The power of language
Language is powerful. I’ve seen first hand what happens when you change language and the result is changed behaviour. Take a simple word like ’staff’. When an organisation with 50,000 of them decided to call them ‘our people’, shift happened. Staff are a commodity, a mass of resource, usually subordinate.
People are part of your team, have all kinds of human qualitites that bring success to your business. You treat them differently. Changing language requires superhuman effort in organisations where words are entrenched. It doesn’t happen by chance but by planning, rigorous attention to detail and often playful ways to get everyone to start using the new word comfortably and naturally. Want to engage your people? Choose your words with care.
Quite right.
I’m just about to start reading a book by the American pollster Frank Luntz - “Words that Work - It’s not what you say, it’s what people want to hear” which apparently has a few lessons that businesses can learn.