With another fraught presidential election looming and parts of the world at war (or teetering on the edge), it seems everyone is either walking on tenterhooks or spoiling for a fight. No wonder it’s tempting to consider banning all political discussions at work. (But remember how that ended for technology company Basecamp in 2020—a firestorm of negative press and a third of employees quitting!)
To work together, we must be able to talk to each other. To truly collaborate (and innovate and problem solve and everything else that drives success), we have to know each other. And that’s where things get tricky. To know someone is inevitably to know things you don’t like. During the last presidential election, Gartner research found that 36% of employees avoided talking to or working with a coworker because of their political beliefs. This kind of polarization erodes trust, relationships, and performance. Plus, workplace conflict wastes 2.8 hours a week and costs employers a staggering $359 billion a year.
The polarization problem is so big it’s listed as one of the World Economic Forum’s top risks for 2024, so it’s easy to feel powerless—to shut down rather than speak up. Unfortunately, retreating into our respective corners is how we got into this mess in the first place. To wrest back control and rebuild connection, here are five things you can do to dial down the political heat at work, or even at the dinner table.
Debate Without Arguing
One of the most insidious workplace threats is the lost art of respectful debate. Sixty-four percent of people now believe we are incapable of having civil or constructive debates. As a result, we simply “cancel” views that don’t align with ours.
This creates a toxic environment where people are afraid to speak up. In fact, more than 90% of nurses said they would not correct a doctor–even if a patient is at risk. Companies that openly welcome debate (like McKinsey does with its “obligation to dissent,”) need team members who are comfortable to raise misgivings or concerns to the team, and celebrate them when they do. The next time you’re making a decision, seek out a dissenting voice. Show people that their voices matter. Aim to debate without arguing. Leave emotions at the door. Separate your ideas from your ego. And these tough conversations can be energizing instead of damaging.
Respectful debate helps us build on each other’s ideas and improve them. If we destroy our ability to wrestle with alternative perspectives, we settle for groupthink, complacency and the status quo.
Find the Coin
We live in self-aggrandizing echo chambers, watching only what aligns with our thinking, being spoon-fed social media content that confirms our embedded points of view.
This encourages zero sum, “us against them,” binary thinking that perpetuates polarization. We head into every conversation armed with “what we’re against.” What if we spent more time figuring out what we’re “for”?
Try this exercise: find the coin. If you’re speaking with someone you disagree with, visualize your opposing views as two sides of the same coin. What unites you? What’s the coin?
Common ground is where solutions live. “That’s where we get to use the energy of polarization to be creative and not just to get shocked and zapped into our own bubble,” says Jason Jay, MIT lecturer and co-author of Breaking Through Gridlock.
Get Better At Empathy
Most people think of empathy as a personality trait—you either have it or you don’t. But the hard truth is, if you don’t have it, it’s because you never learned it. Empathy is not just a feeling. It’s a skill you need to build. As humans, we’re hardwired to favor insiders and be suspicious of outsiders. So we’re much more likely to offer empathy to people like us, or people we know and care about–”insiders.”
To build your empathy muscles, make time to expand your relationships at work and actively get to know more people–especially people different from you. By creating spaces to practice empathy at work—encouraging people to engage with their differences, or to work with people with divergent backgrounds—we can foster empathy and inoculate our organizations against conflict.
Listen More, Talk Less
Rushing to immediately weigh in, take a stand or pick a side, can result in catastrophic disagreements and mistakes.Instead of telling someone their opinion is stupid or wrong, get curious about it. Honest questions can build a powerful bridge across differences. Where do your beliefs come from? What happened to influence your thinking on this?
Drop your agenda. Listen to learn–with an open mind and heart. Sincere questions invite people to rephrase their positions to help you see them more clearly. Feeling heard helps them de-escalate the anger of defending a point of view.
Develop a habit of listening more than you talk. This provides an unparalleled opportunity to step back, observe and reflect. By not jumping in right away, you can unscramble your thoughts, balance your emotions and build the strength to weather challenging conversations. When we listen more, we learn more.
Change Your Own Mind
In neuropsychology, they say “neurons that fire together wire together.” This helps us rapidly process the world. It also holds us back, hardwiring our bias and reactivity. If we constantly complain that becomes our default. If we say “no” to everything, we always start at “no.” We can’t change the way anyone else thinks or acts. But we can change our own minds. And it starts with changing how we think.
Examine the bias and shortcuts in your own brain. Slow down and shake up how you react to people and ideas. Open your mind to nuance and complexity. Invite compassion instead of knee jerk judgment.
Today’s world is filled with deeply nuanced problems, competing tensions and contradictions at every turn. Things are rarely cut and dried. Behind nearly every dilemma there’s a set of paradoxical or interdependent paths that can’t be addressed with a single solution or point of view. Rewire your brain to be more open, less judgmental. Train yourself to recognize potential blind spots and get out of attack mode.
We will never agree on all the things splitting our world in two and setting our Slack channels ablaze at work. But one conversation at a time, we can get better at discussing difficult things and learning from them. And if we do this, it will not only help us survive election season, it will make our teams stronger and better at problem-solving, collaboration, and innovation–during every season.