Preparing Your Team for a Year of Intense Political Polarization
From Ron Carucci and Caroline Mehl, writing for The Harvard Business Review…
In the wake of 2023’s turbulent social and political landscape that has spilled over into 2024, business leaders face a compounding challenge as the U.S. presidential election approaches. The campaign vitriol has already begun, and many leaders are dreading what this is going to bring into their workplaces and onto their teams.
If you’re a manager anticipating (or already seeing) tensions on your team — and feeling uncertain about your role in helping them navigate them — your angst is not misplaced. Having social discord on your team can lead to lowered productivity and work quality and unhealthy conflict among team members. According to Gartner research, 36% of U.S. employees surveyed reported that the topic of the 2020 U.S. presidential election had led them to avoid talking to or working with a coworker because of their political beliefs. Even a year after the election, according to a 2021 SHRM survey, 47% of organizations listed political disagreements as one of their top challenges.
Shaping an environment that allows people to productively exchange opposing views and maintain mutual respect in the face of deeply personal differences is no small task. Further, some of those delicate viewpoints may be your own. Figuring out how much you can personally share without tipping the team’s dynamics can be even trickier.
Keeping your team unified when external forces are trying to polarize you is possible, but it takes advance preparation and managerial courage. In our roles supporting organizations through these challenges (Ron as an organizational consultant and Caroline as the executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute), we’ve seen organizations employ effective methods for building conflict-resilient cultures. Here’s how you might begin.
Co-create ground rules of expression with your team.
One of the best ways to prevent things from going off the rails and get your team committed to productive discourse is establishing the boundaries for what good looks like. You can present the business case for creating an environment that supports diverse perspectives by describing how the open exchange of ideas reduces groupthink, improves decision-making, and increases creativity and innovation. You can also tie this work to your organizational values and efforts around diversity, inclusion, and belonging by explaining that making space for people to express their different opinions advances inclusion.
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