Civility as a Business Practice: Lessons from Reagan's White House

Executive overview

Shelby Scarborough, founder of Practical Protocol and author of Civility Rules, draws on her career managing White House advance events, State Department protocol, and high-profile engagements with leaders from Nelson Mandela to Pope John Paul II to make the case that civility is not politeness theatre — it is a learnable, repeatable practice that directly reduces business risk and deepens relationships.

The core insight is that civility is not about being weak or accommodating; it is about communicating clearly enough that the other person can actually hear you — and that capacity to be heard is what enables growth, partnership, and trust in any organisation.

The episode covers how small, intentional acts of courtesy compound into cultural change, why intellectual humility is the keystone of every other civil behaviour, and how the 110 rules George Washington adapted from a Jesuit etiquette manual still map cleanly onto modern leadership challenges.

Shelby's career and the protocols of civility

• Started in President Reagan's White House advance office straight out of UCLA.
• Managed presidential movements worldwide: Venice Economic Summit, Berlin Wall speech, Gorbachev summits.
• Moved to the State Department handling visits of kings, queens, and foreign ministers — the floor was foreign ministers.
• First private-sector client was Nelson Mandela days after his release from prison; handled his White House, State Department, and Capitol Hill visits.
• Each high-profile engagement reinforced one pattern: every interaction teaches something about civility, good or bad.

The swan principle: grace on the surface, paddling hard underneath

• Protocol officers use the swan metaphor — calm and composed outwardly while constantly tracking next steps.
• Reagan's Oval Office "admin time" stacked Miss America, Boy Scouts, departing staff, and Secret Service families back-to-back in under 90 minutes.
• Guests were staged individually around the West Wing — cabinet room, Roosevelt room, lobby — rotating in sequence so each felt they had a personal experience, not a waiting-room shuffle.
• The logistical precision was invisible; the emotional warmth was what people remembered.
• This is a template for any high-touch business process: choreograph the mechanics so the human moment can land.

Reagan's civility as a leadership model

• Reagan's "after you" habit in elevators was instinctive — he insisted despite it being logistically backward for advance staff.
• He treated adversaries — Gorbachev, Tip O'Neill — with consistent dignity; policy disagreements stayed about positions, not persons.
• Reagan and O'Neill fought hard for their positions then went for a beer; shared Irish heritage gave them a common bond to return to.
• He kept a plaque on his Oval Office desk: "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go as long as he doesn't mind who gets the credit."
• Scarborough received an engraved version of that plaque when she left the White House — it became a career-defining motto.

The business cost of incivility

• A single mishandled firing can destroy a company; Gallagher cites cases where a bad termination ended a 50-year business within a year.
• Soured bank relationships — telling rather than partnering — cost businesses flexibility precisely when they need it most, e.g., PPP access during COVID.
• Uncivil conflict inflames disputes, turns resolvable breakdowns into expensive litigation or talent loss.
• Conversely, a civil firing can preserve the relationship: Scarborough remains close friends with people she terminated.
• Even egregious behaviour does not require an egregious response; dignity in termination is an HR floor, not a bonus.

Civility is not weakness — it is the medium for difficult messages

• "Civility isn't about being weak. It's not a weakness to be polite to people."
• The real definition: saying what you need to say in a way that people can actually hear it.
• Antagonistic delivery guarantees the content is lost; civil delivery keeps the channel open.
• This applies to politics, boardrooms, family — anywhere communication needs to move people forward together.
• Disagreement is essential; a culture of only-nice is a culture of stasis with no room for growth.

Intellectual humility as the keystone

• Humility does not mean spinelessness or absence of position; it means walking into a room knowing you could be wrong.
• The practice: "I might be able to learn something new here" — held simultaneously with confidence in your own view.
• You cannot force civility on someone else; your only job is your own behaviour and hoping it influences the room.
• The blind men and the elephant: everyone reports their perspective faithfully — the trunk is a snake, the leg is an oak — all are correct from where they stand.
• EO/forum practice of asking clarifying questions before sharing experience is the operational version of this humility.

George Washington's rules and the roots of the book

• As a schoolboy Washington translated a Jesuit monk's French etiquette manual intended to groom French noblemen.
• The resulting 110 rules — including "stand not so close as to do a man with one's spittle" — are in the public domain and read as oddly prescient (especially in COVID).
• Scarborough spent years distilling those rules into her book Civility Rules: Timeless Tools for Creating a Practice of Civility.
• Washington's insight was democratic: civility was not a class marker but a shared practice for a new egalitarian nation.
• All 110 rules compress into five concepts: humility, honour, duty, trust, and courtesy.
• Washington himself was imperfect — had a temper, was a slaveholder — but grew; he freed his slaves at the end of his life, partly under the influence of Lafayette's abolitionism.

Small acts, compounding culture

• A Canadian student who had been bullied started holding open the school's front door each morning and greeting people.
• Initial mockery turned to expectation; the behaviour spread; local media picked it up; his world changed.
• The lesson: one person, one repeated act of courtesy, can shift a culture without a programme or budget.
• Office equivalents: ask a colleague if you can grab them a coffee; during remote work, explicitly set and respect boundaries rather than passive-aggressively resenting encroachments.
• A crossing-guard who made deliberate eye contact and a personal wave with each passing car is Gallagher's version of the same principle — a moment of genuine connection people remember.

Pope John Paul II and the power of physical acknowledgement

• At a hospital-wing consecration in Poland, the pope concluded his speech and walked to 40 hospitalised children seated on wooden stools in pyjamas, some bald from chemotherapy.
• He touched each child on the head, one by one.
• The room became electric — Scarborough, not Catholic, describes it as overwhelming.
• The lesson: the direct, individual, physical acknowledgement — like the crossing guard's eye contact — cuts through ceremony and reaches the other person's humanity.
• Generosity of spirit — giving people the benefit of the doubt, assuming good intent — is the daily business version of this gesture.

Credit, recognition, and giving it away

• Reagan's desk plaque on credit became a personal operating principle for Scarborough.
• Deliberately giving credit away requires effort; taking it is the default human tendency.
• Gallagher's on-air acknowledgement of his production team is the same practice at small scale.
• Old saying: "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan." The leadership inversion: give everyone credit for success, absorb personal responsibility for failure.
• This is the "noble" version of the original rules designed for noblemen — nobility operationalised as generosity, not status.

Civility in extremis: coaching in a maximum-security prison

• Gallagher and his wife spent two days coaching prisoners, many convicted of murder, inside a maximum-security facility.
• Going in terrified, he came out with a principle: nobody is irredeemable, nobody is a monster, nobody lacks humanity.
• Hearing the full story — family, upbringing, circumstance — makes behaviour understandable without excusing it.
• This is empathy in its most demanding form, and it mirrors what Scarborough argues civility requires daily: withhold judgment long enough to understand someone's full context.
• The same capacity that allows grace in a prison can transform a difficult performance review, a partnership breakdown, or a customer complaint.

Practical takeaways and the "caught in civility" card

• Civility is a practice, not a personality trait — it can be trained, habituated, and institutionalised.
• Scarborough is producing credit-card-sized "caught in civility" cards to hand to strangers who show exceptional courtesy, with "pass it on" printed on the back.
• The card reframes attention: instead of scanning for threats, you scan for kindness to reward — which changes your own state as much as the recipient's.
• Applicable in any organisation: formal recognition of civil behaviour (not just performance) signals what the culture values.
• The five operating concepts — humility, honour, duty, trust, courtesy — are measurable enough to build feedback, hiring, and culture assessments around.