I saw a Wikipedia correction the other day that stopped me in my tracks.
Someone changed the phrase “Clients of high net worth” to “rich people”. And it struck me how the edit transformed the emotion in the original posting.
At a stroke the original article went from an anodyne discussion of business to a political statement about inequality. Before, the text avoided any sense of value and after, it posed a challenge about the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy.
All too often companies work with language that denies the passion and excitement of change with dry, cold terms. Instead of ‘smashing the competition’ we are asked to ‘build competitive advantage’. We talk about ‘exceeding client expectations” when we really mean “blowing customers away”.
We can all speculate why leaders do it. Everyone who has ever written a CEO’s speech or drafted a newsletter article has seen the blood drained out of their copy; and most of us have rolled over and let it happen at some stage or another.
But we all know it is wrong.
Sucking the colour out of corporate language isn’t just a matter for those of us with ambitions to win a Pulitzer. It’s like untying your shoelace just before you run the 100 metre final in the Olympics.
Humans are not rational. We like emotion, we like pictures, we like making links in our minds between concepts. When you talk like a spread sheet, your audience has nothing to hold onto. No one ever got motivated by battling for a “five point uplift in gross margin”.
Yet as soon as we hear colour, can connect with something we admire, desire or fear, you’ve got us. We’ll get fired up by an image of customers queuing up to pay more because we’re better than the competition.
So what is a change communicator to do?
For a start, we should come to conversations with senior leaders with arguments about the need to paint pictures. It’s not just about helping them to tell stories (which is important), it’s about asking them what they really mean. It’s about getting them comfortable talking as they would in the pub or when they’ve kicked off their shoes and are talking to friends.
Over the years, I’ve worked with an excellent actor who does this really well. She starts working on diction and nerves and then tackles CEO’s about their scripts.
I’ve seen her push and cajole leaders to talk about how they would feel if their winning strategy pays off. She nags them to paint pictures of what would happen if the competition won; what it would look like the day the bailiffs walked through the front door.
There is much talk these days about getting leaders to sound authentic. We need bosses who we can trust; people we can get the measure of before we decide to follow them.
But we need to add to that their role to be vivid in the metaphors and images they put into people’s minds.
Authentic gets them in the room but vivid keeps them listening.
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