Tolerance

Words have meaning. Words are symbols of our thoughts, ideas, and our character—both individually or as groups. We communicate ourselves, our values, and our aspirations through words along with a specific message intended in a given communication interchange. Indeed, the specific message words convey is often only incidental to the larger, more generic, and more powerful ideas loaded into certain words. These words have come to symbolize powerful cultural ideas that succinctly define what it is to be American—a citizen and a worker. Words—especially certain words like tolerance—leave an intellectual trail that captures a worker’s cultural history and shapes his or her present and future actions. Leadership in America continues practices extending back over more than 200 years of our history. Operationally, intellectually, and emotionally who we are as workers and how we do leadership in this nation is traceable to founding values and ideals immortalized in a relatively few words. These words and the historical “loading” our heritage has instilled in them provide the foundation for our individual self-perception and the character of our leadership. They give life to the leader’s words and meaning to their actions beyond the obvious.