Can We Talk About Charlie Kirk at Work?

It’s been over a week since Charlie Kirk was killed, and it’s still weighing on people, though in very different ways. In this episode, Michael Baran explains how organizations can’t ignore important events like this. He gives practical strategies for leaders, for managers, and for everyone to acknowledge realities, align on values, and connect human to human.

The killing of Charlie Kirk is weighing heavily on many people. Is that something that can be discussed at work? How should leaders handle events like this in their organizations?

While many people are feeling deep emotions about the killing, it is happening in very different ways. Some are grieving because he was an inspiration to them and a voice for many of their beliefs. Others are devastated that people are unconditionally celebrating a man who they saw as espousing beliefs and actions that were directly aimed to dehumanize them or people like them. 

In this episode of The Culture Advantage, host Michael Baran dives into the challenges of this current moment, for people and for organizations. The strong emotions don’t disappear when we go to work. They carry over, affecting our engagement, our creativity, our mental health, and our collaborations with others. Leaders wonder, “should I do anything about this? And if so, what?”

Michael draws from both his social science background and his practical experience working with organizations to give some basic, foundational guidelines for navigating these challenges.  He first explains that silence from leaders might have worked in the past, but these days authentic and humble communication is essential. 

Michael also explains how helpful it can be for organizations to embark on a journey of reconceptualizing and recommitting to the organization’s values. These values can provide a framework and a guide for handling novel situations if they are thoroughly communicated to everyone. 

A key strategy for ensuring that tensions and conflicts are addressed is to make sure that managers are thoroughly trained to be inclusive leaders, to be able to handle challenging situations in the moment with authenticity and vulnerability. He also highlights research on false polarization and deep canvassing, showing that we are not as divided as we think and that we can learn and grow and connect more than we realize.  

The conversation is both professional and deeply human, offering guidance for any workplace striving to build a culture of connection, resilience, and inclusion in turbulent times. Whether you’re a CEO, manager, or employee, this episode will help you think about how to foster trust, lower stress, and strengthen community even when the world outside feels divided and scary.

Transcript

Can We Talk About Charlie Kirk at Work?

Is your company struggling, navigating through high turnover, toxic leadership, or a culture that's holding your team back from reaching its full potential? Well, you're not alone. So here's your host and guide, Michael Baran.

Michael Baran: Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. By the time this episode comes out, by the time you're listening to it, at least more than a week will have passed since the killing of Charlie Kirk in the United States. The way things change so fast these days, this might even sound outdated by the time you listen to it, even though it's just been a few days since I recorded it.

Nonetheless, I wanna share some thoughts. Not from my own [00:01:00] personal beliefs. There's a lot of that out there. But rather from the perspective of a workplace and what I'm gonna talk about, it's gonna be a lot more broad than this one specific incident. This episode, it's really about. Any big incident like this because they happen a lot where emotions are high, where opinions are polarized, where there's a lot of misunderstanding.

So as anyone, I bet some of you have watched the TV show Severance. I'm fascinated by that show. If you haven't seen it, check it out. But if also, if you haven't seen it, it's a place that imagines you could undergo some sort of procedure where you separate right in your brain, you separate your work self from your outside.

Self and one doesn't know anything about what happens with the other, [00:02:00] right? There's your any self and your Audi self and one of them just works and knows about that, and the other one just does the life outside of work and doesn't know anything about the work. I bring this up to say. We're not that, right?

Humans are not really that our emotions carry over and they impact how we show up at work, how we interact with other people. So given that, and how do you think people are doing at work right now? You think people are okay? I don't think so. Some people. Are feeling grief and anger because they feel like one of their people, maybe an inspiration to them has just been assassinated for his beliefs.

And some of those beliefs might be their beliefs too. Others [00:03:00] are feeling maybe devastated because people, they know, people they work with, they see them unconditionally celebrating a man who had beliefs and encouraged actions that were designed to dehumanize them and people like them. Everyone out there may have seen a video of this happening, an actual video of someone being killed, which is horrific.

Let's not underestimate the trauma. That this is causing to all of us because we're subjected to videos like this and other horrific, violent, disturbing images almost on a daily basis, right? And sometimes taking you by surprise, even teenagers, right? You got people who might be scrolling through their feeds and teenagers might go from like a video on Minecraft to a video of someone being [00:04:00] shot right with no warning. There's a lot of fear and worry around, whether that is fear and worry about more violence or what's happening right now. Just a lot of anxiety and obviously this is a huge challenge for organizations.

What are you supposed to do about that? The organization. And of course the old answer was nothing. Right? Don't you know we don't talk about politics, we don't talk about religion, do your job and go home. That's what was the norm, but that's not the world we're living in now. This is. Increasingly challenging, especially with the intensity of beliefs, the way some influencers, some prominent people, some politicians are trying to divide and polarize us the way that algorithms further isolate and divide us.

