So while I was being pretty civil to a bunch of brook trout yesterday (by catching and releasing them) in a small meadow creek near Rabbit Ears Pass (exact location is classified information), a friend and colleague was sending a message to my Blackberry urging me to read an article in the New York Times, No Time to Be Nice at Work, by Christine Porath. "I think you will find it highly relevant and 100% in agreement with the basic themes" you write about, my friend messaged me.
He was 100% right. I thought it was a terrific piece. Ms. Porath is a business school professor at Georgetown University. Her main point in the article? "How we treat one another at work matters. Insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people's health, performance and souls."
It's a subject I've been whittling away at, in one form or another, for several years now. After nearly a quarter century in Fortune 500 company management, I came to the firm conclusion that management civility is a difference maker - not because it's somehow nice or ethical or politically correct...but because it's effective. It gets results. In an environment where numerous large studies show that only around 30% of employees are fully engaged at work, at a productivity loss exceeding $400 billion a year, civility breeds productivity, not resentment.
It's a notion I've been exploring in Forbes with blogs like The Surprising Managerial Power Of Common Decency, You'll Never Go Wrong Leading By Example, One Very Simple Way For Management To Boost Loyalty And Productivity, plus a book to be published this August, The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World (Prentice Hall Press). Sure, management can be a hard high-stress job. No question about that. I get it. I did it. But over the long term treating people in a way you wouldn't want to be treated yourself accomplishes little - except demotivation and demoralization. Mindset matters. It's just common sense: Employees have to be in the right mindset to want to do their best for you. Which is why I was pleased to read Porath's eloquent, research-based business case.
As a professor, Porath has done studies, as she details in her New York Times piece, showing that employees who are treated rudely perform worse on routine tasks. "Incivility shuts down people in other ways too," she writes. "Employees contribute less and lose their conviction, whether because of a boss saying, 'If I wanted to know what you thought, I'd ask you,' or screaming at an employee who overlooks a typo in an internal memo." Did I ever witness such overwrought behavior and the sub-optimal results it produces in my own corporate management experience? Oh, maybe only a couple million times.
"Incivility also hijacks workplace focus," Porath notes. "According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71% tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27% tied such behavior to patient deaths."
Porath describes what she feels is the rise of workplace incivility and offers a fascinating explanation for it. "I've surveyed hundreds of people across organizations spanning more than 17 industries, and asked people why they behaved uncivilly," she writes. "Over half of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40% say they have no time to be nice." Indeed, I can attest to individuals being overloaded, especially in a current management environment that worships at the altar of "doing more with less." But saying you don't have time to treat employees respectfully is akin to saying you don't have time to treat people in a way that will get good results...which after all is your job as a manager.
Anyway, much as I might have liked to, I couldn't stay up at Rabbit Ears Pass all day, so I came down and read the article. And was glad I did. "We all need to reconsider our behavior," Porath concludes. "You are always in front of some jury. In every interaction, you have a choice: Do you want to lift people up or hold them down?"
It's a deceptively simple but important management question.
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Victor is author of The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World (Prentice Hall Press).
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