Incivility- a major reason of failure

Who do you want to be? This is a simple question but your activities and the way you behave with others is answering this question despite of your knowledge and your intention. The answer of this question is explaining who do you want to be and where your business is going because your way of dealing other people is guiding your success or failure in your business. Not only business your life itself is being guided by this behavior.

What is incivility? It’s disrespect or rudeness. It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings. And what’s uncivil to one person may be absolutely fine to another. Take texting while someone’s speaking to you. Some of us may find it rude, others may think it’s absolutely civil. So it really depends. It’s all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do it has consequences.

If you are misbehaving the staffs under you, you may not know or you may not imagine what mental stage that staff goes and what would be the impact on his/her performance. The consequences can be beyond your imagination. Either you lift people up by respecting them making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. Incivility may have little negative impact in government or military organizations but it has severe negative impact in the service oriented organization.

Associate Professor of University of Georgetown, USA, Ms Christine Poroth and her team had conducted a survey to study consequences of incivility. They asked the team to write a few sentences about one experience where they were treated rudely, disrespectfully or insensitively, and to answer question about how they reacted. One person told us about a boss that made insulting statements like, “that’s kindergartener’s work” and another tore up someone’s work in front of the entire team. And what we found is that incivility made people less motivated: 66 percent cut back work efforts, 80 percent lost time worrying about what happened, and 12 percent left their job. And after they published these results, they got call from CISCO, which, read about these numbers, took just a few of these and estimated, conservatively, that incivility was costing them 12 million dollars a year.

Incivility is a bug. It’s contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it. And this isn’t confined to the workplace. We can catch this virus anywhere — at home, online, in schools and in our communities. It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others. It even affects our attention and can take some of our brainpower. And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. It can happen even if we just see or read rude words. Let's mention an example what could be the consequences of it. To test this, some people were given combinations of words to use to make a sentence. Half the participants got the list with 15 words used to trigger rudeness: impolitely, interrupt, obnoxious, bother. Half the participants received the words with none of these rude triggers. And the result found was really surprising, because the people who got the rude words were five times more likely to miss information right in front of them on the computer screen. And as this research continued, what is found, is that those that read rude words took longer to take decisions, to record their decisions, and they made significantly more errors.

This can be a big deal, especially when it comes to life-and-death situations. Christine mentioned about a doctor who was never very respectful, especially to junior staffs and nurses. But she mentioned about this one particular interaction where this doctor shouted at a medical team. Right after the interaction, the team gave wrong dosage of medication to their patient. Whereas the information was right there on the chart, but somehow everyone on the team missed it. She said they lacked the attention or awareness to take it into account. Simple mistake, right? Well, that patient died. Researchers in Israel have actually shown that medical teams exposed to rudeness perform worse not only in all their diagnostics, but in all the procedures they did. This was mainly because the teams exposed to rudeness didn’t share information as readily, and they stopped seeking help from their teammates. This is not only in medicine but in all industries. So if incivility has such a huge cost, why do we still see so much of it? It creates stress on other and their subconscious mind starts shrinking and more influenced by such uncivil behavior forgetting the important information what was there in their mind before.  

If somebody says he/she has the habit of quickly getting angry, he/she is completely lying because we all know that at what degree that person gets angry with the persons junior to him/her on the same degree he/she expects same behavior from his/her seniors and gets melted instantly. So that is the mere choice of a person who shouts to another who is, by some reason, is not able to shout back to him/her.

According to founder of Virgin Group, Mr Richard Branson, What you behave to your employees, your customers are getting the same behavior from your employees. If you act uncivil to your employees then you can't expect polite behavior for the customers from your employees. Normally people do not want to go to any organization where the environment is uncivil and the people are rude.

Hence, incivility is the main reason which is not allowing any service oriented organization to progress and prosper. Its now become very high time for any organization to evaluate the prices they are incurring for incivility which is hindering unknowing to go in the path of success.