Promoting Civility Vs Addressing Incivility: A Smoke Detector Approach to Preventing Toxic Conflict

Most psychological safety experts emphasize promoting civility in workplace teams as the foundation for a healthy and productive environment. They focus on fostering respect, kindness, and understanding. However, in my opinion, promoting a culture of civility is complex, requires leaders to be ideal role models, and is time-consuming and expensive. I believe a more proactive approach is to detect, address, and resolve minor heated spats that can occur during disagreements or difficult conversations. We suggest using a well-designed intervention that empowers team members to address incivility in real-time and directly—before they escalate into more serious toxic conflicts.

In most organizations, the approach to incivility tends to have two main steps:

• First, the leader is specifically encouraged to be the ideal role model for civility and use expensive external consultants facilitating training programs and codes of conduct.

Then, when more serious bullying, harassment or conflict eventually emerges, it triggers the second step:

• A formal time-consuming and expensive conflict resolution process that typically involves HR or external mediators. While these approaches can be effective, they often only deal with issues once they’ve already escalated to a problematic level.

SpatzAI helps team members to intervene before escalation becomes a concern, much like a smoke detector alerts to danger before a fire starts or gets out of control, preventing greater damage. By providing every team member with a well-designed and effective intervention toolkit, SpatzAI helps individuals address minor acts of incivility as soon as they arise. The goal is to address any minor untoward behavior early on, creating an environment where people feel safe to object and discuss any minor infringements openly, without letting them build into major disputes or toxic conflicts. This approach reduces the need for formal conflict resolution and ensures civility becomes a shared responsibility within teams, rather than a top-down leadership initiative.

Naturally, just like a smoke detector, there can be occasional false alarms. SpatzAI addresses this by using the SpatzAI Team-Assist Review (STAR) platform to objectively determine whether there was truly an issue that needed intervention.

With SpatzAI, the intervention is immediate, and empowering, and helps to create a healthier team environment and dynamic from the outset—an approach that is not just reactive but transformative in addressing the root of incivility before it grows into something more harmful.