As leaders, like everyone else, we have beliefs about what is true and right. We have bold opinions around those beliefs. Culture also purports current trends and thinking as examples of what it thinks is true and right. When there is a difference between the beliefs these two groups operate by, a gap is created. This gap creates distance. How leaders view this gap drastically influences how they treat people on the other side of that gap. So, how is this tension navigated? And what is it that limits a person’s ability to engage with someone who believes differently than they do?

One of the biggest obstacles to influencing culture (which includes your business, your team, and your direct reports) is this:

Our ability to influence culture is limited by our disgust toward it. 

Let's talk about disgust.

"Humans are most likely the only species that experiences disgust, and we seem to be the only one capable of loathing its own species." —William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust

Disgust is a feeling of revulsion aroused by something unpleasant or offensive. Richard Beck has gathered some incredible work around this topic¹, and much of the next few paragraphs are based on what he wrote about in his work from over a decade ago – and as captured in his book Unclean.

As people, we instinctively move away from things that disgust us. This is because disgust functions as a boundary between a person and the object of their disgust. We have many more boundaries than we are aware of. Think of how many boundaries you would have to cross to eat someone else’s chewed gum from the ground. Think also about the conclusions you would make about someone you saw eat chewed gum from the floor.

Disgust is part of who we are. It keeps us from harming ourselves. Disgust helps us survive by helping us avoid rotting food and contagious diseases. However, disgust becomes a problem when we apply it onto people, when it inhibits our ability to understand and influence culture. When we identify groups or types of people and label them disgusting, very real boundaries are created between us and those we have decided are hard to love. We all know people who are hard to love, but when we are disgusted by them, we tend to treat them more like objects than people. We look at them more like a piece of discarded gum than a human being.

To overcome disgust, we need to move toward messes. This means we need to move toward people on the other side of our perceived cultural gap. But our moving toward messes can’t stop there. We also need to be honest with ourselves and the messes inside of us. If we are disgusted by anyone, it is often the result of the internal messes we are choosing to ignore.

I know that for me, personally, when I was behaving in a way that exhibited “disgust” towards people around me, it was more to do with a lot of internal mess that I had not worked through. Candidly, it was a bunch of junk in me that I didn’t know about. It wasn’t until I had done a lot of deep work around coaching and counseling that I was able to bring to the surface a conscious-level awareness of what was going on in me. And it would be years later that I truly felt like I had excavated a lot of that junk and got on the other side of it. To be clear, I’m not saying that I don’t ever visit some of that disgusting behavior around seeing other people with disgust. Regretfully, I still do; but I don’t live there. I only visit that behavior; and then I quickly call myself out and get out of that way of thinking and behaving. I quickly run from that tendency to view people through that lens.

One of the best ways we can overcome this tendency is to understand that everyone has a moral circle. The moral circle is the circle of people you are nicest or most loving toward. Take three minutes to watch the video below that illustrates what a moral circle is. 

Imagine how different our world would be if we included more people in our moral circles. Are there people at your office you avoid? Small amounts of disgust cause us to put very real boundaries between us and the people we are leading – that we have influence over. You might be thinking, I am not a mean person. We don’t influence culture simply by not being mean. We influence people by respecting their perspectives and different opinions – to truly value them as a person that has so much to offer to the team, to the organization, and to the world.

There are people in your office you have influence over; but (unknowingly or knowingly) you may have built boundaries between yourself and them because in some small way you were disgusted by them. Take some time today to think about how you can choose to expand your moral circle and show kindness to people that are not your kind.

[1] Beck, R. (n.d.). Unclean. The Lutterworth Press.