’s point of view but also to encourage us to view those with different opinions as either evil or stupid (or both).
Neither is conducive to forming meaningful conversations, and Collis instead urges us to assume the best of those with different opinions, even to the extent of reframing negative comments in their best light.
Seeking out divergence
Thinkers like Scott Page have long advocated the benefits of thought diversity in organisations, yet if we all coalesce around an extremely strong culture we run the risk of having a team of people who all think and act the same way (if they don’t all necessarily look the same way).
Just as Edward de Bono famously argued for one of his “six thinking hats” to be a critical voice, Collis argues that we need to actively work to try and find the best argument against whatever position we feel we might be taking. You see this in cybersecurity departments, where “red teams” are tasked with behaving as an opponent might do. Doing this in an intellectual way can not only highlight different ways of thinking but also remind us that there are costs to every solution.
Another key is to be open to change. This can be particularly hard for leaders as we’re hardwired to assume that leaders should have all of the answers, and therefore seldom be wrong about anything. This goes hand in hand with the earlier suggestion to have as much intellectual humility as possible, but also requires us to stay out of in-group/out-group dynamics if we can and to go wherever the evidence takes us.
If we can do this with humour and humility, then we can stand a better chance of creating the kind of culture whereby uncertainty and differences of opinion are key rather than the tribalism that so often seeks to divide rather than unite us.
