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Political correctness is killing this country, or so I’ve heard.

What I haven’t heard is a clear, crisp definition of what the phrase political correctness means.

When I first heard it I was pretty clear on the concept: It meant I couldn’t tell Polish or Italian jokes anymore. This was back in high school, where my clarity about the concept came courtesy of a much larger and more muscular Polish acquaintance who made certain I understood his point, reinforced by a seriously cute Italian girl who explained that I’d just reduced my chances of dating her to the sort of number mathematicians use negative exponents to express.

Along with the recognition that racially-and ethnically-oriented jokes were in bad taste came an increasingly widespread recognition that the extensive and colorful variety of racial and ethnic pejoratives that had been in common use, and the various stereotypes that had accompanied them, were no longer to be uttered in polite company either.

As my own heritage has in the past been used as a verb meaning “to negotiate beyond the point of reasonableness” — a stereotype I’ve often wished was more accurate when negotiating compensation and consulting rates, even while finding it offensive when spoken aloud — I long-ago made my peace with political correctness.

My perspective is, I recognize, less than universally shared — a situation I always find puzzling. In this case I’ve often wondered if the main problem is one of pronunciation: It should be spoken as “Polite-ical correctness.”

The problem, friends and acquaintances have explained to me, is that the desire to avoid offending anyone has been taken off a cliff, as in the example of calling people who are particularly short in stature “vertically challenged.”

Which leads in turn to the question, why would you want to call attention to someone’s past-two-standard-deviations stature? If they suffered from some other unusual size characteristic … say, unusually small hands … would you … oh, wait. Never mind. We crossed that boundary a couple of months ago.

None of this would be in bounds for Keep the Joint Running were it not for the nature of the most recent attempts to make political correctness socially incorrect.

Which is that right now, among some members of the political (as opposed to the polite-ical) class, political correctness means being forbidden to attach bigoted and factually incorrect stereotypes to all Muslims of all stripes everywhere in the world.

And, for that matter, to all Sikhs as well, because many of those who complain about political correctness aren’t all that well-informed, not only about Islam but also about what it means to wear a turban.

This is a legitimate KJR topic because, in your role as business or IT leader, you’re likely to hear colleagues emulating their favorite political personage or pundit, expounding loudly, unfavorably and in public about Muslims.

Which, whether they realize it or not, insults the DBA, developer, or sysadmin in the next cubicle. One of those who feels offended might report to you. If so, you have a legal responsibility to make sure they don’t work in a threatening and harassing environment.

Depending on your personal moral code, even without HR’s dictates you might figure you have a responsibility to help out someone who’s on the receiving end of verbal bullying, because being a bystander in a situation like this is the sort of passive behavior that won’t make you proud of yourself when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

More important than this: Why would you want to let some uninformed lout spew garbage that drives good employees to work for a competitor? We’re all in a fight for talent. That being the case, fight to win.

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions we hold back, for no other reason than that we aren’t sure what to say in embarrassing circumstances like these. If that’s what’s troubling you, be troubled no more.

I recommend starting by looking at the offending party with a sour expression and a don’t-look-away gaze that’s just short of a stare. When you’re sure you have their attention, say, “What you’re saying is offensive and uninformed. You’re welcome to your opinion, but you aren’t welcome to share it here. What you’re doing is a firing offense, so we’re both better off if you button it right now. Save it for a bar after you’ve left the office. People in bars expect to hear folks who have had a few too many expressing their ignorance in loud voices.”

Well, okay, maybe that isn’t the best way to handle it.

Tempting though.

Who’s your boss?

Your boss is whoever assigns you work.

Whoever the org chart says you report to isn’t just free to assign work to you. That’s their job description.

But many of us let colleagues be our bosses too. After your official boss has already given you enough work to keep you busy, these coworkers ask you to do them a favor, which as a practical matter means adding their favors to your already overstuffed inbox.

