Restoring Community in the Workplace by Practicing Forgiveness

By Patricia M. Bombard, BVM, D.Min

Mistakes, misdeeds, conflict, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings are always possibilities in the natural course of human interactions. – David Bright

Forgiveness in the Workplace
Immaculée Ilibagiza¹ is a Rwandan woman who survived the 1994 genocide by living for three months with seven other women crammed into a bathroom in a pastor’s home. In her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, Ilibagiza describes the moment when she realized that, if she survived, forgiving those who had murdered her family was the only true path back to life for her. To not forgive her family’s killers would leave her as devoid of life as her murdered parents and siblings. The lesson: Forgiveness is about us, not them.


Ira Byock² drew on his experience as a palliative care physician working with people at the end of life to write his book, The Four Things That Matter Most. Byock says that the words, “I forgive you” and “Please forgive me” are two of the four toughest things we ought to say as often as possible in relationships. (The other two are “Thank you” and “I love you.”) The lesson: Forgiveness is not easy, but it is an important skill we can learn.


David S. Bright³ is a scholar who researches the role of forgiveness in the workplace. He suggests that forgiveness is an “intrapersonal experience.” It requires a person to first become aware of and then choose not to act on the negative emotions that arise when he or she feels victimized. Bright also suggests that taking such an attitude can turn a negative experience into a learning opportunity for everyone involved, and that the act of forgiveness can restore a positive environment in the workplace. The lesson: Forgiveness is all about feelings and how to manage them.


To illustrate a fourth lesson on forgiveness, we need to go back about 400 years to 17th century France and two stories about forgiveness drawn from the life of St. Vincent de Paul. In the early days of his priesthood, Vincent’s mentor, Madame de Gondi, a wealthy aristocrat, invited Vincent to console a dying peasant man by offering to hear his confession. Afterward, the man’s profound joy at receiving forgiveness for his sins moved Vincent to reevaluate his role as a priest. Soon after, Vincent preached a sermon on general confession in the chapel at Folleville. The response by the villagers was so overwhelming, Vincent had to call upon his Jesuit colleagues to help him hear confessions. This event made apparent to Vincent the need for more well-trained priests and helped him conceive the idea of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians), initially a small band of colleagues who traveled to villages spreading the message of forgiveness and reconciliation.⁴


Vincent’s biographers offer several more dramatic accounts of village-wide reconciliations. One large town “of twelve hundred souls” reportedly “had a violent, even bloody, reputation, with frequent homicides committed there” — 70 in three years. Following the preaching of the visiting Vincentians, however, “almost everyone made a general confession and were reconciled to God and to their sworn enemies.”⁵ The lesson: Forgiveness is not only an individual, personal affair. It is also about restoring a community.


Forgiveness in the Workplace
In this column, we will further explore these four lessons: that forgiveness is about us because it is about our feelings and, if used effectively, can restore community. In a previous column, author Mariella Palacios described the need for Catholic colleges and universities to create an intentional workplace culture in which everyone is connected to the mission and to one another. But what happens when that connection breaks because of the “mistakes, misdeeds, conflict, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings” that David Bright talks about in the opening quote above? How can a leader or manager restore a sense of community so essential to delivering on mission?


Byock suggests several strategies for learning to be more forgiving. One is simply accepting that we all are merely human and “that means we screw up from time to time.”  He also suggests that before we jump to feeling victimized, we consider the situation of the other person. “Most of the time when people are nasty, mean-spirited, or greedy they are acting out their own pain,” Byock observes. Leaders and managers can help create a culture of forgiveness by being clear about their own level of expectations around workplace behavior.

Bright elaborates on Byock’s simple suggestions. Bright says that forgiveness “functions as a lubricant to the friction that occurs during the natural course of human interaction.” Bright has a model for how to focus the lubricant of forgiveness on the friction caused by conflict, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings in the workplace. However, before we use Bright’s model to learn what forgiveness in human relationships should look like in the workplace, a few words on how not to think about forgiveness.


Forgiveness Is Not…
First, says Bright, forgiveness is not a pardon. It is not simply letting someone off the hook for his or her bad behavior and moving on. At the same time, it is not a denial of injury; nor is it an agreement simply to forget about it. Forgiveness also is not the same as reconciliation, or at least reconciliation without true forgiveness. Bright says that often two people who agree to reconcile are, in truth, simply agreeing to continue to work together; meanwhile, one or both may continue to harbor negative feelings that will continue to adversely affect their performance, and that of their team, as we shall see in a moment.


Finally, Bright emphasizes that forgiveness does not condone the wrongdoing. The forgiveness act is separate from any punishment or other consequences that might result from the offensive behavior. However, because forgiveness is ultimately about feelings, it important to note that without the act of forgiveness, negative feelings will remain in the workplace even if “in justice” the offending employee is shown the door.


