How Your Lazy Language May Be Tanking Your Leadership Influence

I graduated from college in 1991 and landed in central Minnesota to start my professional career as a k-12 teacher and coach. Since I knew few people besides those I worked with, friendships emerged through my coworkers. Many of them had also made big moves for their teaching positions, so we naturally became like a second family to each other. It was easy to ascribe to the phrase:?

“We are like family here.”

While our intentions were good in thinking about my colleagues as family, I grew to realize that phrase was problematic.

Years later, I worked for a boss who regularly espoused that exact phrase, “We're like family.”

That was all lovely until the organization went through a few bumps, and the cultural implication at the time became more combative, with a domineering fist at the helm barking out orders to help out “the family.”

I didn't fully appreciate the connection until I read Sharone Bar-David's book?Trust Your Canary: Every Leader's Guide to Taming Workplace Incivility.?She writes in one of her articles:

“At the heart of this belief lies the notion that the closeness and caring that characterize family life allow members of the ‘workplace family’ to cross colleagues’ personal boundaries without being hurtful or inappropriate.”

Her perspective motivated me to eliminate this phrase from my vocabulary. While I still have close relationships with the people I serve, I've stopped short in recent years from thinking about (or espousing) them as actual family.

The Problem with Incongruency

Many of our everyday language traps result from habits that don’t actually align with our intentions. This results in an incongruency. When you and I are incongruent, we project confusion and doubt to others.

The examples below are the most common phrases I regularly encounter when language doesn't match what's intended. I'm still working to eliminate some of these phrases I've said myself.

As many of us discover, the leadership development journey is as much about what to stop as it is about where to start.

“Frankly…” or “To be honest…”

A common example of incongruent language is prefacing what's about to be said with “Frankly…” or the closely related “To be honest…” Most of the time, when this is said, the intention is to emphasize candor.

Unfortunately, the listener sometimes hears the opposite. A sudden emphasis of candor may leave the other party wondering what changed. When I notice someone say, “To be honest…” during a conversation, I find myself wondering if they've been honest up until that point.

Skip the doubt and drop this qualifying language. If you notice yourself saying this a lot, you might ask yourself:

“Am I actually providing as much candor as I claim?"

Hollow Apologizing

I most regularly see unnecessary apologies at the start of a formal meeting or presentation when something unexpected occurs. It might sound something like this:

“I want to apologize in advance if I miss a few things in this presentation. Jon was supposed to present this section, but he's unexpectedly out today…I just got the material this morning. I'm not really the expert on this, so I hope you'll forgive me if there's missing information or if this leaves you confused.”

Hey, if it's just you and a few colleagues you know well, no big deal, right?

Yet, I've seen it happen often when someone opens with language similar to the above in front of an executive team or board of directors. I begin to doubt the presenter's credibility when I hear this kind of opening.

By all means, apologize if you've done something wrong or errored, but don't dig yourself into a hole before you've even started. Very few people care what preparation didn't quite go according to plan.

Instead, skip the unnecessary apology, give yourself a pep talk, and show up to serve, even if you did get the slides just an hour earlier.

Side Note: A close cousin of the above is spending inordinate amounts of time troubleshooting technology problems in front of your audience. Always arrive early to set up your tech and have a backup plan. If the technology fails and you can't resolve it in 15 seconds while on the game field, move on and adapt.?

READ MORE

I invite you to dig into the remaining four lazy language traps that leaders fall into via my original blog posted HERE.

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