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1. OPTIMIZE FOR COLLABORATION, NOT COERCION

Collaboration is essential to any great human accomplishment. Designing organizations that promote healthy collaboration requires proactive efforts to combat coercive behaviors from individuals and groups, such as arbitrary, ego-driven, fact-ignoring biased decision-making, bullying, harassment, and physical violations or violence. When we build management systems that put checks and balances on the power of leaders, they can be held accountable for their behavior and their results. Employees contribute ideas rather than being silenced. We help each other improve, and we achieve more than we could ever dream of achieving alone.

There is growing consensus that coercion, even by otherwise visionary leaders, neither gets the best results out of people nor generates the innovation necessary to thrive in the modern economy. Yes, most of us have the impulse to coerce when we can get away with it, and leaders often can get away with it unless checks and balances constrain them. When we design management systems carefully, we can mitigate the damage this can do.

2.HONOR INDIVIDUALITY, DON'T DEMAND CONFORMITY

If we want each person we're working with to bring their full potential to our collaborative efforts, we need to honor one another's individuality rather than demanding conformity. None of us (except actors) can do their best work while pretending to be somebody they aren't. Telling people to bring their best to work while discouraging them from being their true selves seems obviously doomed to fail. But we do that all the time, usually unconsciously. Too often, we look for "culture fit" rather than "culture add" when we hire, forcing employees to pretend to be someone they are not, making it difficult for our organizations to evolve, and excluding people who could make important contributions. Often we advertise that we admire people who "think different," but then we punish or ostracize outliers.

Successful collaboration requires diversity of thought and experience. Part of the benefit of collaboration is that "many hands make a light load." But the more important benefit is that diversity allows us to challenge each other because each of us has a different point of view, different life experiences. One person easily notices something that another person is oblivious to. But if that person is punished for speaking up, they will go silent and nobody will get the benefit of their observations in the future. When we challenge one another, we improve one another's work. That is why feedback at work is so vital to our individual and collective growth and success.

If we were all exact clones, we'd lose much of the benefit we get from working together. What is impossible for one person is simple for another. What is tedious drudgery for one person is a pleasure for another. We need one another.

WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF RADICAL RESPECT?

A "TOXONOMY"

Why is the combination of optimizing for collaboration and honoring individuality so rare that I dub it radical?

All too often, our biases cause us to expect conformity without even realizing what we are doing. And when you layer power and management systems on top of that, that expectation gets baked into who we hire, promote, and fire. Unconscious bias enables discrimination.

When we are at our worst, we seek to establish dominance or to bully others at work, rather than seeking to collaborate with them. And again when you layer management systems and power on top of those instincts, things go from bad to worse. Bullying escalates to harassment, physical violations, and violence.

These are universal human failings. "Progressive" organizations drift toward coercion and conformity as surely as do "conservative" ones. But these problems are not inevitable. Fighting the gravitational pull toward conformity and coercion requires much more than good intentions. We must act. Part of the solution is for leaders to consciously design norms and systems that keep us moving toward respect and collaboration. But leaders can't do this alone. We all have a role to play.

What can we do to make Radical Respect less rare? Let's start by naming the problems so we are more apt to notice them. As I learned when Michelle gave me some feedback on Radical Candor, we can't fix problems we refuse to notice.

What precisely do we mean when we talk about a "toxic" or "unfair" work environment? Those terms make the problem feel monolithic, insoluble. When you break a big problem down into its component parts, it's easier to find solutions. I'm not promising a quick fix; but by diagnosing more precisely what was unfair, we can figure out what to do about it and make our situation a little better.