The corporate machinery functions very much like any other profit-oriented power centre. It has its own share of dissidents, and rebels, and factions, and leadership teams. When objectivity is shunned and a relativist outlook to life is celebrated (as in today's times) purpose begins to derail from the tracks of knowledge and tumbles mindless, and directionless into the dark void of nothingness – the one ultimate nothingness that is the anti-thesis of all that is good, in life and in creation. This derailment soon manifests as conflicts. And where there is a conflict there is diplomacy. “If you need to grow in your chosen career path, you need to learn to be diplomatic,” this is the founding mantra taught to all initiates entering the corporate world. But is this advice sound?
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Here are three ways how being diplomatic can adversely affect your character.
Diplomacy can be short-sighted
The reason to be diplomatic, more often than not, rises from the fear of getting entangled in conflicts. While this is not a bad or unwise desire, to objectively approach a conflict with an aim of putting an end to it is everyone’s obligation. Diplomacy, unfortunately, encourages a myopic (and a fear-led) approach to conflicts. Diplomacy either takes a middle ground and absolves you of all your personal responsibility to do the right thing or it takes a stance not for the collective good, but for selfish, and short-sighted personal good.
Diplomacy can eat up your identity
Everyone is unique in their own way. When knowledge is introduced to this uniqueness, we acquire the ability to create a balance inside us and between us and the rest of the world in our own unique way. But diplomacy binds us to conditioned mindsets and stops us from reaching our own true identity. It stops us from speaking our mind, and it forces us to submit to group-think and collective trends, robbing us of our individuality.
Diplomacy can keep you from acquiring knowledge
Once a person submits to the crippling convenience of the neutral ground of diplomacy, and forgets (and relinquishes) their true identity, they are submitting themselves to be drowned in the murky waters of willful ignorance. Diplomacy encourages ignorance of the decay in the social setting. The more we ignore taking the right action in this mindlessly competitive and predominantly unjust setting, in the name of being diplomatic, the more we contribute towards creating an unbalanced and an unequal environment. Diplomacy keeps out the much-required knowledge in keeping balance and harmony.
Diplomacy can, sometimes, be a momentary and self-satisfying strategy to get through the dog-eat-dog dynamics of the world. However, this self-satisfying strategy when employed by each and every individual for their own selfish goals, all at the same time, needless to say, would present disastrous results. Calling a spade a spade is the only way to reclaim the clarity that we have lost in the name of diplomacy.
