A fine line – where do professional disagreements end and violations of dignity begin?
In all workplaces and professional communities, differences in perspectives are prevalent and can be an asset. But we need to be watchful of disagreements escalating into breakdowns of cohesion and important relationships.
Often, in a large and complex organisation such as a university, the needs and demands of different groups of people are conflicting. Or at least they seem to be. The challenge for leaders is to find the best solution for the entire community of staff and students. My starting point is always that it should be possible to not sacrifice the needs of any one group for those of another. Experience tells me that in the vast majority of situations that is entirely possible, although it is not always easy. While trying to find common solutions that are good for everybody, it seems that I will inevitably upset some people in the process. How to preserve the sense of togetherness in those situations can be a bit of a puzzle.
I know that staff and students in my university will be able to do their best work when we are a strong community, with a clear set of values and a common purpose. But for people to come together as a group, they need to feel acknowledged and recognised as individuals. They have to be able to be their authentic selves, and to express themselves without fear of being harshly judged, or made to feel bad as individuals. That does not mean they shouldn’t be accountable. On the contrary, accountability should be a core value throughout the organisation, but it must be based on the premise of trust, and the assumption that everybody inherently wants to do the right thing. In other words, our starting point should be to believe in each other’s best intentions.
“We can be at our best as a professional community if we ensure we do not violate each other’s dignity when conflicts arise and passions flare.”
A few years ago I was made aware of the importance of “dignity” as a concept, when thinking about how to best deal with disagreement and potential conflict in the workplace. I find it an incredibly useful compass. I think we all have a strong idea about what it means to be treated with dignity, and how it feels when our dignity is being violated. We can be at our best as a professional community if we ensure we do not violate each other’s dignity when conflicts arise and passions flare.
“When we openly share our harsh, personalised criticism and attacks on the person’s inherent worth as an individual, we erode all the elements that are needed for a strong community.”
The most important aspect for me in thinking about not violating dignity, is distinguishing criticism of a person, from criticism of a person’s actions. The moment we blur that line, we risk violations of dignity. Think about it: when we conflate a supposedly bad professional decision with assuming the person who made the decision is bad, or stupid, or short-sighted, or selfish, or power-hungry – or whatever attribute we ascribe to them – we create antagonism, and build in conflicts that will be hard to overcome. When we openly share our harsh, personalised criticism and attacks on the person’s inherent worth as an individual, we erode all the elements that are needed for a strong community. When colleagues become fearful of expressing themselves, or of taking certain professional actions or decisions because they will be made to feel bad as people, we stifle trust and collaboration.
The principles of not violating dignity and not amplifying disagreement into personal attacks should apply to situations ranging from giving written or verbal feedback, to openly differing in meetings, to discussions on social media – with lots in between.
Taking the first of these examples, students’ feedback is hard to take for individual teachers when it becomes personal. If feedback encompasses criticism of appearance, clothes, manners, voice, or accent, it potentially violates the dignity of the teacher and can rarely be constructively applied to improve the teaching. If it is personal, negative, and non-specific, such as “this teacher is hopeless/terrible/awful”, it might be more likely to drive the teacher out of academia than to empower them to change their teaching. With the second example, when colleagues aggressively disagree with each other in meetings, they too violate dignity and can make others, both the recipient and the onlookers, feel personally unsafe. This will ultimately undermine what the group needs to achieve. And, finally, it is clear from abundant research and, unfortunately, from the personal experience of many of us, that personalised attacks on social media can be quite devastating since they blatantly cross the boundary between constructive criticism and violation of dignity.
“It helps immensely if we can, in a considerate way, and without retaliation, call out certain behaviours in each other.”
I want to be on the lookout for dignity violations in my university, and to be very clear about what I do and do not accept in colleagues’ behaviour, for the sake of my entire community. And I want to invite others to do the same. To this end, in my university, we are currently going through an exercise to define the values that we want to live by as a community. This is seeking to involve as many people as possible, and one of the core questions we are considering is what behaviours we should not tolerate. Behind this is a recognition that it helps immensely if we can, in a considerate way and without retaliation, call out certain behaviours in each other.
To do that kindly is not easy, especially in circumstances in which we ourselves feel threatened. But respecting others’ dignity is a vital skill to keep practising. If, as a collective, we can be alive to the crossing of that thin line between necessary push-back and constructive criticism on the one hand, and violations of individuals’ dignity on the other, we will all be able to do our best work. We will be a more fulfilled, and more cohesive university community if we are not being pitted against each other for what we believe in and what we perceive we need individually. And we will have far greater impact on the world if we instead channel our abundant personal passions for reaching our agreed, hugely valuable common goals.
