I think culture is governed by how team members respond when minor behavioural issues emerge.
Every team member, on occasion, will lose their cool, interrupt, dismiss an idea, talk down to someone, be overly dogmatic, use sarcasm or simply get their tone wrong.
That does not suddenly make them a “disrespectful person” ie. full of disrespect.
It means their level of disrespect has increased for that moment.
This is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with words like “respectful” or “disrespectful“. They turn something that exists on a gradient into a category.
I also struggle with the idea that we somehow accumulate “respect”, as though we can measure how much of it someone possesses.
My view is almost the reverse.
Respect is the default, like the air that we breathe. Disrespect is the variable or pollution.
I don’t need to become “more respectful”. I need to become less disrespectful, remove any impurities from the air.
Perhaps respect is simply what remains as we progressively identify and remove disrespect from our behaviour.
I believe that this distinction matters in workplace culture.
If we reserve the word disrespectful for behaviour serious enough to deserve the label, we can easily overlook the dozens of smaller amounts of disrespect occurring every day: the eye-roll, interruption, dismissive response, impatient tone or unnecessary put-down, etc. etc.
They may seem too small to address.
Until they accumulate. You know the story; leaving the top off the toothpaste too many times.
So perhaps one blind spot in workplace relations is that we ask people to “be respectful” while providing very little process for identifying and correcting minor disrespecting incidents.
A healthy culture may therefore not be one where everyone is always respectful.
It may be one where small amounts of disrespect can be noticed, addressed, objected to and corrected quickly, proportionately and without turning every minor lapse into a moral judgement.
So, maybe respect is the baseline, culture by default and revealed by what happens when we depart from it.
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