Have We Become Too Easily Offended at Work?

Years ago, while working in Italy, I remember having lunch with an American executive and several Italian colleagues. After a few minutes of casual conversation, the American began talking about work and spent much of the lunch discussing projects, deadlines, and business issues. Nothing he said was inappropriate and, from his perspective, he was probably being engaged and professional. Yet afterward, some of the Italian colleagues described him as distant, overly transactional, and almost uninterested in them as people.

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Neither interpretation was unreasonable. They were simply applying different assumptions about what a relationship between colleagues should look like.

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Anyone who has worked across cultures will recognize some version of this experience. Directness can be interpreted as aggression, informality as lack of respect, silence as disengagement, and questions intended to show interest can sometimes feel intrusive. We interpret other people's behavior through our own cultural expectations, often without realizing that those expectations are cultural at all.

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If these misunderstandings are an inevitable part of working across cultures, then the responsibility for navigating them cannot rest entirely with the person who causes the offense. Of course, we should become more aware of how our words and behaviors affect others. But the person on the receiving end also has a role: to remain curious about intent, recognize that different cultural norms may be at play, and resist turning every uncomfortable interaction into a judgment about the other person.

 

This makes me wonder whether, in our efforts to create more respectful workplaces, we have focused disproportionately on teaching people how not to offend, while paying less attention to an equally important capability: learning how to respond when we feel offended.

 

This does not mean that intent is all that matters. Saying “I didn't mean to offend you” does not erase the impact of what was said. Discriminatory, demeaning, or deliberately disrespectful behavior should not be excused as cultural difference. But neither should impact automatically determine intent. There is a large territory between genuine mistreatment and perfect interpersonal comfort, and much of working across cultures happens there.

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"Perhaps we need to become a little harder to offend without becoming less sensitive to others."

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Some of the strongest multicultural teams I have worked with were not teams in which nobody ever offended anyone. They were teams in which people had enough trust to say, “That didn't sit well with me,” and enough generosity on the other side to listen without immediately becoming defensive.

Perhaps that is one of the less discussed dimensions of intercultural competence. It is not only learning how our behavior affects others.

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It is also learning how to interpret the behavior of others before judging their intentions.