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September 25, 2007

What's in a word?

Every organization has its own vocabulary: words that have taken on special meaning based on intentions and shared experiences.

“Quality,” for example, may be the concept that saved the company from ruin—or the superficial campaign that ate a lot of time and accomplished nothing.

Think of other words in common usage at your organization that are not only ingrained in people's consciousness, they're also shorthand for a whole lot of history and meaning—words like:

Innovation
Customer
Leadership
Growth
Integrity
Execution
Colleague

Here's the reason I bring this up: Once these words have thoroughly infiltrated the minds of your employees, you can't decide on a whim to change their meaning. Let's say, for example, that you work in an organization that is conservative, bureaucratic and risk-averse. You are trying to promote creativity and collaboration, so you decide to call your program “Innovation,” hoping that it will inspire people to think outside the box. But every time employees see the word “innovation,” they get anxious, because they associate it with behavior that gets people's hands slapped.

In other words, using the word that carries so much emotional baggage has the opposite effect than what you intended: Rather than engaging employees, it makes them want to run as fast as they can in the other direction.

Or, even in a less extreme example, the misuse of words may cause employees to think that something doesn't apply to them. If, for example, “customer service” is the name of a certain department, people in accounting naturally think that it's not their job. So introducing a new priority called “Customer Service” is going to cause confusion.

Can you, over time and with a lot of concentrated effort, ever change the meaning of a word in your organization? Sure, but it's an uphill battle. Before you volunteer to try to push that big boulder, consider whether using a different word might be faster, easier and smarter.

Posted by davisandco at September 25, 2007 01:07 PM

Comments

Posted by: Bob Beardsley at October 12, 2007 02:15 PM