From the course: Difficult Conversations: Talking about Race at Work
The alluring trap of intent
From the course: Difficult Conversations: Talking about Race at Work
The alluring trap of intent
- When it comes to these difficult conversations, it's going to be extremely tempting to try to figure out what the person's intent was. Why did they say that? Why did they do that? And that's problematic because it leads to a very unproductive dialogue, because you're going to try to accuse them of doing something with intent. They're going to say they did not intend to do that. And now we reach a stalemate, which doesn't get us the outcome that we want. And so a simple trick that you can use is giving them the benefit of the doubt. Now, listen, I'm not saying that we don't hold people accountable. We're not giving them a pass. We're still going to hold them accountable. But what we're doing is we're freeing ourself from the need to be the mind police. Now we can just focus on the actions that somebody took and the impact that it had. And that's it, because ultimately what we want to do is change behavior. So let's focus on that behavior, and it makes it a lot easier to have a productive dialogue.
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