Today's Reading
You can use this book to figure out what you can do to improve your own situation and build a better culture where you work. Of course, your degrees of freedom are different depending on your role or roles—often, we are in two or more roles at once: leader, upstander/observer, person harmed, or person causing harm. Some key questions it addresses:
* What must leaders do to prevent bias, prejudice, and bullying from destroying respect and collaboration on their teams?
* How can we make sure we are upstanders and not silent bystanders when we observe bias, prejudice, and bullying affecting colleagues?
* When we are the person harmed by bias, prejudice, and bullying, how can we choose a response that will help us maintain personal agency?
* What can we do when we realize that we have caused harm? How can we come to grips with the fact that we all have our own biases and prejudices, and most of us bully others at least occasionally? If we want to do better in the future, we need to adopt a growth mindset about our own problematic attitudes and behaviors. As my son's baseball coach told his team, "You can't do right if you don't know what you're doing wrong."
* How can we design our management systems to minimize rather than reinforce these problems? When organizations layer power on top of bias, prejudice, and bullying, the result is discrimination, harassment, and physical violations. If leaders don't design management systems for justice, the result is predictable: systemic injustice. And if you are not a leader, how can you navigate your career so you minimize the damage that unfair, inequitable systems can do to you?
* How can we as individuals speak truth to power without blowing up our careers?
There are things each of us can do, today, to create a more respectful, collaborative working environment for ourselves and those around us. An equitable working environment in which we can all do the best work of our lives and build the best relationships of our careers is within our grasp.
Just Work, the original title of this book, just didn't work. People thought I was telling them to work all the time, or to return to the office, rather than to work more justly. Hence the new title: Radical Respect. I also revised the book based on feedback from people who read the hardcover, to make it shorter and more user-friendly.
I hope this book will energize you to build the kind of working environment where you can love your work—and the people you work with. We must do better than merely tolerating one another if we are going to optimize for collaboration and honor individuality. We can work together better—joyfully, even.
PART ONE
EVERYONE HAS A ROLE TO PLAY
CHAPTER ONE
A FRAMEWORK FOR SUCCESS
WHAT IS RADICAL RESPECT?
The word respect has two very different meanings. The first has to do with admiration for someone's abilities, qualities, or achievements. That kind of admiration has to be earned. But that's not what I'm talking about in this book.
The definition of respect I'm using here is a regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, and traditions of others. This kind of respect is something we owe to everyone; it is not something that needs to be "earned."
The kind of respect that is the birthright of every human being is crucial to a healthy culture. We don't have to respect a person's opinion on a particular topic—we can disagree, vehemently. We don't have to respect a particular action a person took—we can still disapprove and hold them accountable. But we do have to respect that person as a human being if we want to be able to work together productively while also leaving space to disagree and hold each other accountable when necessary.
Radical Respect happens in workplaces that do two things at the same time:
1. Optimize for collaboration, not coercion.
2. Honor individuality, don't demand conformity.
What makes it radical is that it is so fundamental, and yet it rarely occurs.
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