Recently I was in a meeting with a few other people who I have known and walked pretty closely alongside for a few years now. While I wouldn’t describe us as best friends, I definitely believed that we were all in good mutual standing. A topic arose that one particular person began expressing disagreement with, and then this immediately escalated into the person sharing past instances that had been taken as offensive. After a few minutes, the verbal barrage ended, and the rest of the room was left in stunned silence. 

While the initial point of disagreement ended up being the major issue coming out of this meeting, I was struck by how quickly this difference turned a corner and headed down blame lane. It was like this person had been keeping a mental record of all the various things that had rubbed them the wrong way, and when the door was cracked open these all came pouring out. 

Thinking back on this afterward, I realized that this was not the first time this person had displayed the behavior of taking easy offense to small perceived slights. In fact, I would even say that there was an ever-growing track record here of being easily offended.

In a workplace setting specifically, what are some outcomes when people are easily offended? What is the impact, and who bears the brunt of the impact?

Outcomes and Impacts

–The First Domino: In his book The Advantage, organizational health author Pat Lencioni argues that many teams unknowingly function from a place of disadvantage. In contrast, a smaller percentage of groups create and maintain an advantage by having a healthy organization. The first discipline of organizational health is to build a cohesive leadership team. And the first aspect of a cohesive team is trust. In other words, trust is the FIRST domino that must fall in order to build a healthy, effective team. Unfortunately, one of the easiest ways to tear down trust with others is to take easy offense to things that they do/say. While there are certainly narcissists and negative people out there, the average person isn’t intentionally trying to harm the people around them. Note that I said “intentionally”. Despite our best efforts, we all still end up inadvertently doing numerous things each day that could be taken the wrong way. Someone who is easily offended will end up latching onto the missteps of others and will make a big deal out of them. This immediately degrades trust and causes relational strain that escalates more and more over time.

-A Hypocrite: One of the ironic things about people who are easily offended is that they themselves commit the exact same kind of offenses towards the people around them. But they are either oblivious to this fact, or they even make excuses for their own behavior as if others should be held to one standard but the same rules do not apply to them. This all paints the person in an extremely poor light, and their reputation deservedly suffers. A person’s reputation is EVERYTHING. “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.” (Proverbs 22:1)

-A Child: Easily offended people sound like my three-year-old son. They whine and fuss and complain and frankly act more like young children than they do adults. Much like being hypocritical, this reflects so poorly on them as onlooking professional adults shake their heads in dismay.

-Erroneous Outcomes: I’ve written before about the powerful question, “Is this behavior helping or hindering your ability to get what you want?”. There are a number of things that people who are quick to suffer offense might be wanting. They could long to feel better about themselves, want people around them to care, or just want to be in control of outcomes. But whatever the case, when they take offense to small slights these people guarantee outcomes that do not match up. The behaviors being displayed will actually HURT their ability to get what they say they want.     

-Negative Impact: Due to all the outcomes mentioned above, being easily offended produces a negative impact for EVERYONE involved! The offended person only suffers as people avoid them or withdraw relationally. Others suffer as they work extra hard to avoid offending this person or to get things done while avoiding the person. As Lencioni says, organizations suffer a disadvantage as resources are poured into a bottomless pit of lack of productivity. In the land of the easily offended, everyone loses! 

The Inverse

So what’s the opposite of being easily offended? A few years ago a couple joined the church that I am a member of and leader in. The husband articulated that he and his wife would be “low maintenance members”, and that others wouldn’t have to worry too much about them. To me, the opposite of being easily offended is exactly this: LOW MAINTENANCE! 

In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz’s 2nd agreement is “Don’t take anything personally”. At the core of any offense is something that you or I choose to take personally. If this exact same thing had happened to someone else, we wouldn’t think the first thing about it. But no, this happened to ME and people should know not to treat ME like that and I’M going to do something about this. Ruiz goes so far as to say that humans don’t even have to take the death of a close loved one personally. While this is obviously an overly-extreme application of this idea, it helps to get the point across.

In Closing

Are you easily offended? If so, are you pleased with this? Are there people working in your organization who are easily offended? What negative impact is everyone experiencing because of offenses that are taken? What can you do to change or influence all of this?