Peace work How can your job relate to world peace? Just about every place you turn there are prospects for violence, so you don’t have to go far to be a peacemaker. You can wage peace on the job. Hopefully you’ll never experience it yourself, but violence lurks in every workplace. It’s a $4 billion a year problem in North America, producing half a dozen homicides each month. If you become a manager of any kind you will have plenty of opportunities to wage peace. You can distinguish your managerial style by watching for danger areas or “triggers” that can lead to workplace violence (such as job loss or demotion; problems at home; romantic obsession with a co-worker; or increased substance abuse). Managers spend an average of 15 percent of their time resolving staff conflicts. The lazy ones turn their heads and either let staff battle it out themselves or let them internalize their frustrations (and maybe take it out on their families when they get home). More effective is to cultivate teamwork and delegate with clarity. Ensuring that each person’s work is properly integrated and interrelated with the work of others sends a message of respect for each person’s contribution. That not only reduces strife in the workplace, but also creates synergy and ends up being good management. Interesting, isn’t it, that something as formulaic as management style can make a difference to peace. Wherever humans work together there’s a chance of friction. Even something as simple as answering the phone can bring you into conflict. One savvy office
receptionist who gets at least one angry phone call a day relies on a verse from the Bible — “A soft answer turns away wrath” (Prov. 15:1). She defuses seething callers by hearing them out, not leaving them on hold, not being defensive, not passing the buck, and making sure someone follows up. “Unseen ministers” can bring the leaven of peace to the world at their doorstep. Valerie works as a liaison between the livestock industry and consumers. Among her tasks is to encourage cooperation as competing interest groups lobby for their approaches to the environment. No one thinks of her as a “peacemaker,” but her goal is to bring warring sides closer together and work towards amicable solutions. Byron toils behind the scenes for a regulatory agency ironing out wrinkles in a water agreement between the United States and Canada. The work he does is paving the way for greater neighborliness in the future. In any job, you’ll be part of a working community where you can build relationships of trust and integrity that promote peace. Excerpted from You’re Hired! Looking for work in all the right places, a career guide from MEDA. Available for free download at www.meda.org
There’s the rub Steve Jobs got an early business lesson from a neighbor’s rock tumbler. “Get some stones,” the neighbor told him one day. Young Steve complied, and brought back a handful of jagged stones which the neighbor placed in the tumbler along with some grit. He turned on the machine and let it run. The next day he showed the result. The rough-edge rocks had rolled and rubbed each other smooth, producing beautiful polished specimens that looked like gems. The young computer genius gained a metaphor suggesting how great products are made. Organize a team of highly talented people, let them work closely together, bump up against each other, argue (maybe even fight) and make noise. Over time they will polish each other and polish their ideas and “what comes out are these beautiful stones.”
The Marketplace July August 2014
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