Defacing The Enemy

Standing in front of a room of managers and team leaders, I ask an important question. “In Australia, when we don’t like someone in our workplace, what do we normally do to them?” 


Regardless of the environment (government or private) the answer is always the same. “We isolate them.” Having posed this question to hundreds of workgroups over the last six years, not even one workgroup has answered differently. Here we are, adults acting like bullying school children. It's a basic human need to feel we belong, to feel valued. So how can we justify inflicting the hurt of isolation? Part of the answer may lie in a strategy soldiers use to justify the killing of fellow human beings. 


The military call it ‘defacing the enemy’.


If someone does not have a face, then they're not like us. They don't belong. They're aliens and have no right to be here. No right to live. A dramatic comparison you're thinking? Not really. Ask someone who has been isolated, ridiculed and made to feel worth-less. It's like being invisible, like being a ghost. It's like they don't have a face. It's not only in the workplace people need to feel they belong.

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