In high school one of my poorer bits of judgment was an attempt to win the admiration of an exceptionally attractive young lady. My strategy was to tell her a very funny joke. The joke I chose was, had the vocabulary existed back then, politically incorrect and then some — its punchline was a pun on a derogatory name for an ethnic group.
Her ethnic group.
After my head stopped ringing — her response was instantaneous and surprisingly muscular for someone that slender — my chances of her going out with me, never very high, dropped to numbers smaller than mathematicians had yet invented.
It was a painful lesson. Literally.
The phrase “politically correct” is overused these days but what it means, exactly, isn’t clear. It might mean “a ridiculous attempt to euphemize plain facts,” but it often seems more like “I want to tell Polish jokes in public without peeving the Poles.”
Faced with a phrase that means little, the best course of action is to not use it. So I don’t.
Which brings us to the question, raised last week, of how to handle an employee who belongs to the Jehovah’s Witnesses — and who, as a consequence, doesn’t celebrate birthdays — if your staff habitually celebrates all birthdays as they come around on the calendar.
Unsurprisingly, I received a flood of responses (many are chronicled as comments on Advice Line if you’re interested in the details). Many were from Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom expressed their appreciation for my raising the issue. When invited, it appears, the average Jehovah’s Witness politely explains the situation, wishes everyone well, and offers to answer the phone during the party.
I also heard from a few folks asserting that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, should be treated as such, and that perhaps as a manager you should encourage them to seek your help to escape.
Before continuing: Neither KJR nor Advice Line are forums for discussing what is a religion, what is a cult, or for that matter what the difference is between the two. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult, that hasn’t been obvious to me in my dealings with any — that’s as far as I’ll take the subject.
To continue: Your role as a manager isn’t to discuss what is a religion, what is a cult, the difference between the two, or your opinion that one or some religions are superior to others. As a manager (at least in a publicly held corporation), you are secular. Here’s why:
Publicly held U.S. corporations are, by definition, secular entities. Their ownership is diffuse and largely anonymous; any religious affiliation of the owners is unknown and almost certainly not uniform. Beyond that, the laws currently governing the chartering of a publicly held corporation limit them to a single goal: Increasing value to shareholders.
When you act as a manager for a publicly held corporation, you are its agent. That confers an obligation to be secular when in that role. Any other course of action goes beyond your scope of authority and responsibility. Worse, it creates an environment in which some religious groups have an expectation of preferred treatment and others have the expectation of the opposite.
It’s a very clear principle, which collides with a very messy reality: The people who work for you are diverse and human. In order to work together effectively they can’t be automata — they have to get to know and trust each other as human beings. Inevitably that means finding out who was born when, where their ancestors came from, family history, how many children they have, whether they like dogs or cats, and all the other bits of information that you, in your official capacity as manager, aren’t supposed to know or take into account as you assess who is performing how well and what to do about it.
Don’t let the impossible balance you’re supposed to maintain paralyze you. You can get through most of these challenges by following one of the simplest and most basic rules of courtesy: Be interested in them but don’t ask them to be interested in you. That Schwartz is Moslem, Achmed is Presbyterian, Andersen is Jewish and Chelsea used to be Sheldon isn’t your business. If they tell you anyway, because you’re a good listener and they like to schmooze, it will help you facilitate the sometimes-awkward group dynamics that can result when even the best-intentioned people make assumptions about each other.
And the group dynamics definitely are your business.