“Assume Positive Intent”, I assume, is a concept that was created with positive intent (see what I did there?).
It is one of those rules that, on the face of it, sounds completely reasonable and can be used to great effect. In distributed companies or communities where a lot of communication is written, it can be a very good rule of thumb. In written communication especially, it’s easy to assume the tone is more cold than it was actually meant to be, and by adopting the practice of always assuming the writer meant well, you can avoid escalations.
That sounds great on the face of it, but if you let it completely permeate your culture and policy, you might actually be creating a more toxic environment.
Well-meaning people can easily benefit from the practice of being given the benefit of the doubt with their writing, but when your team by default assumes positive intent, you are also unwittingly creating an environment where assholes can thrive. I I often see executives practice this antipattern. They’ll say something kind of inflammatory and when they’re called out for it, they’ll make an appeal to assume positive intent on their part. It weaponizes tolerance. If your company or community is a big proponent of assuming positive intent, keep a close eye on who is benefiting from that. And perhaps more importantly, ask yourself if there is an equal emphasis on being kind in communications. “Assume positive intent” by itself can create a safe space for jerks, but “assume positive intent” paired with encouraging and rewarding kindness can help ensure that you’re creating an environment that is not toxic.
Second, and this I think is one gets a little hairier, is in who we ask to assume positive intent.
Suppose we have two colleagues, one male, one female, named Jens and Sabine. They’re peers, but Jens tends to have an easier go of things compared to Sabine. Their skills are comparable, but Sabine routinely gets interrupted during meetings, and gets negative remarks in her reviews for instances when she’s assertive, whereas Jens’s assertiveness got him noticed earlier in his career and promoted quickly.
Jens and Sabine are having a discussion about how to best move forward with a project, and as they are expressing their differing opinions. Jens is immediately rather dismissive of Sabine’s proposal, and pretty quickly the chat is getting a bit heated. At one point Sabine, having been dismissed one too many times by Jens, makes a salty remark in Slack. Jens makes a formal complaint.
Sabine is taken aside by her manager who emphasizes the company’s culture of “assume positive intent” and is asked to apologize for the remark since Jens wasn’t explicitly saying anything inflammatory. She gets moved off of the project. Interestingly, Jens was never asked to assume positive intent on Sabine’s part when she made the salty remark.
To assume positive intent in practice requires that you’re doing so from a place of feeling psychologically safe. If you ask two people to assume positive intent from one another, but one person routinely lives with a constant baseline level of harassment in their life, setting this expectation is being burdensome on that person in a way it’s not burdening someone who hasn’t had those experiences.
If a woman in a bar hears her hundredth crass pickup line from a man, many of whom have gotten a little aggressive with her in the past, you can’t reasonably expect her to assume positive intent the way that you expect a man getting a genuine and polite compliment from a woman to.
If you’re setting policy, “assume positive intent” is a good guideline for communication, but you shouldn’t codify it into your policy, because it’s not a policy that treats different members of your team equitably.
Leave a Reply