Maybe Your Colleagues Aren't Ruder—Maybe They're Finally Talking

Recent data says most people think their coworkers are ruder now than before the pandemic. About 25% of workers say they've been ignored or had their judgment questioned by colleagues.

That sounds bad. But I'm not sure it is.

Here's a different read: what we're calling "incivility" might actually be more open debate. The kind of debate that's been missing from most teams for years.

I've run dozens of team effectiveness workshops. Conflict comes up every single time. Not because teams have too much of it—because they have too little.

Pat Lencioni's "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" makes conflict a core ingredient, not a problem to solve. The logic is simple: any time you have more than one person in a room, you have different knowledge, different experience, different perspectives. If everyone just nods at the first idea, all that value gets wasted.

The only way to use it? People have to actually say what they think.

That means disagreement. Sometimes uncomfortable disagreement.

Here's the catch: what feels like healthy pushback to one person can feel like rudeness to another. That gap in perception is real, and it matters.

But the solution isn't less debate. It's getting better at staying in the discomfort long enough to hear each other out.

So before you write off a colleague as rude, consider the possibility: maybe they're just not pretending to agree anymore.

That might be progress.