Bad Business Jargon To Banish Immediately

Every culture has its own vocabulary, but the words and phrases created in the workplace are often hollow, shallow, or mind-numbingly boring. You don’t want your business communications to sound like a script from?The Office, do you?

We're living in a time when transparency and authenticity are finally being respected. There is no place at work for conformist phrases that scream imitation instead of differentiation.

Yet it’s hard to break the habit. I tried for a week – and it was painful. I couldn’t believe how easily these creativity killers unconsciously slipped off my tongue.

So I reached out to friends and colleagues for their opinions on the worst, most annoying and overused business jargon. I compiled the list and share it with you below.

The list below includes some of the most annoying business jargon, but it's by no means exhaustive. In the comments, share with me and other readers the words and phrases you think are overused and annoying.

If reading that jargon made you cringe (good!), here are two challenges to invigorate your vocabulary.

1. Personal Challenge?

For one week, keep a diary of all the times you use (or almost use) these words and phrases or other business jargon. Bring your diary to meetings. Use it when you’re writing emails, on the phone and preparing documents. Then decide which words and phrases you want to permanently remove. Practice replacing them with your own words or phrases that are more meaningful and relevant.

2.?Group Challenge

Make your next team meeting more interesting and less predictable. Get all participants to agree to remove a set of deadly dull words or phrases for the entire meeting. Identify the most annoying business jargon you hear all the time at your workplace. Then put the complete verboten list on a white board (or send them in advance for web conferences).

Next, assign someone as the jargon catcher to record every instance of the utterance of those words. To make it even more fun, you can have a buzzer that gets rung every time someone uses one of these words. Or have a contest and reward the person who uses the fewest. Make note of the fresh, precise words or phrases you use to replace this common jargon.

To build an authentic, strong and compelling personal brand, create your own business vocabulary. Jargon is bad for your brand!

Say what you mean, and say it with style.

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