How much of it should we have? My intuition would shoot from the hip with an immediate “Zero!”. But does that really help? Does it make the situation better.”?
True enough, as a company policy, zero tolerance could work, depending how you define intolerance. Wikipedia defines it as unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behaviour that differ from one’s own (Let’s ignore the food intolerance for a moment. I have views on that but they have little to do with mental well-being).
You can imagine that, as an organisation you want your policy to read that you have zero tolerance for this. But there is a better way to deal with this. To understand this, let’s first look at the corporate culture in the US or Australia. There I have first hand experienced how intelligent and experienced people as a result of well meant actions or comments, found themselves involved in grievance procedures. The system has been set up in such a way that the slight discomfort that someone experiences, can be tagged to a comment or action. Institutionalising such procedures in itself is not wrong. It is the assessment of the cases where things may go astray.
In fear of lawsuits, negative publicity or regulatory slaps on the wrist, companies at times tend to side with the plaintiff, especially if they are from, what is labeled as “vulnerable” group. This in turn creates a culture of fear; fear to communicate, fear to explore and innovate, fear to challenge.
The opposite is also true; too much tolerance to intolerance will lead to convergence to dominant views, dominant speech, or even dominant race, religion, educational background etc.
Where companies manage to strike the right balance, the rewards are certainly there. Despite having a heavy handed legal system when it comes to discrimination and lack of inclusion, the US still has some of the most invocative companies in the world.
What are the benefits of tolerating a certain amount of intolerance? In my view the answer is found in the way human brain work and human tongues communicate. There are many researches around whether fear of what is different is nature or nurture. I read some that argue one way or the other, but I will not summarise them here. Rather, I personally rely on the reasoning that, in mankind’s early days, anything that looked unfamiliar was probably a threat to your life. This kind of prehistoric programming is still very visible in our brain and it will become more prevalent when we slip into “survival-mode” which is triggered by the sympathetic part of our nervous system.
In brief for the science nerds like me; the sympathetic part of our nervous system in survival-mode gets triggered when there is a perceived threat that is dented serious enough, and it will lead to a fight or fight response. The counterparty to this is the para-sympathetic part of the nervous system, which prompts us to stay calm or, if the threat is perceived so great that both fight and flight are considered futile, to freeze. As always, I add a disclaimer here that I am in no means a neurologist and these are my lay interpretations of a very complex matter. If there are specialists in this field that are now starting to cringe, I would really appreciate corrections of my interpretation in the comment section.
In short, it is for most of us easy to recognise this fight, flight and even freeze response (except for those of us well advanced into mindfulness training) and we can probably recall recent situations where we have displayed some of this behaviour, much to the dismay of the people around us. We scream at people who cut in front of us in the line, we get into an argument with that coworker that stole our idea or even our promotion. Often, we do this without checking with that part whether there was a reasonable explanation for their behaviour. We assume a threat and act according to our survival-mode programming. We have become the intolerant one.
Not for nothing, in a course on positive intelligence, which I am currently following, our biggest saboteur is the Judge, the master saboteur, who is quick to draw a verdict about someone’s behaviour based on assumed drivers of that behaviour.
As a result of such judgmental and damaging responses, the relationship turns sour and, in a work situation, productivity suffers. But every now and then, our own intolerance is met with tolerance. Tolerance for our intolerance. The person at the receiving end of our intolerance manages to see the situation from our side, looks through the intolerance to see the person behind it being by and large a good person. Relationship breakdown averted and (often) foundations laid for much stronger ones.
So in a nutshell, the world is a much better place with some practical tolerance for intolerance. True enough, the policy should probably aspirationally read zero tolerance, and having tolerance for intolerance needs proper boundary setting in each relationship. But we are human beings and as such almost all of us have saboteurs, prompting the occasional intolerant response. We can’t avoid that in the people around us.
All we can do is train ourselves to recognise our own saboteurs and, with grace and empathy, to build in some tolerance for intolerance, within the clear boundaries that we have set for ourselves and have communicated to the people around us.