But the problem isn’t your infringing colleagues themselves. If it was, you’d just say no and that would put an end to it.

Nor is it a character flaw on your part – an insufficiently durable spine.

It isn’t a failure to maintain a catalog of clever comebacks either. Sure, we all wish we were snappy answerers. But in most business cultures, sharp comebacks accomplish little, other than branding you as an unpleasant person.

The problem is deeper. It’s the collection of social norms that makes turning a colleague down difficult. Faced with these norms you need … call them “counter-norms” to get you through the ordeal.

The counter-norm is more than a comeback, and more even than comebacks plus comebacks to comebacks. It’s a dialog architecture, that consists of four parts: diplomacy, your façade, an offloaded solution, and the big close. In more depth:

Diplomacy: That diplomacy matters is hardly a new thought. It’s how to avoid gaining a reputation as an unpleasant person. And while it’s been described as knowing to say “Nice doggie!” while searching for a rock, what it mostly entails is maintaining the line that separates empathy from agreement.

Façade: Your façade is your poker face. It’s the self-control that gives you an expression and body language that conceal your desire to perform an anesthetic-free splenectomy, right now and right here in the cube farm.

Offloaded solution: Just saying no, to quote Nancy Reagan speaking in a different context, doesn’t work. It sounds rude to our own ears, let alone those belonging to the person you’re turning down and everyone else in earshot. “No” with a rationale is a whole lot gentler on the diplomacy scale.

But rationales tend to be event-driven and short-lived. Claims of excessive business fall into this category. A rationale gets you off the hook temporarily, but tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that you’ll find yourself right back where you started, searching for another fresh, new, and plausible rationale.

You need something more durable, even in the face of well-rehearsed comebacks. That’s where “offloaded solutions” – solutions that solve your colleague’s problem without your involvement – come into play.

Here’s what an offloaded solution looks like when released into the wild:

A colleague and teammate asks if you can put a quick spreadsheet together for them. You respond with a rationale: “I just can’t right now. I already have a full plate plus a list of back-burner items that need my attention.”

But your colleague plays this game to win. They’re better at it than you are. They respond, “Please? You’re good at Excel – this won’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

It’s a one-two punch – a compliment, coupled with rationale-rejection. Offer another rationale and your rationales become excuses – you’re still stuck, and the dialog has damaged your image as well.

Compare this outcome to what you get with an offloaded solution:

“Ten or fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes more than I can give you. Here’s what I recommend: Our on-line training includes some very good Excel courses. Take a couple of them, then have a whack at putting together your own solution. Email it to me, along with a written account of the problem you’re trying to solve and I’ll take a look.”

“This way you won’t only get the spreadsheet you need, but all the spreadsheets you’ll need in the future, too.”

Big close: This is what blocks your interlocutor from continuing to pester you. A good general-purpose example:

“And now I really have to get back to what I was working on. Good luck with the on-line training.” Then swivel your chair back to your keyboard, dismissing your colleague from the fray without ever feeling or looking like a bad person.

Bob’s last word: This isn’t all that different from HBR’s famous “Who’s Got the Monkey” article, except that the HBR article’s focus was keeping delegated tasks delegated.

That’s important, too, but in the absence of techniques it’s one of those things that’s easier to say than to do.

Bob’s sales pitch: I just know you know people who know people, all of whom should know about KJR if they don’t already. Forward your favorites to them, and encourage them to subscribe, too.

It’s a good way to establish yourself as a thought leader.

Now showing on CIO.com: A shot across the bow of XaaS, which, for unaccountable reasons stands for “Everything as a Service,” even though “Everything doesn’t start with an “X” and XaaS doesn’t include Everything.

Take a look at “XaaS isn’t everything — and it isn’t serviceable.”

ManagementSpeak: We need to reset their expectations.
Translation: We need to reduce what they get from us while making them think nothing has changed.
IS Survivalist James Tomascak resets our expectations about how to translate euphemisms.