The Colonel said, “Prejudice is intentional ignorance. You have to be bigger than that, kid.”
I was having a casual conversation with a colleague recently. We were both awaiting flights to different locations and, by chance, had run into each other in the layover city. (This happens more often than you would imagine in my industry.) He was recounting an exchange with one of his audience members that rattled him that day. He ended his thought with, “This obsessive ‘cultural correctness’ these days… I just think it’s stupid.”
I don’t know him that well and was not eager to get into a tussle were I to challenge him on that mindset, so I let it be and moved on to a safer topic: football. Still, I was saddened because this colleague speaks on the subject of leadership.
I believe, and share in nearly every one of my sessions, that our goal as leaders and communicators is to allow all people to feel safe (physically, intellectually, and emotionally) and treated with respect in our presence while we stand our own ground and get our message across. If that is the case, then this “obsessive cultural correctness” is not stupid but imperative. How can I endeavor to help someone feel safe and treated with respect in my presence if I am blindly or naïvely repeating something that might be construed as offensive to them?
A casual response to that would be, “Well, how am I supposed to know what might be offensive to someone? I can’t know everything!” While it’s true we can’t know everything, I believe it’s our responsibility, as leaders, to know as much as we can.
The Colonel was adamant about this. He believed that prejudice is intentional ignorance. If we never allow ourselves to learn or understand a paradigm different from our own, we prevent ourselves from being significant. We prevent ourselves from having an impact on anyone who doesn’t think or believe exactly as we do. Significant leaders do the (sometimes very) hard work that endeavors to make all people feel safe and treated with respect in our presence.
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