“Assume good intent.” I’m sure most of you have heard that phrase before and some of you may have even adopted it as a rule in your life. I’m not going to tell you it’s a wrong way to live, but I do want to offer up a bit of critical analysis on how it might end up doing more harm than good in certain situations.
During my years in Corporate America, one constant that I’ve found is that wherever you have groups of diverse individuals, there will be conflict. Most workplaces strive to reduce interpersonal conflict, through codes of conduct, informal agreements, or even group workshops. One of the teams I worked on made an attempt to address their history of conflict by creating a set of team commitments – “assume positive intent” was included on the list. While this was written out explicitly, it had always been an implicit expectation at most companies I worked for.
I could never really put into words why it didn’t sit well with me. Because on the surface level, it seems like the right attitude to have. Approach interactions assuming everyone is on the same team and wants what it best for the group. But the way it was stated always made me feel like it was putting the responsibility on the receiving party to “just get over it” or “let it roll off your back.” Again, generally good skills to have in the workplace. But ultimately I felt like it was still missing the root cause of why people sometimes walked away with hurt feelings in certain situations.
And then I started hearing people use the phrase “impact over intent” and I realized that’s what I’ve always felt was missing in these corporate mantras of “assume good intent.” There are times when we need to hold people accountable for their impact rather than making the recipient accountable for their reaction. The commonly used analogy is Mary stepping on Alex’s foot and apologizing even though she didn’t mean to. She is recognizing that her unintentional actions caused harm.
This is certainly not a new concept. In fact, as I was thinking about writing this post I googled “harmful good intentions” and a ton of content came up. I was particularly struck by this blog post* that discusses the harm that these kinds of workplace agreements can have on diversity and inclusion efforts. The author does a great job of expanding on the “stepping on the foot” analogy, stating that groups with a history of discrimination have been stepped on day after day and policies to assume good intent put them in a position where they have to ignore the repeated harm because people didn’t mean to step on them. And that if they call out the harmful actions of people around them, they are subject to a code of conduct that requires them to assume their peers meant no harm. It gives them little to no recourse for correcting bad behavior.
I think back to how often workplace relationships could have been mended or even avoided breaking in the first place if acknowledging the impact of words and actions was placed above defending intentions. Would everyone be best friends? No, of course not. But I think a lot of hurt would have been lessened.
All this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t still assume good intent as a starting place. The continuation of the title quote from Camus is “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.” I really do think for the most part people are not acting or speaking with malice, more often than not it’s carelessness or a misunderstanding of how they affect others . But I think there’s a lot more emphasis that could be placed on impact over intent. I always say that words mean something. And if we start to explicitly change how we talk about interactions I think it would start to change how those interactions happen as well.
*disclaimer: I cannot vouch for anything else on that website, I only read the one blog post and liked it. Upon initial glance it looks like there’s some interesting content to dig into.
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