Summary
Civility is a set of behaviors that recognizes differences and builds mutual respect.
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Relationship management
- Communications
- Growth
- Problem-solving
Self-Awareness
Emotional Awareness – Identifying and understanding our emotions and their impact on our thoughts, behaviors, and others.
Accurate Self-assessment – Clearly understanding personal strengths and limitations without self-criticism or inflated self-perception.
Self-confidence – Firmly believing in one’s abilities, talents, and judgement.
Self-respect – Properly regarding and caring for the dignity of one’s person and character.
Authenticity – Acting in accordance with one’s true self, values and beliefs.
Self-Management
Emotional Self-control – Managing and regulating one’s emotional responses, preventing impulsive reactions.
Adaptability – Flexibly and efficiently learning and applying that knowledge across situations.
Achievement Motivation – Orientation towards success, mastery, and sense of purpose.
Initiative – Recognizing needs, taking action, and pursuing outcomes without waiting for direction.
Optimism – A mental attitude characterized by a positive outlook and expectations of favorable outcomes.
Apologizing – Acknowledging errors and guilt, expressing regret, repenting, asking for forgiveness.
Trustworthiness – Demonstrating credibility, reliability and intimacy buffered from self-interest.
Resilience – Bouncing back from adversity with flexibility & strength, maintaining wellbeing despite challenges.
Social Awareness
Empathy – Understanding what other people feel, seeing their point of view, and imagining yourself in their place.
Organizational Awareness – Interpreting a group’s emotional state, relationship dynamics and power structures.
Service Orientation – Willingly anticipating, recognizing, and meeting others’ needs, before they are articulated.
Perspective Taking – Considering others’ thoughts, feelings, intentions, and motivations in a particular situation.
Cultural Awareness – Recognizing the different beliefs, values, and customs of someone based on their origins.
Relationship Management
Influence – Capacity to affect the character, development, or behavior of another person, group, or organization.
Conflict Management – Process by which disputes are resolved, negative results are minimized and positive results are prioritized.
Teamwork and Collaboration – Combined effort of a group of people working together towards a common goal or objective.
Inspirational Leadership – Inspiring and guiding people to get the job done, to bring out their best.
Change Management – Providing approaches, tools, and techniques to achieve a desired future state.
Collaboration Tools – Offering any technology or tool that can be used to help people to better work together.
Meeting Management – Organizing and facilitating meetings to ensure productivity and alignment.
Project Management – Planning, organizing, and executing tasks to create a tangible product, service, or deliverable.
Communications
Commonality – Finding and emphasizing common interests, perspectives and experiences.
Be Patient – Encouraging others to speak, not interrupting them.
Overall Awareness – Paying attention to non-verbal cues, overall message of speakers.
Recognize/Validate Others – Listening, remembering and using names, acknowledging others’ views and emotions.
Mirror Communications – Confirming listening by restating what you heard in your own words.
Speak Kindly – Using words that are neutral or supportive, not attacking others.
Understand – Asking questions, clarifying, seeking first to understand, not to reply.
Manage Praise – Giving and receiving praise for communications, actions, intentions and results, when appropriate.
Defend Properly – Defining boundaries, expressing views in “I” statements, not overreaching.
Solve the Problem – Focusing on issues, not people.
Electronic Communications – Effective email and social media communications.
Growth
Experiential Learning – Benefiting from the experience and natural results of participating in civil processes.
Continuous Improvement – Maintaining newly developed skills and skill levels with support from civil colleagues.
Embracing Feedback – Encouraging honest feedback provides opportunities for personal growth.
New Perspectives – Gaining new approaches, viewpoints and paradigms from interacting with others.
Higher Expectations – Improving goals and behaviors in response to the expectations/norms of others.
Confidence – Using civil processes to address and resolve difficult situations builds personal and process confidence.
Broadly Applying Skills – Trying, testing and using civility skills in all domains of life.
Modelling Behaviors – Practicing civility skills helps to teach, influence and inspire others.
Developing Others – Recognizing and nurturing potential in others through encouragement and honest feedback.
Problem-Solving
Analytical Tools – Critical thinking, decision making, game theory, finance, economics and operations management.
Creative Thinking – Thinking about a task or a problem in a new or different way, or generate new ideas.
Strategic Thinking – Intentionally and logically making organization level decisions with long-term impacts.
Organizational Design – Improving an organization’s effectiveness and performance.
Organizational Development – Structuring an organization to align with its strategic goals and objectives.
Systems Thinking – Cognitive skill and a way of understanding reality that emphasizes the whole rather than the sum of its parts.
Process Engineering – Approach to designing, analyzing, and optimizing steps to produce a consistent, repeatable outcome.
Public Administration – Coordination of government activities to ensure the effective delivery of services and the application of laws.
Summary
We have lost our commitment to civility in our interactions with each other in the last 50 years. On the other hand, we understand exactly how and why we should act civilly. We can learn about acting civilly within all of our institutions, setting aside our political differences. The behavioral sciences have clearly described the practice of civility. We now have the ability to learn and sharpen our civility skills. We must implement this training for our children and our fellow citizens.