Even [00:05:00] cause us to be more extreme in our views, because of the amount we know about our colleagues, if we're connected to them on social media, which can be a lot that we end up knowing about them. What's an organization supposed to do with all that? All right, well first, if you're a leader. Think about communicating to the organization, right?

Silence also speaks volumes, and leaders don't always know what to communicate about if they should communicate. There are lots of things happening all the time, but when they're big, I suggest airing. On the side of communicating. Even if you don't know what to say, just acknowledging is important.

Acknowledging. With humility rather than acting as if you have all the answers. Okay? And whatever you communicate. It doesn't have to [00:06:00] be long, it doesn't have to be a whole essay or something, just something that says to people, I see you. I'm with you Now, please, leaders, if this is you thinking about communicating before you hit send on that email.

Show it to some people and get some feedback. I'm thinking back to 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, we had a lot of leaders sending us letters that they were about to send and saying, you know, does this look good? This look okay. And they needed help. Right. The tone was not right. The message was not right.

It was not gonna resonate with people. To give an example, one white male CEO wanted to start off a leader with something like a. I get it. And then tell the story. You wanna tell this story? From high school, it's a [00:07:00] football story where he, sure. He was the star quarterback in high school and things went pretty well for him, and he was pretty privileged.

But one day he went to home, you know, with someone on his team. And in that home people only spoke Spanish and he. He felt what it felt like to be excluded. So he was trying to say, I know what exclusion can feel like, and I don't wanna diminish that experience for him. It's really good to start somewhere.

In empathizing with how someone might feel exclusion. But of course, that afternoon of feeling exclusion from a teammate's family, even though they're probably being incredibly nice to him and probably even speaking some English to him. That is not the same thing as what people were feeling after the murder of George Floyd, [00:08:00] right?

What Black Americans, what African Americans were feeling after witnessing police murdering a black man. And after that's happened again and again and again, and after the systemic inequity and the exclusions and the discriminations and the pain. The violence that has happened historically. And now to equate that with an afternoon of feeling a little bit uncomfortable, it wouldn't be the right way to send a letter right now.

He also needed some. Support and some help to really understand why those were not equivalent things, right. But also you can do some damage, sending out a letter without checking with people. Right. Now who would you get feedback from? Well, ideally people you trust, ideally a diversity of people, but especially those people you may be trying to speak to.

And make sure you [00:09:00] encourage them to give you feedback that you really want it. Okay. What about a case like this going on right now where you've got such different opinions among people at your organization? Potentially. Maybe you just acknowledge that. Hey, there's a lot going on. Emotions are high.

I know we have different opinions on this, but I know we're not as divided as it may seem from looking at social media. You know, just stuff like that. Acknowledging the situation and maybe there are resources you're providing at your organization and we'll get to that in a moment. Because of course.

Second, if you want your organization to thrive, you need people to be feeling okay to be feeling good, right? You need them to be fully present. You need them to be able to work together. Now might be a good time for leadership to go to embark, to go on a journey, [00:10:00] a process of clarifying and committing to your core values.

And what you want the culture to be at your organization, what you want it to be for real. What will be tolerated and what will not be tolerated. Making that explicit. Not just implied or not just having to figure it out on a case by case basis, right? The commitments to these values can't be vague and performative.

They've gotta be really concrete and foundational, and once you all agree on this. Which is not as easy as it sounds, right. But once you do, communicating the commitments, communicating the values to the entire organization, not just throwing 'em up on a webpage where people could find them if they wanted to, but actually communicating them in a.

Effective way, really disseminating the information through [00:11:00] discussions and workshops and town halls and onboarding, making sure people are on the same page that they know it. And while of course you cannot dictate what employees must believe. You can dictate acceptable behaviors and words and ways of interacting, and those values can help you make some hard decisions as your guide.

Okay. Another thing that you might wanna think about now, and I've talked about this before, is equipping your managers. Are your managers? Really able to handle the array of emotions that are happening now on their diverse teams to make sure everyone is feeling inclusion. When things get complicated, when there are tensions, when there are subtle exclusions.

I doubt it. That's a big task, right? A lot of managers. [00:12:00] They think they do pretty well, and sometimes they do pretty well. But I've been in a lot of trainings where we try to give managers a specific scenario and see how they might respond and their first instincts. Well, they're not terrible. They're maybe not as complete as they should be.

Right? To give you an example, we'll give them a scenario. They're leading a meeting and somebody kind of snips something at someone else during that meeting and you know it's gonna make, that person or others feel bad and we ask them, what are you gonna do? You're leading the meeting. Right. What are you gonna do in that situation?

