by Randall Reid, Southeast Regional Director, ICMA

Many of us anticipate the gathering of our extended family around a bountiful holiday table with a sense of joy and perhaps some dread. While it’s a chance to catch up with family members, there’s also the potentially stressful conversation that springs up at the table when it comes to the topics of contemporary politics or religion.

Conventional wisdom says these topics are best avoided to assure civility, particularly now when there is so much partisan division in our society. For some families, like communities, these divisions can result in hurtful interactions that lead to hard feelings or even violence in what should otherwise be a season celebrating family and gratitude.

Lessons Learned as a Public Manager

Forty-plus years as a city and county manager have allowed me to glean some valuable lessons from hours spent in public meetings and in small-group interactions with elected officials. These lessons apply directly to encouraging civility and harmony among my relatives at the holiday dinner table. In our household, Grandma would act as the elder inclusive convener, bringing together our extended family for a meal and encouraging fellowship and sharing to nurture a sense of belonging. Everyone would then depart feeling more connected as part of a sustainable extended family.

This creation of a sense of belonging is important to a community as well as a family. It is a desired outcome of most public meetings, where mayors and managers often convene civil conversations around issues of importance to residents. Family members and residents enjoy and share both rights and responsibilities in these two unique human institutions.

Common Roles and Rules of Engagement

Like council members or residents in small-group public settings, our siblings, aunts, uncles, and newly arrived in-laws or children around the table often assume identifiable roles in discussions: passive observer, informed educator/expert, provocateur/agitator, and peacekeeper. Sometimes these roles are embedded in overall family dynamics and become altered with each new participating child or in-law.

Some families have rules of engagement; in my own family, debates with my siblings could get intense, sometimes provoked by my father, but only until the hostess, my mother, became upset, at which point debate ceased until it could be carried on outside or later in whispered voices in assigned bedrooms. Many of my best council members took on similar roles, and as manager, I often had to assume the role of peacekeeper or facilitator of a healthy, robust, increasingly difficult, but civil discussion.

As a manager, I have observed in public meetings that some people particularly love to be the provocateur or agitator. I have relatives for whom the Thanksgiving dinner conversation was the highlight of the year as an opportunity to passionately advocate partisan positions in conversations around politics. A worthy provocateur would push the liberal or conservative envelope to the point where the “observers” at the table could no longer tolerate it and were encouraged or forced through conscience to jump in, while the agitators could sometimes be so partisan in their comments as to appear condescending, disrespectful, or uncaring of others’ beliefs.

A Responsibility to Reinforce Civility

As a manager in public settings, I learned that sometimes it’s best to ignore the provocateur goading me to respond or be defensive and to moderate or measure my words in my response to the partisan agitator to tone down the rhetoric. Occasionally families may have agitators who can be abusive, almost bullying, to quiet the more timid conversational participants, particularly if alcohol fortifies opinion. Similarly, some commissioners or residents may bully from the dais when judgment is impaired by ego or anger.

My personal response to such agitators at the public meeting or at my own dinner table is frequently to revert to the role of peacekeeper, the one who reinforces civility. Peacekeeping at public meetings and my extended family holiday gatherings employ some similar techniques. These techniques include demonstrating and communicating the purpose of the gathering with a communal love and respect, reflecting on the common heritage and blessings that we share, and seeking to correct or moderate offensive or demeaning language, which is often inadvertently used without forethought.

Peacekeepers reinforce the value of mutual respect for the different experiences and challenges of people in the room and assure the newest arrivals, like my Australian son-in-law, that they, too, belong in the family and its conversations. Community and family conversations are not so different in these respects.

Acknowledge Context and Perspectives

Encouraging empathy for others is valuable. Sometimes painful or partisan comments are made and understood only from the perspective of the person offering them. When speaking about political perspectives, the elderly resident struggling to make ends meet or an unemployable former union employee complaining at a public meeting may be envisioned as the aunt or brother at the holiday table who may not be benefiting from the roaring economy and stock earnings that you are grateful for this year.

Clarifying language, even among family, is valuable for avoiding misunderstanding. Your brother’s new bride might herself be a naturalized citizen, so clarifying a relative’s comment distinguishing between “legal” and “illegal” immigration when the border security conversation comes up could really avoid a painful or ugly response.

Perspectives of a young “criminal felon drug user” may change if his mother is your sister seated across the table tearfully explaining the absence of your “opioid addicted nephew,” who broke a leg playing football and had a drug-dispensing physician.

In my own family, the reality for conservative and liberal family divisions over Obamacare was tempered by a 25-year-old niece with a preexisting and life-threatening illness and huge monthly medical bills. Proximity to loved ones undergoing medical issues or a life-style crisis changes perspectives others may not have.

Our Families: Microcosms of Our Communities

It’s good to remember that personal character flaws and implicit bias that often make their way into comments made unthinkingly by family members at holidays are really a microcosm of the conversations occurring in our communities and public meetings. We often lovingly dismiss or forgive inappropriate comments by our relatives as “they don’t know any better” in a way that we are unwilling to do for strangers at civic meetings and that we label hate speech. Forgiveness is linked to gratitude and civility is linked to healthy communities of any kind.

I am grateful to have had a career as a local government leader and privileged to have improved the quality of life in several communities. My goal was always to increase the civility, sense of belonging, and cohesion of residents. So as ICMA members who will likely engage relatives and family members in loving and courageous conversations, let’s keep the civility end goal in mind and use our acquired skills to nurture and strengthen our extended families. If we’re lucky, our commitment to each other will flourish, and they can go back to strengthen their own neighborhoods and communities and convey the gratitude and blessings we share with others as Americans.