Christine Porath has a quite dramatic job: incivility expert. So, she decided to better understand rudeness in the workplace and, after interviewing more than 600 people from 17 industries, she found the numbers. More than half the people said they were rude because they had too much work to do, and more than 40% explained that they had no time to be nice. What about you? Do some of these excuses make sense for your accidental lack of courtesy? See how you shouldn’t behave if you want to prove you know how to make a great team management:
The top 10 leaders’ rude behaviors according to their team
1. Interrupts people
2. Is judgmental of those who are different
3. Pays little attention to or shows little interest in others’ opinions
4. Takes the best and leaves the worst tasks for others
5. Fails to pass along necessary information
6. Neglects saying please or thank you
7. Talks down to people
8. Takes too much credit for things
9. Swears
10. Puts others down
Does your boss also make any of these unkind acts? However, if you are the boss, check out if you would do what these leaders did:
The top 10 leaders’ rude behaviors confessed by themselves
1. Hibernates into e-gadgets
2. Uses jargon even when it excludes others
3. Ignores invitations
4. Is judgmental of those who are different
5. Grabs easy tasks while leaving difficult ones for others
6. Does not listen
7. Emails/texts during meetings
8. Takes others’ contributions for granted
9. Belittles others nonverbally
10. Neglects saying please or thank you
It’s even worse than it seems to be
According to Christine Porath, rudeness also hijacks workplace focus. In a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.
In one study, the experimenter belittled the peer group of the participants, who then performed 33 percent worse on anagram word puzzles and came up with 39 percent fewer creative ideas during a brainstorming task focused on how they might use a brick.
In a second study, a “busy professor” was rude to participants by admonishing them for bothering her. Their performance was 61 percent worse on word puzzles, and they produced 58 percent fewer ideas in the brick task than those who had not been treated rudely.
In addition to these findings, teachers Deborah MacInnis and Valerie Folkes of the University of Southern California found that people were less likely to patronize a business that has an employee who is perceived as rude — whether the rudeness is directed at them or at other employees.
Now that you know the prejudice of being rude, you must be willing to review your behavior. In short, Christine Porath says, you are always in front of some jury. In every interaction, you have a choice: Do you want to lift people up or hold them down?
If you think it’s time to develop your team management and your relationship with your team, meet Runrun.it. The online tool adopted by more than 100,000 companies in the world, able to make dialogue more transparent, cut off informal demands and recognize the team for its productivity and interaction. Want to see how? Try Runrun.it for free.
