Love Thy Colleague

Being authentically Christian at work

William Morris

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780857217172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How do you cope with arrogant colleagues, or coax the best from shy or sensitive colleagues? How do you develop a decent working relationship with someone who won't shut up? Some people spread depression like a fog: how do you lift their spirits and stop them infecting the workplace? Our presence at work is a responsibility and an opportunity to bring the character and nature of God though what we say and do, and how we respond to our colleagues. William Morris draws upon his years in the corporate world and his Christian faith to reflect with wit and insight upon the characters we come into contact with during the working day. He explores these people from a pastoral perspective, informed by Jesus teaching in the parable of The Good Samaritan, giving reader's permission to examine and find new perspectives on getting along with the people we work with.

1

Who is My Neighbour at Work?

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Luke 10:25–37 nrsv

Right out of school, my first job was working in a French bank at the minimum wage doing whatever relatively unskilled tasks needed doing. After a short while my employers decided I was just the right guy to mark each of the hundreds of cheques that our customers deposited each day with a magnetic number in the bottom right hand corner. It may not sound terribly exciting, but it was, truly, one of the formative experiences of my life. However, when I started I did face three small problems: first, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing; second, despite my assertions to the contrary when I was interviewed, I actually spoke no French; and third, I had no friends (or even acquaintances) in Bordeaux.

But as the months passed three rather wonderful things happened: some of my colleagues took pity on me and showed me how to do the job; others of them helped me with my French; and a third set of colleagues, although often much older than I and from completely different backgrounds, invited me round for dinner, or out to a movie, or to go to the beach. That workplace was certainly not perfect, and by no means was everyone happy, but, because of that kindness shown to me as I initially struggled, it remains one of the most fulfilling of all my work experiences.

Neighbour… neighbourliness… neighbourhood

We tend to view the workplace through a dystopian lens, whether it’s that of a Dilbert cartoon, or a TV show like The Office, or a movie like Wall Street. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t have to be a place of alienation; a place of purely transactional interactions; a place of only sterile, antiseptic relationships. It can be so much more – and yet it so often isn’t. Why does it seem so hard, given the story I’ve just told? Well, you might say, your story could only have happened to an unthreatening teenager in a relatively low-pressured environment. What if I had been an ambitious permanent employee in a cut-throat business in my twenties; or a harassed, irascible, over-stretched new parent trying to find a work–life balance in my thirties; or a lazy, gossipy, middle-aged freeloader drifting through my forties; or an incompetent, out-of-touch, just-hanging-on-for-my-pension boss in my fifties? Would my colleagues have been so kind then? Would they have cared? It’s a fair question. Some colleagues in the workplace can be incredibly difficult to approach, far less like. And when we are always being pushed to go harder and faster, when we constantly have to worry about our jobs, it’s tough to find the time to think about others. It is emotionally so much easier to keep our distance; so much more unambiguous (and fun, sometimes) to be judgmental; so much less effort if we restrict our involvement to the bare minimum. Of course, we’d rarely put it that way… but if we narrow our scope so that care is something only to be doled out when we have the time, is something only to be awarded based on whether the person is deserving or not, then the workplace loses much of its potential to be transformational in our lives – loses that potential that I experienced all those years ago.

So how do we foster work relationships, and an atmosphere in the workplace, that together can move us beyond those rather narrow, purely transactional interactions into which we can all-too-easily slip? And how do we do it in a way that enables us to have those relationships with difficult people as well as easy people; with unsympathetic people as well as engaging ones; with older people as well as younger ones; with more senior colleagues as well as junior ones? Well, I think – I hope – the answer may lie in a single word, although a big one: “neighbour”. If we can view all of our colleagues as our neighbours, our entire workplace as a neighbourhood, and our obligation (and privilege) to all of our fellow workers as neighbourliness, then perhaps we can start to build relationships that don’t rely on how much we like our colleague, or how deserving they are. And if we can do that, then we will also begin to see our work as a place that God cares about, as a place where He Himself is at work, and as a place where we can work with Him.

Who is my neighbour?

But, as I said, neighbour is a big word that needs unpacking. Who is our “neighbour”, and what does it mean to be a “neighbour”? To answer that I want to explore one of the best known of all Jesus’ parables – the parable of the Good Samaritan. We may think we know the story well: someone gets hurt; another person helps him; and we’d do the same. But there’s actually much more to it than that, and if we dig into the story we’ll unearth the complexity, and potential richness, of what it can mean to be a neighbour at work.

The parable asks four questions: two explicit ones, and two implicit ones. And, I believe, it is only in answering all four that we can fully understand the idea of neighbourliness, of being a neighbour at work.

• ● The first (explicit) question in the parable is this: who is my neighbour?
• ● The second (implicit) question is: am I the Good Samaritan – or another character in the story?
• ● The third (explicit) question is: who was the neighbour to this man?
• ● The fourth (implicit) question is: what does it mean to be the Good Samaritan?

We’ll look at each question in turn, and, in doing that, hopefully we can begin to answer the central question of this book, which my French colleagues seemed to understand so effortlessly (if implicitly) all those years ago: how do we truly love our neighbour at work? How do we truly love our colleague?

Offering mercy: who is my neighbour?

