Several years ago, I read The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Stanford Professor Robert Sutton. At the time, I was President of Monks’ Bread, an Upstate, New York baking company and subsidiary of a parent company AOTG. As an organisation, we were in a transformation era. The situation the family-owned business was experiencing its first non-family key managers and struggling to adjust. The objective was for management to convince owners to disengage from the company operations, and spend more time working on the business from the boardroom than the plant floor. In times of change, bad behaviours often get worse before better, and incivility can take over even the best of organisations.
As leader, I was faced with leading a transformation that required great civility. After 10 years in that role, I have moved on to an executive role in a much larger Sydney, Australia family-owned business in, you guessed it, an aging generation of owners in transformation. This time around, through Wharton’s Adam Grant, I became aware of the work of Christine Porath from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She is the leader is workplace civility research and consulting.
In one of her articles, she shares a great model for a code of workplace civility worked out at an Orange County, California location of the Bryan Cave Law firm. I think this is a great model for a simple code of workplace civility. Let’s eliminate rudeness in our organisations by developing our own codes of civility for the workplace. The process Porath used in the law firm (which by the way are not known for being civil workplaces), was:
1. An exercise to define collective norms. Asked employees: “Who do you want to be?”
2. Ask what norms were right for their organization.
3. Define rules for which you are willing to hold one another accountable.
4. These become a “civility code,” to display and use as boundaries to be a great place to work.
Bryan Cave’s Code of Civility
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We greet and acknowledge each other.
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We say please and thank you.
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We treat each other equally and with respect, no matter the conditions.
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We acknowledge the impact of our behavior on others.
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We welcome feedback from each other.
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We are approachable.
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We are direct, sensitive, and honest.
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We acknowledge the contributions of others.
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We respect each other’s time commitments.
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We address incivility.