Let's restore civil recourse

A lawyer friend, involved in negotiations to sell a small business, told me about a deal that blew up because of rudeness. • What is happening to civility?

Have the polarizing pundits on radio and TV and the anonymous posters on the Internet threatened civil discourse to the point of extinction?

The lawyer, representing an "old-school" sort, was stunned by the cocky, disrespectful behavior of the people on the other side of the negotiation.

From major real estate deals to individual job losses, we're hearing more tales of business gone awry because of people who were too difficult to get along with.

And, unfortunately, many of those who are most adamant, most entrenched in the rightness of their views, are also the most factually wrong.

They can't and won't see it, though. And when there's no civil sharing of opinions, there's no compromise or conciliation. Labels and name-calling replace discussion.

I recently wrote a careers column about how employers test for "emotional intelligence" through "behavioral" interviewing. That's when interviewers ask applicants to describe how they handled a specific situation in the past. The technique hinges on the belief that past actions are the best predictors of future behavior.

The column sparked a call from a job hunter who said that when he encounters such questions in interviews, he turns the table on the interviewer, asks him to answer the same question, and/or leaves the interview.

That's a ticket to long-term unemployment, I told him — regardless of what you think of behavioral interviewing.

It's not uncommon to punch through my voice mail messages and hear epithets in reaction to a column, or even a single word or isolated sentence.

Is it surprising that those messages are left at times when the caller is sure I won't be at my desk? And that's a shame, because I've found that whether on the phone or in e-mail, a real give-and-take conversation often gravitates toward common ground, if not a scintilla of mutual respect.

We might never end up in a campfire sing-along. But it is possible to have a civil exchange of opinions — and to represent clients in adversarial deals — without arrogance, rudeness or uninformed intractability.

Diane Stafford is the workplace and careers columnist at the Kansas City Star.