What You Call a Thing is as Important as The Thing Itself. The Power and Impact of Words to Drive Transformational Alignment.

Part 7 of Allyn Bailey’s Series on Driving Talent Acquisition Transformation

In my last article, The Power of Design Principles In Your Talent Transformation, I talked about the importance of having design principles that everyone can leverage to ensure that actions, design decisions, system requirements and day to day behaviors all align to your transformational goals, even if you are not in the room. If you missed that or any of the other articles in this series where I outline lessons 1 - 28, you could read them all?here.

Today I want to talk about words. Words can inspire. And words can destroy. You must choose them very, very carefully. Throughout my experience driving transformations I have learned the hard way that what you call a thing can either propel or sink your efforts.?The biggest challenge with labeling ideas, roles, intents, etc. is that you are walking a fine line between making the title palatable to your audience who are basing their understanding on their past experiences and making the words evocative enough that it cannot be confused with previous beliefs or concepts you are looking to replace.?To illustrate the impact of these naming decisions, let me tell you the story of my experience trying to introduce and embed recruitment marketing into an organization.?

I was excited that I had gotten enough rope from the TA leadership team to start exploring proactive recruiting with a representative group of recruiters from across the organization.?Hooray, I had achieved milestone number one, which was getting enough traction to bring people together and brainstorm.?The three-day face to face was one of the most difficult of my career.?In the room, I had a combination of people who were open to exploring new thoughts and a strong contingent of recruiters and staffing managers who had their own agenda.?They firmly believed that what was needed to improve their recruiting challenges was more “sourcing”, and any other initiative would pull needed resources away from their recruiting teams. When I say sourcing, I should be clear they were really talking mine, match and shortlisting applicants in the ATS, not robust sourcing. So not really sourcing and definitely not proactive recruitment marketing.

I was able to navigate the conversation so that by day three we had come to agreement that there was possibly some effort that we could all agree was needed by the recruiting team before reviewing applicants in the ATS, but the recruiters were uncomfortable with the term marketing being attributed to this effort, as they felt marketing was fluff and would mean the new role we endorsed would not be held accountable to making their job easier as recruiters. They believed they would have no tangible way to measure a marketers impact on the recruiter’s job.?

It was day three and I was tired.?I felt like the dialogue had been going around and around in circles and I wanted to leave the face to face with enough alignment that I could go back to TA leadership and say I had tacit agreement from the recruiting team and leverage that to begin the work of building a recruitment marketing strategy.?My thought process at this point was, to let them label the idea anything they could tolerate, to get “agreement” and then set out to win them over to the underlying value and beliefs later. ?So, I looked for a path forward, and found it in the term, Lead Generation.?The pro "sourcing" contingent saw this as an action-oriented label, the pro marketing contingent saw it as close enough to recruitment marketing.?I was thrilled. I believed we had a win.?

I was very, very wrong.?I had a momentary win, but in the end the choice of Lead Generation as a term to encompass the concept of recruitment marketing put the transformation efforts in major jeopardy. First off, a battle immediately ensued between those that saw lead generation as a "sourcing" function and those that saw it as a proactive marketing function.?Secondly, we ended up mired in the challenge of how to demonstrate the impact of lead generation teams once we built them, because any measure or metric leveraged was always tied in the minds of the TA leaders and organization to how many “leads” were brought in, how fast, and how many were connected to specific job requisitions.?Hopefully, most of you reading this know that recruitment marketing has a major role to play in awareness and engagement which although highly impactful to the recruiting process is not something you can draw a straight line from to a hire.?Its more nuanced than that.?By allowing the labeling of recruitment marketing as lead generation, I allowed the organization to avoid navigating the transformational work of adopting a strategy that was more nuanced than just application processing.?I believe this one mistake in labeling pushed back the organizational transformation by at least a year if I account for the cumulative challenges this one term generated during our journey.

Lesson 29: Old Words Bring Old Baggage

This brings me to my first lesson this week.?Be very thoughtful about the words you use and leverage as labels for concepts and ideas.?Avoid the trap of wanting to make a label palatable or allow for greater ease in acceptance by avoiding tough conversations about your intent or the work of creating alignment across an organization.?Aligning to old vocabulary may feel easier, because it allows people to feel comfortable and makes them more agreeable, but old words come with old beliefs, intents, perceptions.?Not ripping of the band aid and removing vocabulary that is evocative of old beliefs for the sake of comfort only pushes your change battles down the road and makes them more difficult, because you have inadvertently created a foothold for transformation challengers to hold onto.

"Be mindful when it comes to your words. A string of some that don't mean much to you, may stick with someone else for a lifetime." -Rachel Wolchin?

Lesson 30: New Words Need to be Linked and Labeled

There is some science to helping your audience connect newly generated vocabulary to something they already know.?This is called linking and labeling.?What this means is, you are taking the new concept, word, or idea you have created as part of your transformational journey and generating a bridge to something your audience already understands.?This bridge can be made by clearly articulating how something is like something they already know, but has a set of recognizable and specific difference that make it a new thing. Or you can use very specific examples of real-life instances that occur, that demonstrate what the new thing is.?Whichever tactic you use to link and label, you must be very literal and proactive in saying this thing you see here is an example of X.?Don’t leave your audience on a cliff with no way to understand your new term, idea, or concept.?Provide a clear bridge for them and point out that the bridge is there, even if they don’t see it right away. Don’t expect people to find the bridge on their own.

"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Lesson 31: Words Create Identity

Finally, don’t underestimate the power of a new and unique vocabulary to help you create a revised identity for your organization.?Words help us not only label things and express what they are to others, but they also create alignment between disparate individuals and teams and signposts to others about the organization’s identity and beliefs. Think about your experience joining a new organization.?One of the first things you are struck by is usually the uniqueness of the language people use in the organization to communicate with each other, the terms, the acronyms, the titles, the references to commons stories and ideas.?Organizations create a shorthand to help them express ideas and thoughts that is unique to that organization.?Their words become beacons to others, identifying where they belong and who they align to.?One of the most important things you can do create change in an organization is to systematically change the words that are used in the organization. ?Replace those that reflect the old ways of thinking with ones that evoke your new transformational ideas, and beliefs.

"The best world shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest." -Markus Zusak

Next week we move into the final set of lessons on transformation in this series. I am going to be talking about how you prepare your team to pivot and change while maintaining day to day activity and deliverables.?In the meantime, I challenge you to think about the words you are creating to evoke your core transformational beliefs and consider how they are serving you in your journey.?Is it time for you to build a new organizational vocabulary, and if so what words should you be leveraging and how will you link and label them for your audience?