Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Another breakfast chez family Wallace. I can hear my wife downstairs already, clattering plates in a bad-tempered way, swearing – in French of course – at the cat. I have to hand it to the cat; it maybe doesn’t appreciate the full nuance of exactly what it is being accused of, but it sure gets the general drift and exits sharply out of the utility room window. I wish I could do the same.

I cautiously enter the kitchen and am followed by our two yawning girls, over whom I immediately fuss and hover. Not because I’m the doting dad type, more the self-preservation type. The girls’ passive-aggression thing, exacerbated by tiredness, which itself is exacerbated by them staying up late on iphones and devices, which was exacerbated by the inadequacy of my policing work to curb this last night, is going to lead to a nuclear detonation. Another good call by the cat, disappearing into her neck of the woods.

What are you having then? demands mother of her daughters. Dunno, mumbles one, the other offers nothing more than the ghost of a grimace at what’s on offer. Tension mounts, it’s all going to kick off. It’s all heading to me.

Come on! Barks Mrs W in a predictable, inevitable Gallic rage... Why will no one play balls with me?

The extra ‘s’ has added a whole new dimension to her question, though we are all way too intimidated to point this out at this precise moment. My wife’s English is excellent, often better than mine, but there are occasions when it can miss, by the narrowest of margins, with devastating results. This morning we are all inclined to go with it, because, errors aside, there can be no doubting where she is coming from. It was the same last week, when she grew frustrated at being the only one – as she saw it – making an effort to keep the house clean. Why, she asked aloud, am I the only one left holding the fork? I was too busy following the cat out of the fort to offer a view.

So readers of a certain age and background may recognise the characters in the picture above and the television comedy it’s taken from. Mind Your Language, a 70’s thing, unthinkable and unbroadcastable now. A hapless teacher takes a class of various nationalities attempting to learn the majestic English language, and are all milked for laughs according to their national stereotypes – a lazy, womanising Italian, humourless housefrau, a portly delusional but macho Spaniard etc. As is the teacher himself, a well-meaning, utterly polite but inhibited Brit, reduced to a stuttering wreck by the flirtatious and charmingly unrepressed sexuality of the French Mademoiselle as in our caption. You will have guessed, that for me, with my very own dear wife, this is a comedy routine that is well, routine for me.

So why isn’t this piece entitled Mind Your Language then? Isn’t that what I’m about, as a communications professional who has made a career from words, and choosing the precise ones that create the impression you want? Yes and no. Yes, it’s important to get these right. My first week as a Director of a Water company and somehow I let a press release out explaining that a sewage plant was disgorging raw effluent because of a ‘catastrophic breakdown’ of part of the machinery. Now this was a UK national story, people were all over us looking for answers and who was to blame. A catastrophic breakdown in the engineering sense, means broken beyond repair, which is why it was a perfectly factual explanation in print. As it appeared on the press release however, it probably read as apocalyptic melt-down with earth shattering consequences. Or something more serious. On reflection, I probably should have spotted it. Didn’t. Things went a bit wilder for a while until happily the demands for our CEO’s resignation eventually died down, as did his anger at me. You can bet I’ve studied every word in a press release since, and web content, and letters and poster headlines and all of it. I have debated at length whether saying ‘I am sorry this has happened’ is the same as saying ‘I apologise that this has happened’. (It’s not, but can buy valuable time when sparring with Mrs W).

Mind your language indeed. My trade, words. Ones to inspire, and ones to defuse. To build your brand.

Except. There is something way more powerful than words, and that’s why this post has a different title. For me, you see, even as a man of words, it’s all about how you say it.

Back to a previous job. I was part of a team that developed a corporate vision for our business. We spent days crafting this by committee, our form of words that articulated an aspirational future. Then we launched it – printed banners, documents, polo shirts with our words, took it on the road to staff and stakeholders. The words turned out to be as good as we could ever have hoped, the sell from the top team couldn’t have been more committed. A huge success; industry-leading engagement, motivation and recognition followed. Was it the words or how we told it? Well I guess that’s the point. For some it was one, and others the other. Both were in harmony, and when you have that, it’s unstoppable. And you begin to think it’s easy.

We got greedy. Ever more ambitious. More visions – ‘supporting’ visions, departmental missions, annual aspiration statements. More words than a fridge magnet poetry masterclass, and diagrams to explain the linking of statements and their hierarchy. Until we reached our peak/nadir of this new industry and I found myself on a stage at a staff event waving a double-sided plastic laminated guide to well, everything. One side the overall vision, and its supporting pillar statements, regulatory business goals and tangible targets. Other side the leadership behaviours required to achieve all this, colour-coded of course so you would know how to feel as you read this, and a broader shopping list of business aspirations stretching out to future millennia. I think there was a built-in compass to orientate north from south and electrodes to monitor your heartbeat to see if you were excited enough about it all. Okay, I made those last bits up, but we did have two sides of colourful nonsense that they would have baulked at in North Korea. All about control, message, attitudes, and ensuring buy-in.

But buy-in can only come from sentiment. Lousy words don’t help, but you either feel it or don’t. And that my friends, comes down to the authenticity and honesty with which you deliver the words, any words. So me, professional scriptwriter to the stars, will always say, here’s some words, use them, but not all of them. Replace some with ones of your own. Better still replace them all with words you use, and the people you are trying to reach know you use. Otherwise you are being me, and I’m better at being me than most. Or you are being whoever wrote your script in which case why do we need you anyway?

Sentiment over syntax, always. Back to the reality show that is my life. We moved house four years ago, left Edinburgh for full-on farmhouse countryside. The much maligned Mrs W - to whom I must apologise for perpetuating the falsehood that she is some kind of permanently agitated harridan dishing out torments galore when in fact she’s only like that some of the time, usually for good reason, the rest being an adorable ray of sunshine that lights up my existence – set about turning our house into a home. She did this with unlimited glee and enthusiasm at her new surrounds. And we asked a builder to come over from the city to quote for some work we required. Average, Scottish guy, polite but gruff, hands like shovels and a bit limited in small talk. We offered a cup of tea. Nice place, he commented, the hills around here look wonderful.

Yes, beamed my wife, smiling right by my side. I’d love to show you my neck of the womb.

He took a big slurping gulp and swallowed hard. That would be nice, he nodded. Again, it made more sense to me to just let this one pass. I think we understood each other better without it.

There will be those reading this whose working lives involve endless teleconferences. Some working for global businesses and international teleconference/video calls. Somehow, we have all let a culture emerge where the norm is to sit still on these, wait for your turn to speak, and select each word with surgical precision when we do. Think about those joining in for whom English isn’t their native tongue, about the barriers we are putting up to getting the best out of them with these straightjacket protocols. What if there’s an amnesty, and everyone’s allowed to be themselves, make mistakes with words but wave their arms and gesture to get their sentiment across? They would be pressed to make a bigger faux pas than my wife did, and she still got away with it just by being herself.

Final question. What’s French for double entendre?