"Like Gandhi, [Thomas Edison] believed that 'Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.'" - Michael Gelb
Non-violence in the workplace includes the way we choose to attack or respect another person's thoughts when expressing ourselves. I've been involved with consensus-building for a group of a dozen supervisors, supervising 70 people, trying to "calibrate" performance ratings. At its best, these kinds of exercises are like religious summits, where perfectly clear-headed people hold valid yet opposing views strongly. Further, since this group doesn't make widgets but instead does a variety of tasks foreign to many of the other supervisors, the imprecision of it all generates quite a bit of natural tension. Focus on the common goal of reasonable expense management slips the mind easily. "Violent" statements like "I have a hard time believing..." trickle out instead of "What do you think about..."
Like Edison said, "If we all try to carry out the Golden Rule in this life we have little to fear... no matter what our belief may be."
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