Word-collecting and accurate language
Throughout my life, I’ve been a a word-collector.
It’s taken me a while to figure that out, or to put a name to it…but I like that Title for now: “Word Collector.”
This morning posted about tone, words, and using accurate language. She recaps it the whole point of the post fantastically:
Use words that accurately reflect what you mean. The benefit is fewer misunderstandings, more trust in your word, feedback that’s well received, and more productive conversations that help you and your team arrive at a good decision.
It’s extremely wises advice that I was excited to read this morning, from the title through to the very end. Words were also a theme of today’s conversations with my client, so that’s the theme of today’s thoughts: accurate langauge.
For homage, I’m using Kao’s headings to add my own thoughts to the categories—in a different order. I’ll link to her post at the end—would highly recommend a read.
Choose words that reflect your level of certainty.
Growing up in a small city near the beaches of North Carolina—population ~55.5k → ~107k throughout my time there—my world was quite small. Attending the largest university in the state, around 40k students, introduced me to people and worlds I never knew existed.
Then there’s Amsterdam. An official population of around 800k people, compounded with more than a million tourists a year.
It’s a city where worlds gather.
Leading extremely diverse teams
Words take on a new challenge when you’re working alongside, managing, and leading diverse teams of people from every habited continent on the planet. People with a wide spectrum of languages spoken, let alone English levels.
It’s an interesting, fun challenge.
The words one uses could have many, many, many meanings. The importance of choosing words increases dramatically. All sorts of assumptions could come from miscommunication, even if you used the “right words” just from the fact of extremely different backgrounds and individual contexts.
Brains create shortcuts to use less energy, creating basic assumptions and biases.
It’s very different to navigate certainty when everyone is taking different shortcuts on what’s being said, understood, and then acted upon.
Words can encourage or discourage divergent thinking.
Kao talks about prescriptive language:
🚫 “We should do X, Y, and Z. [Goes on at length about why we must do this.] What do you think?”
✅ “We might want to try X, Y, and Z. These are a few ideas, but I’m not stuck on any of them. What do you think? Where do you agree and disagree?”1
This is important in terms of “giving a solution” versus “finding the best solution” and expecting one to come up with the solution oneself. Asking questions like this, “We might try this, or that; what do you think?” is a way to lead more inclusively as an additional bonus—open up the conversation for others to actually share and give feedback.
It’s also why I didn’t get through an interview, where the interviewers stopped asking questions less than 20 minutes into an hour long interview.
There are many ways of doing things, and chaos always surprises us.
Speaking in binaries—this will never happen; it’s always like this—closes opportunities and possibilities to explore…but what if the it’s not a 0 or 1 situation?
Even then, what happens if one’s native thinking style is more Chaos than Order?
What’s the cost of being wrong?
When I was onboarding into my third organization as the senior leader, multiple times I received some thanks from people as I had gotten to know them.
I had learned a few things while writing blog post announcements to the 2k+ department—and regularly received feedback if I emailed something with inaccurate statements.
Start with the broad and then, as you learn more, you can be more specific.
In my initial example, these thanks were because I had started changing my default langauge and spoken words to a broader categorizations because I needed more words that better aligned with the context.
“Do you have a [husband|wife]?” → “Do you have a partner?”
Evidently, I was the first manager or person of Power that had ever asked the inclusive question. He was excited to be able to talk about his husband and how he met.
It also led to a funny instance where I discovered one of my team leads was gay, after working with him for a year…I hadn’t really heard any specified partner genders when the topics arose. I didn’t assume. We laughed as I found out.
But the cost of being wrong, even with pronouns or how you greet someone, is extremely high. If first impressions are so powerful, how is it to be denied existence because someone’s language isn’t expansive enough?
Accurate, specific statements are more helpful.
🚫 Before: “You are [X trait]. This is ineffective because [reason]. You must Z.”
✅ After: “I’ve noticed you tend to do [X behavior]. This might not be as effective because [reason]. If you want to [reach goal], you might want to consider Z.”
Yes. Feedback 101.
That’s it for the day.
Thank you for sharing your insights. I loved it and had stories to add.
Everyone else, her post is titled Tone and words: Use accurate language on her own Substack, ’s Newsletter.