Stop the jargon and become a better leader

You can’t hide anything under plain speaking

First published on
Sep 22, 2020

From online jargon generators to newspaper columns lampooning the opaque vocabulary of business meetings, “corporate speak” has been relentlessly mocked for years — as much by those who use it as those who observe it. 

Yet, as anyone who’s taken part in the world of business will know, it’s almost impossible to escape this strange language. Rather than agreeing on something in a meeting, we’re “aligned on the deliverables.” Instead of a change happening from now on, it’s “onboarding new processes going forward.” And, when announcing redundancies, we obscure the bad news in unintelligible euphemisms that leave a sour taste. 

“As part of our Never The Same Again programme to embed the positive changes in ways of working through the crisis, we are today announcing proposals to further streamline store operations and management structures.” 

That’s how Marks & Spencer’s chief executive Steve Rowe announced 7,000 job losses. Janet from Womenswear and Oli in Buying must have been delighted to read about those positive changes, shortly before they received their redundancy notices. 

Yet as our day-to-day communications have been siloed into half-hour Zoom calls, it seems, anecdotally, that our use of jargon may be relaxing somewhat. Perhaps less formal language feels appropriate as we watch our colleagues’ cats walking over their keyboards, or their toddlers demanding biscuits during a client call. 

One senior leader who has long been an advocate of cutting to the chase is Russell Dalgleish, Chairman of the Scottish Business Network and Managing Partner of Exolta. An immensely experienced international businessman, he says, “I’ve sat in board meetings in London and I’ve been assessing professional advisors to come in to advise the firm, and I’ve honestly not known what they’re talking about.” 

That’s a surprising admission from someone who’s been a leader in the workplace for nearly 40 years, but how many of us could claim to have never had this experience? Indeed, it sometimes seems that there’s a whole industry out there invested in using language to keep people out, rather than invite them in — perhaps because it’s in their financial interest to keep things complicated. That, in a business landscape desperately trying to improve its diversity quotient, just won’t do, says Dalgleish.

“I’d always felt inferior to professionals in the UK — corporate financiers or lawyers or doctors. Because they would use words and expressions that I couldn’t quite follow, I struggled. And I felt that, in my position, I should understand what they’re saying. But when I worked in the States in the 1990s, I found professionals spoke a simpler language. They realised you have to communicate in a way that everyone could understand, and it was a natural thing.” 

For Dalgleish, though, language is not just about making things easy to understand. It’s about getting to the outcome. And, by extension, it’s about leadership. 

“It helps when I’m in a leadership role that I’m explaining things in a very simple way, which makes it easier for everyone else to get on board,” he says. “My personal obsession is the outcome. The management job, how do we get to that outcome, is less interesting to me than actually getting it done.” 

In fact, Dalgleish cites a surprising example of good, simple and powerful leadership language: the politics of COVID, during which leaders of countries around the world had to persuade their citizens to curtail their lifestyles, while also experiencing loss and fear. While the subsequent success of the management of the pandemic is up for debate almost everywhere, some of the language initially used was simple and effective across the entire UK population. 

“In the UK, there was this really simple phrase, which was three beats: “Stay at Home; Protect the NHS; Save Lives’. And it just really worked. We went, ‘I kind of get that, that makes sense. So me, by staying at home just watching the telly, can actually save lives through protecting the NHS? I’m a hero.’ As a piece of leadership rhetoric, that’s fantastic.”

Of course, language isn’t just about words — it’s also about behaviour and consistency, and here Dalgleish cites his own past behaviour. 

“I was working in Hammersmith and I came to work one day after a disagreement with a family member on the phone. So I came into the office and I just went, ‘Hi’ and went into my room and shut the door and got to work. And my HR director came in and said, ‘Russell, you’ve got to come out and speak to the staff.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because they’re all worried about their jobs.’” 

“Because that day I didn’t come in and smile and say hello to everyone, the people in that room quickly decided, ‘Oh the company must be in trouble’. As a leader, you have to be consistent,” he says.

So how does this trend towards simpler, more powerful language help those who are working in business today? Is it the time to stand out from your peers, or should we all hunker down until the storm has passed? For Dalgleish, the ability to communicate concisely and effectively is something that, as the world opens up electronically, will make the difference between getting and losing work. 

“Businesses are now starting to feel like there’s a larger array of choices on who they can appoint to help them. And they’re starting to go, ‘Well, we’re not going to employ just any lawyer. We’re going to employ a lawyer who specialises in the bit that we work in. And I know they specialise in it because I can talk to them and they understand me.’”

If he’s right about that, then we all need to be thinking about the end of obfuscation, of blinding with science, and of padding out the hours with jargon, because it’s not just a matter of communication: it’s a matter of honesty and trust. And once again, Dalgleish turns to a politician to prove it. 

“We’ve got to be honest,” he says. “And it comes back to leaders again. And the leaders that are impressing us at the moment in the world, it is just the fact that they’re being more honest. Watching the New Zealand prime minister saying, ‘This is going to be difficult.’ That’s a brave and challenging thing to do.”

In other words, honesty is at the heart of it all. You can misdirect and confound with opaque language, but you can’t hide anything under plain speaking. And when we can no longer shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye (at least without the grainy screen of a domestic wifi connection), honest language is the one way we can openly, simply and powerfully say: “Trust me.”

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