TAKEAWAYS FROM MASTERING CIVILITY

Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace By Christine Porath Grand Central Publishing 240 pp; $32.50

Mastering Civility might sound more like a handbook for baby’s first cotillion than a business professional’s next pocket read, but Georgetown management professor Christine Porath’s manifesto offers several simple ways the resident cubicle keener can make this year their most courteous – and thereby successful – yet. Here are your takeaways: 1 Get what you give: Civility, by Porath’s definition, isn’t a passive tolerance of behaviour around you. Instead, to be civil is to try, using positive gestures of “respect, dignity, courtesy, or kindness.” So, dear reader, next round’s on you? 2 Cue it up: Porath uses a quick self- test to determine which civil behaviours best align with her definition so that she can more actively embody them, asking: Who do I want to be? It’s an easy cue for self- reflection that Porath says can improve overall mindfulness of civility, so we can better access the practice in routine conversation. 3 Effective inflection: The tone others use accounts for a whopping 38 percent of what we process from conversation. Turns out they can’t entirely be blamed for it, either: by the time we reach seven months old, the part of our brain responsible for reading our own auditory information and distinguishing it from others diminishes significantly. In other words, how we hear our own voice can differ f rom the way others do. This could be very good or very bad news for anybody else whose palms sweat at the thought of recording their next voicemail message. 4 All in the wrist: Faculty at a university where Porath worked developed a method of quietly calling out incivility during staff meetings by employing a unique set of hand signals. Ouch. 5 Snakes and Leaders: Playing games with others helps our brains develop mental models of how other people feel emotion and express intention, increasing our awareness of their overall emotional state, which becomes useful for gauging their response to our civility (or incivility) dayto-day. 6 Chivalry i sn’ t dead: But it isn’t always civil, either. Turns out men and women are equally prone to tell white lies to shield women from unpleasant news in the workplace. Sounds nice, but the intent can backfire long-term: welcome or not, meaningful feedback is key to professional development, and Porath plants this practice alongside other examples of well- meaning but unwitting board room incivility.