Manila, 4 January 2024 — On the rise of intolerance and how we can respond.

Story

It happened last month. In a podcast on what we can learn next from science during the holidays, Kenneth Cukier, a deputy executive editor at The Economist, shared his concern about the rise of intolerance in society. “The idea that very basic agreements on how we treat each other, just to get on, seem to have frayed and broken down,” led Cuvier to search for fundamentally different approaches to understanding our culture and repairing society. “To build it back up again,” he emphasized, “because we need that.” The book that inspired him takes a scientific new look at culture in society: A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going, by Michael Muthukrishna, an associate professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics. As Cukier explained, “Culture is not seen, you have to deliberately stop and see it,” and that’s what the book helped him to do.

Cukier is right. We don’t need to look very far to see the rise of intolerance in society around us. It is evident in how many people we meet or read about display prejudice, discriminatory behavior, closed-mindedness, and a reduced willingness to engage with diverse perspectives or cultures. Last month, teachers explained to me how the rise of intolerance in schools is endangering a safe and collaborative learning environment for students. Intolerance may be expressed in silent, verbal, or physical acts against those perceived as different, fostering an environment of division and hostility, including bullying. Zooming out to the national level, nation-state intolerance, as the media keep reminding us, can open the door to political tensions and to cold and even hot wars when there is a failure to manage and reverse intolerance among the parties. Closer to home, and often more quietly, intolerance is on the rise in many workplaces where people are too busy on their phones and social media echo chambers to “stop and see” what intolerance is and how it affects them.

One of the arenas where the rise of intolerance plays out is the ubiquitous lack of new cultures for collaboration across the generations. In a global study by Deloitte, a consultancy, only 6 percent of organizations reported that their executives were equipped to handle a multigenerational workplace. That should make us stop and see what’s going on. Last month, I listened to a highly motivated Gen Z leader who felt tired of being excluded by executives as a youth and a leader ‘in the future.’ Of two highly driven Gen Y millennials I listened to, one was frustrated about a lack of recognition by Gen X bosses for her leadership work, while the other was dismissive about Boomer executives who, she felt, were not up to scratch in the way they mentored Gen Ys and Gen Zs. Meanwhile, a highly driven Gen X manager was scratching his head about finding effective ways to engage colleagues across generational lines, and an enlightened, and recently retired, Boomer CEO sighed in frustration, wishing that different generations would ‘just stop to really listen’ to each other. As leaders, then, how should we address the rise of intolerance as we work to transform workplace cultures and lift positivity, purpose, and performance?

Challenge

What Cukier shared resonated with me. The rise of intolerance starts in mindsets and shows up in behaviors. We can choose to deliberately ‘stop and see’ this in order to make any positive change. That requires self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-regulation. Rather than just continuing to complain about intolerance in others and what that does to our world, we can also cultivate a deliberate practice of intolerance to our own ignorance and indifference, and choose instead to take informed and skillful actions that repair society and “build it back up again” as Cukier said, starting in our workplaces.

After examining our own mindsets and behaviors, the next part of our challenge to address rising intolerance is reaching out to look for partners who are interested in collaborating with us. What can help us here is the research on collective intelligence by Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and one of Muthukrishna’s mentors in writing his book. “It’s better to be social than to be smart,” is a motto from Henrich’s work. Instead of seeking to become the expert who knows it all, which can easily aggravate intolerance, looking for the collective intelligence in our workplaces and societies is a better strategy. That includes the collective intelligence we can find in our workplaces by engaging and involving all four generations.

In the past week, I received two further inspirations about the prospects of a cross-generational (crossgen) collaborative approach to combat the rise of intolerance. One came from Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, who reminded a visiting British prime minister that “hope survives wherever people come together.” The second piece of good news came from Abby Bertics, a science correspondent who recently joined The Economist team. She mentioned how humans are prone to “hallucinate boundaries that are not there,” suggesting that the social gaps we see in our minds and feel in our emotions, including those between different generations in the workplace, might well seem bigger than they actually are.

Question

From my experience in coaching leaders, an important aspect of leadership that I discovered is that it happens in relationships and conversations. It’s a contact sport, as is often said. In that respect, how we combat the rise of intolerance in our societies and workplaces comes down to how we learn to connect with people, understand where they’re at and take into account their perspectives, and then engage and build trust. Any act of leadership will start with the behavior of connecting properly, and that includes active listening.

Like Kenneth Cukier, I feel deeply concerned with the rise of intolerance in society we see around us, and how that also shows up in many schools and workplaces today. To understand this and do something about it, we need to deliberately stop, see, and listen. Only then can we hope to find the collective intelligence in people of different generations (and across other divides too) that will allow us to move forward together in better ways that show leadership in character, values, and a mindset for openness and innovation. 

That explains why I am passionate about the new leadership challenge we are launching to kick off the new year this week. It’s a challenge where you get hands-on practice to create a significant positive change in your workplace in only 10 weeks—by collaborating with three colleagues you invite from different generations. We call it The Crossgen Challenge and it’s about coming together to discover new ways of collaborating and becoming Crossgen Leaders, supported by a cross-generational pair of coaches: Vanh Mixap (Gen Y Millennial) and myself (Boomer). My question this week is, therefore, simply this: are you up for a challenge to start the new year with new leadership? If so, come join us in The Crossgen Challenge. Registration closes soon, so be quick. When you subscribe you also receive access to our learning resources on the 12 Effective Leadership Behaviors. See you soon inside!