Dealing with the small stuff

I’m doing something I’ve never done before: I’m pulling the plug on a discussion thread. Through a combination of “slippery slope” and hitting the wrong button, a discussion about how to handle a relatively benign and minor consequence of diversity in the workplace has started to turn into a referendum on whether the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult.

Not only don’t I plan to take a position on this issue, I’d advise you to do the same, at least during work hours. It isn’t that cults are good things. It’s that there’s no hard, sharp line that divides religions or cultural groups from cults. To give you an example, one of the harsher posts used the Jehovah’s Witness practice of “shunning” those who leave the faith as evidence of its cultishness. Which brings up this question: Whether your grandfather’s refusal to speak with your uncle for the past 40 years, after your uncle left the Lutheran church to become a Catholic, is an example of shunning, and if so whether that makes Lutheranism a cult.

Not to mention the Amish, for whom shunning is a recognized form of punishment.

And on, and on, and on. In your role as an IT leader, that doesn’t matter. Whether someone is a member of the disreputable cult of Lutheranism, described in horrifying detail by Garrison Keilor every week on A Prairie Home Companion (it’s a code: The acronym, PHC, also stands for “putrid and horrible cult”), really doesn’t matter to you, or it shouldn’t.

Here’s the lesson I’ve drawn from the amazing response to this posting. I’ve read, and given, lots of advice to IT managers and executives over the past ten years. Almost none of it covers something very real that working managers face every day in companies all over America: Seemingly trivial issues arising from seemingly trivial differences among employees that can grow until they have a remarkable impact on organizational performance.

I don’t know exactly where you should go to find authoritative advice on how to handle employee birthday celebrations. I do know they can start as spontaneous outpourings of affection – a way of saying “we’re glad you were born” – to obligatory traditions, and from there to unintended sleights if someone is left our, or to accidentally offensive displays of disrespect for another’s religion, as in the case we’ve been discussing.

And this is just one of dozens of equally trivial issues that can blow up in your face. Most managers would rather avoid dealing with them; many deal with them through the probably worse solution of adding yet another policy to the overburdened Policy Manual.

One way or another, these are issues you have to deal with, generally with some delicacy. If you’re thinking you don’t (and please – feel free to post your opinion on this), here’s my response in advance: You do, because it can affect team performance, and you are responsible for that.

– Bob