Maybe your colleagues are not ruder, maybe they are finally talking

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

That sounds bad. But I am not sure it is.

Here is a different read: what we are calling “incivility” might actually be more open debate. The kind of debate that has been missing from most teams for years.

I have run dozens of team effectiveness workshops. Conflict comes up every single time. The problem is almost always too little of it.

Pat Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” treats conflict as 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 is for people to actually say what they think.

That means disagreement. Sometimes uncomfortable disagreement.

Here is 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.

The work is to get 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 are just not pretending to agree anymore.

That might be progress.