Forgiveness and Emotional Intelligence
Bright defines forgiveness as “a response to perceived negative experiences…in which the propensity toward harbored negativity is displaced or dissolved.” The word perceived  in this definition is very important. If a person believes she or he is injured, the negative feelings – ranging from hurt, disappointment, or powerlessness, to disgust and even anger – arising from that perception are very real. Those feelings are the “harbored negativity” that needs attention.


Research by Daniel Goleman and his colleagues Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee⁶ on emotional intelligence (EQ) suggests that feelings and the ability to manage them properly play a major role in a group’s effectiveness. EQ research shows that a group “catches” emotions emanating from its members. We all have seen how quickly laughter can spread through a group. The same is true of negative emotions. The closer the team, the quicker emotions cycle through it. If someone is harboring negativity, very soon the whole team will be focusing time and energy on coping with the negative emotions swirling around them — time and energy not focused on their work.


Bright observes that learning to transcend negative feelings and engage in forgiveness can create an “undoing” effect and release the positive emotions that help promote healing. He also cites research on the amplifying effect of forgiveness within organizations. This occurs when one person’s expression of forgiveness makes others more likely to forgive, thus amplifying the positive emotions and wellbeing felt by all. This effect may account for the village-wide experiences of forgiveness reported by the French Vincentian priests.


What Leaders and Managers Can Do to Promote Forgiveness
One key idea from Bright’s research is that the forgiveness process can lead to important learnings, for both individuals and the organization. To gain this benefit, leaders and managers need first to create an organizational culture that allows for mistakes and conflict to happen, while trusting in the forgiveness process to manage them. Leaders and managers, says Bright, “can choose to see any perceived slight, in either human or performance issues, as an opportunity for learning rather than keeping score, discovery rather than retaliation, and as a moment for personal and organizational development.”

Second, Bright suggests that successful leaders and managers learn to practice and help foster forgiveness as an organizational strategy. Such a strategy can help leaders and managers “maintain the benefits of positivity in their own experiences, and as a way to help encourage healthy, effective relationships among others.” Such positivity can even lead to greater creativity and improved performance.

Steps to Forgiveness

The first step, then, in practicing forgiveness is recognizing the effect of what has happened on one’s emotional state. A person who perceives an offense should take time to become aware of the feelings generated by the experience. According to EQ researchers Boyatzis and McKenzie, the steps to forgiveness start with listening — first to one’s own feelings in order to name and claim the full range of the feelings triggered by the situation.

In this highly personal work, the next step involves a choice. As Bright explains, “An individual participant in an organization chooses to overcome the potential negative emotions, thoughts, and behavioral tendencies that occur after he or she perceives that another person or group has committed an offense against him or her.”

Then, once a person reaches clarity around her or his own perception of the experience and emotional response, it is now time to take the next step, which is to explore the story of the experience with the other person. This requires setting up a time that feels emotionally right to tell one’s own story, and a willing invitation to listen to the other side. This exchange of stories opens up the opportunity for learning and a commitment to change behaviors in the future.

Finally, as Byock suggests, it is important to say aloud the words, “Please forgive me” and “I forgive you” to one another. This ritual brings an important moment of healing and closure to the incident.

To summarize, the steps in Bright’s model that leaders and managers, as well as team members, can learn in order to reap the communal benefits of forgiveness are:

• Acknowledge the wound. Examine your perception and the impact of the incident.

• Reframe perceptions of the offense and offender by telling your story and listening to the story of the other person.

• Separate justice and forgiveness. Forgiveness is not about consequences; it is about feelings.

• Choose to forgive. Make the life-giving choice for you and your group.

As a leader or manager, you may find it best to act as a facilitator in bringing together two people in conflict to engage in this process. I once was asked to do so by a member of a small non-profit team that had been suffering under the emotionally toxic environment created by two people upset over an incident that had happened five years earlier. I trusted the process and fortunately all ended happily.

Finally, Bright recommends that some people can find additional strength to make the choice to forgive through reflection on their own religious tradition. St. Vincent de Paul and those who served with him in the early Vincentian missions certainly believed in the power of forgiveness.

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1. Immaculee Ilibagiza, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2006).
2. Ira Byock, M.D., The Four Things That Matter Most (New York: Free Press, 2004).
3. David S. Bright, “Forgiveness as an Attribute of Leadership.”In ed. Edward D. Hess and Kim S. Cameron, Leading with Values: Positivity, Virtue and High Performance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172-193. 
4. Thomas McKenna, Praying with Vincent de Paul (Winona, MN: St. Mary’s Press, 1994), 17-18. 
5. Louis Abelly, The Life of the Venerable Servant of God Vincent de Paul. Book Two, ed. John E. Rybolt, CM, trans. W. Quinn, FSC (New York: New City Press, 1993), http://via.library.depaul.edu/abelly_english/3.
6. Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, Resonant Leadership: Renewing Yourself and Connecting with Others through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2005).