The first question asked in the parable seems straightforward: who is my neighbour? The lawyer who asks it has just – correctly – told Jesus that one of the things he must do to inherit eternal life is to love his neighbour as himself. But then, seeking to justify himself, he overreaches. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that he thought that he already knew the answer and was looking for further validation from Jesus. For him it may have seemed a simple question. Who was his neighbour? It was the person who lived in his (nice) neighbourhood; his fellow (well-educated) lawyers; those who worshipped in the same (sophisticated) way as him; his fellow Jews (as long as they were of a certain standing). We are tribal animals, and the lawyer may well have seen it in those terms. His neighbours were the deserving members of his tribe. And perhaps, as I’ve noted above, we would see it the same at work today. Our neighbours are the likeable people in the workspace around us; the deserving members of our team; the good people in our department. But Jesus was having none of that. So, to answer the question about who the lawyer’s neighbour is, He tells the lawyer a story about someone who could never have been in his tribe.

But the story that Jesus tells also has an unusual twist, because it requires the lawyer (and us) to imagine himself in it. And it is in this effort of imagining that Jesus asks the lawyer (and us) the parable’s second question: which character am I in the parable? Now, while it may not be true for everyone, I think many of us (me, certainly) almost automatically see ourselves as the Good Samaritan – whether at home, at church, or in the workplace; as the socially aware, generous, thoughtful giver who cares for the neighbour in need. But we need to be a little careful, because Jesus is not here to validate our own self-image. There are other characters in addition to the Good Samaritan that are available to be played by us – the priest and Levite, for example. So, we need to ask ourselves whether we can be absolutely certain that we are not (unpleasant though the thought is) one of the characters who passes by on the other side. Or, perhaps, might we be the lawyer who asks the (self-justificatory) question: who is my neighbour? Are we really always the Good Samaritan, the good neighbour?

To explore – against what we might think are our own broad, generous views on whom we would view as our “neighbour”, as well as which character in the parable we might be – I want, based on my own experience, to reimagine the parable a couple of different ways in a modern workplace setting, in my own “neighbourhood”. As will quickly become clear, I don’t always come out as well as my French colleagues did…

• ● There was someone in another department who, I heard third-hand, had a child who was seriously ill. Now, of course, if this had been someone closer to me, whom I knew well, I wouldn’t have hesitated to try to comfort them. But this other person? Well, I wondered, might it not be a bit intrusive or even a little presumptuous for me to offer them comfort when I hardly knew them? Perhaps it might even do more harm than good? Perhaps, I eventually told myself, they were just a little too far from me for me to be a real neighbour.
• ● There was a person who was forever gossiping. It wasn’t particularly nasty or scurrilous gossip, but, like a low-grade fever, it never seemed to go away and it ever so slightly soured the workplace atmosphere. Then one day I heard a truly scurrilous piece of gossip about them. Really bad. And they knew lots of people knew about it. More particularly, they knew that I knew. And I could see them shrinking back as I came towards them. But I felt a natural ambivalence – after all, those who live by the sword die by it, don’t they? They really are just not quite as deserving. And anyway, when it came right down to it, I reassured myself, even though it was really bad gossip, it was only words, and those (unlike sticks and stones) wouldn’t really hurt them – at least after a while.
• ● I had a colleague who was having difficulty with their job. But I was pretty stretched, too. If I had had a little more time I would have really loved to help out. But I didn’t have time, and anyway I had to think about my own job at what was a tricky time for the company. Besides which, I told myself, training someone to do their job more efficiently was really my boss’s job (or HR’s, or someone else’s), so, much as I’d really have liked to help (really), I had to prioritize.
• ● A colleague who had a reputation for being a fairly generous spender came to me and explained that they really needed to borrow some money for a month or so. I could tell it had been incredibly difficult – and deeply embarrassing – for them to ask me for a loan, but I couldn’t quite get over their breach of a sacred taboo in asking me for money. So, I rationalized that I might need the money, and I might never get paid back, and, anyway, why couldn’t my colleague go to their own bank, or borrow from their own family?
• ● I had a colleague accused of a serious ethics violation. I’d known the person a long time and couldn’t quite believe it was true. I really wanted to speak up for them, but I just wasn’t sure. So, I told myself that I had to think about my own job. And what if the allegation were true? I couldn’t afford to be tainted with that same brush, because my family was depending on me. And besides, our internal disciplinary process was very fair, I rationalized, so this was not going to be a lynching by management. Anyway, perhaps there really was no smoke without fire.

Offering mercy: am I the Good Samaritan?

Now, perhaps you would have stopped and tended the injured person in some or all of those cases. But I know that I, in each case – and however much I might like to think myself the Good Samaritan – passed by on the other side. Because these were the special cases, I would tell myself. Because the person wasn’t quite a member of my tribe; or wasn’t entirely deserving; or I didn’t really have the time; or I didn’t feel completely comfortable lending money to someone unreliable for what was, quite possibly, a dubious cause; or I had to look out for my own job. But, completely natural, totally understandable though each of these rationalizations is in human terms, I don’t think Jesus would have given them much time. So, let’s run through each of them in turn, and the implications each has for the meaning of the word “neighbour”.

First, there’s the question of whether I need to know someone well for them to be my neighbour. While we are not explicitly told, I think we can assume that the Good Samaritan did not know the injured man. In the par...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Who is My Neighbor at Work?
• 2. The Ambitious Colleague
• 3. The Incompetent Colleague
• 4. The Shy Colleague
• 5. The Lazy Colleague
• 6. The Verbose Colleague
• 7. The Loner
• 8. The Insensitive Colleague
• 9. The Optimistic Colleague
• 10. The Depressed Colleague
• Afterword: The Departing Colleague