At a time when polarization threatens America’s C-suites and storefronts, leaders who have the skills to bridge divides in the workplace are critical and offer a competitive advantage.
One of the most complex issues that workplace leaders must navigate is religion, or employees’ religious identity. That can get especially tricky toward the end of the calendar year, with the annual mash-up of competing religious holidays and observances.
But here’s the good news: successfully bridging divides across religious identity is a skill that can be applied to navigating other differences.
Here are four management tips that employers can learn from interfaith leaders to help successfully navigate conflicting viewpoints in the workplace.
Disentangle Beliefs from Behaviors
Some exchanges between colleagues cross the line into unacceptable behavior. Studies show that 30 percent of Americans report being bullied at work; microaggressions continue to impact marginalized groups; and the number of antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents continue to grow. To be clear, there’s no room for these behaviors in the workplace.
That said, it can be easy to fall into the trap of conflating a person’s religious or ideological beliefs with their behaviors. In an increasingly diverse workforce, we should expect that employees will line up on all sides of contentious issues. When someone’s beliefs about a topic conflict with our own, it is tempting to view the other person’s actions with suspicion.
When we learn that a colleague holds different beliefs — immigration policy, sexuality, eternal salvation or the conflict in the Middle East — it is important to differentiate between their right to hold a set of personal beliefs and the expectation that they uphold a shared standard of behavior in the workplace.
This distinction becomes obvious when looking through the lens of inter-religious difference. A Hindu manager and their evangelical Christian teammate, for example, hold not only different but foundationally opposing views on the nature of the divine. At the same time, they adhere to their company’s non-proselytization standards and are able to work well together toward their shared goals.
Our colleagues’ beliefs are personal, complex, often deeply held, and — when it comes down to it — not in our purview as organizational leaders to attempt to change. People’s behavior at work, however, is something that we can and should monitor. When we face a challenging situation related to colleagues who hold differing beliefs about a sensitive topic, it can be helpful to zoom out and ask whether it’s belief or behavior that concerns us, and act accordingly.
Get Personal
In the workplace, tensions between people with differing religious identities and divergent ideologies can quickly get personal. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 34 percent of global survey respondents said they would reduce effort on projects led by someone whose beliefs clash with their own.
Rather than avoid confrontation, interfaith leaders focus on building positive professional relationships rooted in common ground, while acknowledging and respecting deep differences. As Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America says, “In a religiously diverse democracy, people have to be able to agree on some fundamental things, while disagreeing on other fundamental things.”
Meaningful relationships across worldview differences tend to lead to deeper respect for someone else’s identity groups, and can lead to stronger social capital, which will lead to a greater sense of empathy and trust among teammates and, as a result, a more productive workplace. Teleskope’s 2005 Fortune 500 ERG Benchmark Report found that Employee Resource Group (ERG) participants have longer tenure and stronger performance, and 57 percent report that ERGs had directly influenced business innovation.
Find Shared Values
What does this look like in practice? Interfaith leaders start by identifying shared values across diverse religious and philosophical traditions — compassion and service to others, to name a few. At FaithConnect, Equinix’s Interfaith Employee Connect Network, members of diverse religious traditions join together to drive awareness and raise funds for A21, an organization that combats human trafficking. We can assume that FaithConnect members likely disagree on a whole host of theological and political issues. Yet despite those disagreements, they come together around their shared commitment to ending slavery.
Managers looking to address ideological divides can lean into this focus on building personal relationships rooted in shared values. For example, two employees who disagree about abortion access may both care deeply about volunteering in their local schools. The difference between them is real, but it doesn’t have to be the whole story.
Getting personal is also pragmatic. Anchoring your relationship to a set of superordinate goals that you are both trying to achieve as colleagues can ground your interactions in shared deliverables, which helps right-size conflicting beliefs. Having different perspectives around the table also often leads to more nuanced and effective solutions. We can come together despite our diverse perspectives to collaborate, build and maintain relationships, and get our work done.