And they will often respond with something like, okay, all right. Well, after the meeting was over, I'd go to the person that said that thing and I'd talk to them about how it wasn't appropriate. I'd talk to the person they said it to afterwards, separately, individually, and I'd see if they were [00:13:00] okay.

Okay. Not necessarily terrible things to do, but what about everyone else? That meeting, what message did they get about the culture of our team, the culture of our organization? What's gonna be tolerated? What about others there who might have felt bad hearing that comment as well. Sometimes managers will say something like, well, I would just diffuse the situation with humor, right?

Humor. Oh, here you are. You're leading this meeting. Something happens. All eyes are looking at you to see how you're gonna handle this. And you think in that split second you can be funny in a way that's gonna make everyone feel great and laugh, and also convey how seriously you take inclusion on this team and that people should trust you.

Good luck with that. That's really hard to do. And [00:14:00] so for managers having a strategy in their back pocket with something they could say instead in the moment when it's hard, but something like. You know, something just happened here in this meeting and I don't really know how to handle it now. We probably also don't have time to talk about it right now.

We've got five minutes left. We need to finish deciding this other thing, but this, I take it seriously and I'm gonna figure out a way for us to address the, address it together as a group because they, it really matters to me. Okay? Just something like that, that's simple, that is honest, that is authentic, that can happen in the moment.

And then that manager, that leader, can go learn and talk with people and learn more and come back together as a group and address what happened as a team so everyone feels included, so everyone feels part of it. So everyone gets the same message about the [00:15:00] culture. Also another thing to think about is fostering real human connections.

Right. Certainly there are extreme views out there in the world, and people often think that everyone on the other side holds those extreme views when in reality we are so much closer in our beliefs than we realize. I remember reading this classic psychology paper about this. They, I think they called it something like false polarization.

Basically what they would do is they would ask one side, you know, whether that's. Democrats or Republicans ask one side what they believed about a particular issue. , Let's say it maybe it was abortion, maybe it was guns. What do you believe they would ask them and then they would ask people, what do you think the other side believes?

Right? So often if you're. You can't see my hands. But if you're imagining a spectrum, [00:16:00] right? A lot of people put their own beliefs not too far from the center, in fact. Right. Maybe a little bit one way or the other, but they think the other, where they put the other side, they think the other side is all the way on the other extreme.

Right? And of course the other side thinks that too. So here we are realizing that we're pretty. Reasonable most of the time that we have nuance in the way we think about issues, but we think the other side doesn't. We think the other side is so extreme and this effect has been shown in more recent studies as well.

Of course it's different these days with social media and echo chambers and where, you know, politics sort of becomes your identity rather than just things you think about issues. All that has changed the landscape, but that fundamental concept is still there when we're talking about real people and not just politicians or, you know, [00:17:00] influencers, or media personalities.

Now all those real people in your organization can be cared for at work, can be made to feel inclusion. All the people, not all the ideas are included. Not all the behaviors are tolerated. So we've gotta separate the person from ideas and behavior. And that can be tricky 'cause we see each other's beliefs.

Sometimes we know about 'em, maybe they tell us, or maybe we read the signals that we see, or the symbols, or maybe we see things on social media and people can have their beliefs. People can have very different beliefs. That only starts to be a problem if one person's belief. It directly denies someone else's humanity or right to exist as that famous James Baldwin quote goes.

So at your organization, you might end up wanting to [00:18:00] facilitate better human connections. More conversations, understanding, learning about other people, building trust, building community. People really can learn and change and grow together and build trust. I always think of another study. This one, they sent people around door to door, knocking on doors, I think it was in Florida, and they were having short conversations with people about issues related to transgender people, right?

They weren't trying to convince. Those people devote a particular way. They were just trying to share information and to listen what PE to what people said. And then they measured support for issues related to transgender people. And just those 10 to 15 minute conversations made a big impact. And here's the cool thing too, that impact lasted.

They retested the support months later. And the support lasted so people can connect with [00:19:00] understanding and around shared values. But be careful, right? Don't just throw people with opposing views into a room and say, all right, we're here to discuss. Have at it. No real harm can be done. This has to be done carefully with a facilitator that really knows what they're doing.

Now I don't wanna underestimate the challenges that this moment poses for organizations around all of this. The here, those are some ideas, some strategies, some tips. It's not the full. Picture not the full strategy. I do wanna encourage you to have the mindset that while we can't control everything that happens out there in the world, right, at least what's happening here within these walls or metaphorical walls, at least that's not gonna happen here.

Here, we're on the same team. Okay? [00:20:00] Okay, that's the episode for today. Take care everyone. Be gentle with yourselves and with people. Try to keep the cortisol levels low. I'm trying to work on that as a family. We're all trying to work on that over here. It's not easy these days. Remember, you can email me anytime you want, if you have a thought or a question, michael@cultureadvantagepodcast.com.

I love the feedback. Okay, see you next time.

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