Before You Decide I’m An Arse
There are days when I would like everyone I work with to assume the absolute best of me. If I'm late, there was a very good reason. If I'm quiet, I'm concentrating. If I forget something, I'm unusually busy. If an email I sent sounds a bit abrupt, you have clearly misinterpreted my trademark warmth and charm.
In short: Give me a little grace.
The problem is that I'm not always quite as generous when it's someone else's turn. They haven't replied to my email - Rude. They've missed something they said they'd do - Unreliable. They seemed distracted when I was talking - Clearly they don't value my contribution.
Our brains are remarkably good at taking a tiny piece of information and constructing an entire Netflix miniseries around it. And at work, where we're often busy, tired, under pressure and communicating through short messages on screens, there are plenty of gaps for our brains to fill.
Unfortunately, we don't always fill them generously.
We rarely know the whole story
The colleague who was abrupt with you might be worried about their child. The person who missed the deadline might be juggling three other things you know nothing about. Your manager might genuinely have forgotten. That strange message on Teams might have been written between two meetings while its author was desperately trying to eat a yoghurt.
Or they might, of course, be being an arse.
Grace doesn't require us to pretend that nobody ever behaves badly. It asks us not to make that our first explanation. There's an important difference.
Grace isn't the absence of accountability
Giving someone grace doesn't mean accepting repeated poor behaviour, avoiding difficult conversations or smiling serenely while Gary destroys the team. You can be kind and have boundaries, or curious and still challenge someone. You can say, "That wasn't okay" without adding, "and therefore I have concluded that you are fundamentally a terrible human being."
Grace simply creates a little space between what happened and the story we tell ourselves about why it happened.
Taking a moment to reframe. Can you adjust “She just doesn't care” and try “I wonder what's going on.” Instead of “He deliberately left me out of this”, try “Maybe I don't have the whole story.” Or rather than “They are hopeless”, try “That wasn't their best moment.”
It's a tiny shift. But tiny shifts can change the direction of an entire day.
Bad Days make us ungenerous
This gets harder when we're already having a bad day. When we're tired, stressed, embarrassed, disappointed or overwhelmed, ambiguity can start looking suspiciously like hostility. A two-word email suddenly has a tone. Someone walking past without saying hello becomes evidence. A delayed response starts acquiring motive.
We don't just experience what happened. We add interpretation, intention and sometimes an imaginary soundtrack. And that's one of the ways a bad ten minutes becomes a bad afternoon.
Sometimes the most useful question isn't Why are they being such an arse? but Is there another explanation? Not necessarily a nicer explanation. Just another one.
The grace economy
There's another reason to practise this. Eventually, you're going to need it too. You're going to forget something, send the clumsy email, be distracted when somebody needs your attention or make a decision without all the information. You'll have a day when you're operating at considerably less than your advertised capacity.
On that day, you'll probably hope the people around you don't use your worst ten minutes as definitive evidence of who you are. So perhaps there's a little informal grace economy we can create at work. Give people a fraction more benefit of the doubt. Ask before assuming. Get curious before getting furious. Challenge behaviour without immediately judging character.
And remember that most of us are walking around with far more going on than anybody else can see. So give me grace.