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My name is Conor. I’m helping shape how teams work together at Hugo, bringing your meetings, notes, and tasks all in one place.
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In a TED Talk presented in November 2017, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky demonstrated that how we use language shapes the way we think.
To illustrate this, she drew on examples from an Aboriginal group who have no word for right or left. She examined the Russian language, where there are multiple words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). In many languages, there are even grammatical genders — the sky in French is le ciel (“le” indicating that the sky is male).
In studying the people who use these languages, Boroditsky demonstrated that language and words profoundly shape the way we think about complex, impactful concepts such as:
Space and time
Decision-making
Blame and punishment
"It's how the language that you speak shapes the way you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do? How could I think differently?’ And also, ‘What thoughts do I wish to create?’”
Could building a great team culture be as simple as changing how you speak? It is certainly a good start, especially for the leaders in an organization. Language doesn’t just influence your reality, it impacts everyone around you.
It’s not uncommon in a workplace to hear that someone must deal with a customer. This frames the customer as a problem. Simply changing that word to assist — or another similarly positive expression — changes how you think of customers, and by extension how customers are treated.
The big-box store Target does something similar. Instead of calling their shoppers customers, Target refers to them as guests. Again, this changes interactions from purely transactional to kind and friendly, which has yielded outstanding results for Target’s reputation.
Language doesn’t just shape customer service, though; it also shapes how you view and treat your team at work. Word choice is just one aspect of shaping your team’s environment through language.
🗣 The Language of Leadership
Effective leaders communicate differently. When you speak in this leadership language, you can more easily create a vision that inspires action and engages your team. These are the building blocks of that language.
Clarity
The primary, non-negotiable tip in using the language of leadership is to strive for clarity. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying if nobody is receiving the message. This means that you need to choose your words carefully.
Overly complex ideas or expressions can easily lose your audience. Leading is not an opportunity to look smart, but rather a function where you must use clear, simple language that conveys your intended meaning.
Brevity
Similarly, the language of leadership is concise. Get to the point. Everyone on your team is likely already inundated with information. So it’s important that when you deliver yours, it’s delivered in a way such that it doesn’t get lost in the mix.
Don’t ramble or go off on tangents, or you risk losing your audience. Put the most important ideas at the beginning, and summarize them at the end.
Storytelling
Effective leaders use storytelling in their communication. Humans love stories. When we hear them, we produce elevated levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin, which is linked to feelings such as trust, compassion, and empathy. “We are, as a species, addicted to stories.
Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories,” says Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. So paint a picture when you’re speaking. Insert relevant examples to retain the attention of your audience.
Empathy
When leaders speak, they are also constantly listening and perceiving their audience’s reaction. Keep the emotional dynamics of the room on your radar. Don’t just focus on yourself, but be in tune with how your words are being received. Leverage your emotional intelligence. Read the room.
There’s often an opportunity to adapt your message based on the reactions you’re getting. The most capable leaders I know are constantly doing this on the fly. As you do, you may find that there are other voices that are waiting to be heard. Be respectful. Don’t dominate the conversation — even if it’s your conversation. Allow other voices to speak, and engage with them.
Decisiveness
Leaders speak using action-oriented terms. It’s not enough just to be idealistic. You need to be clear and concrete about things that have happened, are underway and are planned for the future. Position your strategies and ideas in reality.
This will help connect your team and the activities that they are engaging in with the broader vision you’re trying to convey.
🛠 How You Can Implement This
The language of leadership isn’t a skill that you learn and then never need to return to again. Like most skills worth cultivating, it’s an ongoing effort. It’s also an introspective one. So how do you know when you’re communicating effectively as a leader, and where you need to work on improving? Here are three specific tips.
Record your meetings
It’s so easy with products like Zoom to record your meetings in the cloud. Click that button — and of course, announce to everyone on the call that you are recording. You will learn a lot by reviewing meetings.
Just as professional athletes and video game players review their game footage daily and weekly to look for areas to improve, you too can watch how your team reacts and responds to the different languages that you use. The first time you do this, it will be uncomfortable. But in time, this discomfort will give way to a motivation to improve.
Measure your LNPS
Much like the NPS that we seek from our customers, Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a measure of employee engagement that asks, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company as a place to work?”
But that’s a company-level question. You or your HR team can make this more specific by performing an LNPS which is focused on specific leaders and managers. Tweak the question to say, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you recommend working for [insert name]?”
This is a quick health check to get a reading of your teams’ feelings toward you as a leader, which can be a great catalyst for conversation to continuously improve.
Hold one-on-ones
Consider covering language in your one-on-one template. Regularly ask your reports for feedback on your language and communication with questions such as, “Can you think of a time where I could’ve said something in a better way?” or “How did you feel about [insert meeting or discussion]?”
Whether you’re a leader, manager, or otherwise, how you use language is important. Not only does it impact all of our communications, but it shapes our worldviews.
Here’s one last place to begin changing how you use language in your own life and work. You just need to eliminate a single word from your vocabulary.
Should.
Should is indecisive. When you say you should do something, it’s more like a wish than an action. Do you actually do the things you say you “should do?” It is better to commit. If you end a meeting saying, “We should make the following changes,” have you really decided anything? Your action item lacks conviction.
Should is also negative, because it implies that something isn’t already happening. Should is wishful thinking that denies reality. In our connected, modern world, uncertainty is the status quo. As a leader, where do you go from here?
📚 Reads of the week
When Customers Ask for Features
The two most common responses to feature requests are both less than ideal. If you find yourself saying "No, we're not going to build that" or "Yes, we'll put it on the roadmap" too often then this thread is worth checking out.
Are Dashboards Dead?
Another great post from Tristan Handy and the team at Fishtown Analytics. The response in block quotes here is one of the more realistic interpretations of using data in organizations that I’ve seen.
This VP is Doing Things Differently in Product
First Round outlines some of the differentiating ideas for Tyler Hogge and the Product team at Divvy. I especially liked the idea of PMs owning onboarding for smaller deals.
Thanks for reading Future of Teamwork this week! Did anything stand out? I’d love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat 😁
Until next time,
Conor