Navigating Polarisation in Today's Workplace

As elections take place around the world, societal polarisation is more evident than ever, impacting amongst other topics: politics, religion, and gender ideology. This division often spills into the workplace, presenting challenges for emerging leaders.

In our latest episode, we delve into what happens when team members step out of their digital echo chambers and into diverse workplace teams. Graham shared his experience with a LinkedIn influencer advocating for the under-30s, noting how supportive comments dominate his posts. When Graham gently challenged these views, he faced a backlash. So if a gentle response created that kind of reaction, how does a leader go about handling the likelihood of diverse, and possibly quite polarised and emotive political, religious, cultural or other subject viewpoints in the working environment.

One question that will almost certainly come to the mind of anyone responsible for people in a business, but particularly when you’re a new or emerging leaders taking on some of these responsibilities for the first time – whether to discourage these discussions, or create safe spaces for them? And depending on your choice, and within an existing company culture, how do you go about doing that?

This dilemma is often dealt with by establishing clarity about what is on and off-limits for open discussion – a little bit like having a more rules-led versus principles or purpose-led leadership approach. Our experience has been (and a fair amount of research has shown) that organizations embracing diversity are thriving as a result of it are capable of fostering environments where varied perspectives are encouraged. However, this is not something that sits comfortably or naturally with a lot of leaders’ (or their teams) – and for these kinds of polarising subjects it is something that is often put in the ‘too difficult or risky’ category and “should be avoided” where possible.

If you’re taking the route of wanting to keep these matters outside of the working or team environment, one perspective to consider is that the polarisations that exist in society cannot simply be ignored as they don’t just disappear from people’s lives. Therefore, to a certain extent, new leaders must be prepared to acknowledge and manage the presence of polarisation, and find a way that best suits them and their teams to balance respect for diverse viewpoints with the need to maintain team cohesion and productivity.

If you are leader who is going to step into this, practical tools like facilitated dialogues, anonymous feedback systems, and structured debates can help leaders create inclusive spaces for discussion. Using other tools like the Cynefin framework could help give space to acknowledge the fact that in many of the topics there is no ‘right’ or ‘obvious’ answer and maybe a way that leaders could use to work with their teams to classify issues to better understand and address them, fostering an environment where discomfort with ambiguity leads to growth.

What is worth considering as you take on your leadership role for the first time is that the generations now coming into the workplace (virtual or not) are increasingly and often actively involved in debates about societal matters in ways that previous generations simply weren’t afforded. The reason for the big changes – you guessed it – the internet and specifically social media. Over the last decade or more, the ability for much wider connection to opinion, facts (whether accurate or not) and stories become a given. And sadly this is accelerated when the communities involved in sharing them are triggering strong emotions. And mostly negative ones. So, new leader, it’s out there. It’s all around us – so don’t pretend that it won’t leak into the working consciousness in some way. How are you going to handle it?