Good morning fellow leaders and influencers. I hope it is as wonderful a day for you as it is for me!

I’ve been thinking about ‘other’ in recent days. In philosophical and theological circles ‘other’ refers to ‘the other’ from the subject’s viewpoint. So for example, a few years ago, working in Accra in Ghana on a gig, when I walked through a market place or down the street, as a white, Anglo Saxon male who clearly didn’t live here, I was definitely ‘other’. Think, ‘a stranger in a strange land’. We all have any number of ‘others’; people who are so different from us that we find them literally remarkable, we remark about them. Sitting in this lounge with me right now are people who are other gendered, other linguistically, other weight, other status, other ages, other ancestry to me. There are then billions of possible ‘others’ for us; and therefore billions and billions of implications, some positive and some negative. We tend, for example, to fall in love with an ‘other’, someone who is quite different from us. And we tend to act with prejudice with ‘other’ as well; sexism, racism and homophobia being only three of the social issues we face in this place and time based on our view of ‘other’. A fundamental danger is when the ‘other’ becomes an ‘object’ to our ‘subject.’ In the same way that people are often objectified sexually because of their physical appearance, I was objectified as ‘money’ in the markets of Accra. Few people in the markets there were interested in me as a person, I was an object, and I was objectifying them at some level at first as “poor people.”

And ‘other’ figures prominently in our work as leaders. The best teams we know are made up of ‘others’; we need different ways of thinking, different ways of being. And it is with the other that workplace conflicts often fester. For example, the person who doesn’t work in the same way you do is then ‘othered’ by your judgement that they then don’t work as hard as you. And of course when we ‘other’, we can run the risk of objectifying other people, other subjects. People who work with our technology and systems become IT, and often literally ‘its’. HR becomes an object, Accounting becomes an object, to offer two groups of people who are often perceived not as people, but as barriers. Now, it is clear that we use these acronyms to be efficient in our language, or almost as collective nouns, and there is an innocence at heart here.

That said, there is a simple and powerful tool to lessen the chances of prejudices, judgements, language efficiency or collective descriptions becoming ways of objectifying people; know and use people’s names. It s simple but profound shift. That nerdy so and so from IT becomes Charles. That bureaucratic so and so from HR becomes Roberta. That anal retentive so and so from accounting becomes Astrid.  Watch your use of object like language, even in fun, it robs other people, even just a little, of their inherent subjectivity. (And I’m still learning, way too many people who know me hear me use “buddy” or “pal” when talking to them too often!) I’ve found it relatively simple though to do two things to improve my name recollection. First, introduce myself, especially if I am joining a group with a colleague. I don’t leave the introductions up to him or her, I introduce myself, that way I can use the names of the people I’m meeting right away, and the added side benefit of helping out my colleague who may be thinking, “what are their names?!” And I use the names of the people I meet a couple of times; it doesn’t guarantee I’ll remember two weeks later, but it helps. Second, I pay very careful attention to people’s names being used in groups; I keep a little mnemonic note to myself; Julie has jewels, Jack is tall like a beanstalk, Elizabeth is regal, that kind of thing. It doesn’t always work, but it does help. And very importantly, if I’m trying to remember people’s names I’m working on treating them as a subject, not as an object and our conversations will always be healthier and more productive.

May this week we treat ourselves and our teams as subjects not objects.