Last year Jon Acuff, wrote an article for Relevant Magazine, entitled, “7 Questions to Ask Before You Throw Down Online”.  Each of these are worth exploring in the context of purposed worKING and how we handle ourselves in the workplace and online.

“Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”

What is it about the internet that allows for us to act like we know someone online, when we don’t.  This goes both way in that we can become overly “personal” with someone we have never met, and even worse we can tee-off on someone we don’t know online because we disagree with their cause or idea.  If we really knew them though, because we have a longer term relationship to consider, we would have established online lines that we wouldn’t cross.  But, social media makes it a free-for-all to question and attack people who we have never engaged with before.  In business we sometimes anguish over Yelp! or other transparency sites because we just can’t believe someone would say something like that about us. The truth is that if they were standing in front of us, they wouldn’t and if we knew them it probably wouldn’t happen either, but we don’t always have that luxury.  So, we have to both careful in the giving and the receiving ends of the messages.  We need to be careful in how we disagree or take issue and then also be open to receiving what we have dished out to others.

I have found over the years that the best way to communicate with someone I don’t know, but have an issue is to try as best and as fast I can to get to know them enough that I can understand where they are coming from on this one particular issue or question.  This happens in the corporate world all the time when it’s impossible to really know every person in the company who might reach to us to comment or question something.  How we respond and interact with those we don’t know is as good a boundary as we can get to also ensure that those we do know are getting treated with full respect and dignity.  And, we aren’t ever responding in a way that if we met the person the next day live that they would feel any other way than respected, heard and understood. There’s a rule about this isn’t there?

Reference: Matthew 7:12 (New Living Translation)

Happy long weekend and Martin Luther King Day.  PwK will return on Tuesday January 20th