Imprudently Intolerant

My third speech at Toastmaster's

Think of a coworker you do not respect and you will not work with him or her, given a choice..

Now I want you to think of how long you have known him or her, why you dislike this person and their one good quality that stands out

I believe that we are becoming increasingly intolerant at work place.

There are some obvious signs of this in our work environment. The teams and workload of the team members are becoming more and more unbalanced. There is a very high stress related to team dynamics, much more then the stress associated with the “actual work”.

The seriousness of people issues dominate conversations, effect productivity and is the one main reason for people to move on

There are no victims or villains here.

In fact there are many valid reasons for it. Most of the time we have fixed timelines and we do not really get to choose the people we work with. Another very stressful feature of our work is that we need to take bottom-line responsibility of the performance for our team members on whom at times we have little or no authority. People with various cultures, skills and aspirations are brought together not always based on talent but many a times by the various compulsive factors like vendor partners associated with a project, availability at a particular location.

The concept of considering people as 100% replaceable and replicable is not perfect. Personalities and attitudes attribute a lot to performance.

Probably because of this we try to categorize the attributes based on our experiences. we brand people to reduce the uncertainty of their behavior which impact our day to day work life… simplifying people and expectation from them by saying women are more sincere hen men, Indians are more aggressive, Americans are more appreciative, contractors are more flexible … helps us predict the unpredictable.

But this categorization is definitely not accurate. We classify at a very early stage of interaction. Plus we do not always recalibrate people. Once we make an opinion of a co-worker, specially a bad one, we rarely give them a second chance.

For management team member are like their children …when it comes to comparing them with each other

So when an extraordinary performer in team met some unrealistic expectations like taking no time for ramping-up to new responsibilities or putting aside our priorities outside work not only when there are issues, but for regular activities like production releases re met…

They become the new benchmark…expectations hit the roof and fault tolerance drops

This is something we do and are subjected to…

So what can we do to improve work environment?

When we interact with family members and friends we accept them with their strengths with deficiencies. We need to exercise the same patience and discretion, only because intolerance is a double edged sword and in an intolerance environment there are no villains or victims but just negativity and stress

We can start by recalibrating people. When we think strongly against them , we need to repeat the exercise we did at the start of this speech ....that is to think of how long we have known them and why we dislike but along with some of their good qualities ...this is to ensure that we judge people as they are ....without the glasses of intolerance