Offer a Guiding Framework and Prioritize Upskilling
The rise of hybrid work models, AI integration, and the blurring of boundaries between business, society, and technology have transformed our operating context. Rapid change and diverse workforce expectations demand innovative approaches. Interfaith leaders, adept at engaging diverse religious and secular traditions, offer a model for navigating differences that can enhance organizational culture and drive measurable business outcomes.
To achieve the highest impact, successful interfaith leaders first align their organizations around a shared vision. At Interfaith America, we use a three-part framework called Respect, Relate, Cooperate. The environment we try to build is characterized by respect for diverse religious and non-religious identities; mutually enriching relationships across diverse communities; and cooperation around shared goals.
The Respect, Relate, Cooperate framework is also useful when thinking about how to build an inclusive and collaborative culture more broadly, beyond religious diversity. But this culture doesn’t fall from the sky; people need the skills to make it a reality.
The “soft skills” essential for organizations to build an inclusive and welcoming culture are drawn from shared values found in the world’s diverse religious, spiritual, and secular traditions. These values serve as the bedrock for constructive engagement and problem-solving in a world rife with complex challenges.
The skills include:
Respect
- Empathy: Recognizing each person’s inherent value, understanding their experiences, and treating them with dignity, particularly if they hold a viewpoint that contrasts with yours.
- Intellectual Curiosity: Cultivating an appreciation for the diverse ways in which others view the world by exploring the breadth of human experience.
Relate
- Active Listening: Building trust through attentive, open-ended listening that creates pathways for genuine connection and transformation.
- Humility: Recognizing that no individual has all the answers and that our perspective on any issue will be strengthened by seeking out and learning from unfamiliar voices.
- Storytelling: Sharing our life experiences rather than pointing to statistics has the power to dismantle biases, foster inclusion, and reinforce shared values.
Cooperate
- Collaborative Problem Solving: If we go straight to our differences, we get stuck; If we ignore our differences, we get stuck. Instead, focus on what we have in common — a discreet problem to solve, for example — which can create a foundation to work through our differences in a constructive way.
Companies can support upskilling by including a focus on these skills in mandatory onboarding processes, ongoing educational opportunities, or by offering bite-size tools in quarterly all-hands calls. By aligning on a shared vision and prioritizing skill-building, leaders can foster resilient and cohesive teams capable of greater innovation and adaptability in an unpredictable future.
Lean into Shared Values
There are currently six generations in the workforce, and each brings diverse geographies, cultures, perspectives, values, and work styles that influence how organizations function. In an era marked by increasing division and social fragmentation — where individual values are more likely to guide conduct and decision-making — business leaders are faced with the challenge of how to build an organizational foundation that counters the urge to polarize and instead builds an inclusive culture that welcomes all.
While these challenges are daunting, organizations already have the key to the solution. By leaning into your organization’s core values, you can allow for the healthy expression of diverse ideas and perspectives while also aligning individual behaviors with the organization’s collective mission.
Anchoring to a shared set of values drives consistency in times of change and deep division, while clarifying behavioral expectations and setting the standard for accountability that ensures everyone is held to the same principles.
As we navigate through the “new normal” of leading through crisis, now may be a perfect opportunity to take a fresh look at your company’s values, while also identifying interfaith leaders and others within your organization who might model behaviors for those around them.
Learn from Interfaith Leaders
At a time when our colleagues hold divergent viewpoints on contentious issues and organizations are expected to step in and offer solutions, managers can learn practical lessons from interfaith leaders.
By disentangling beliefs from behaviors, building personal relationships rooted in shared values, uniting around a common vision and providing skill-building opportunities to make it a reality, and anchoring to organizational core values, leaders can create a thriving and resilient culture that leverages different identities in positive and productive ways.
Sumreen Ahmad is Managing Director, Talent and Organization at Accenture. Amber Hacker is Managing Director, and Megan Johnson is Senior Director of Corporate Strategy, at Interfaith America.
