How you speak determines how you will be heard. Get out of your own head and think about how your words will land on the ears of your audience.
How you intend to be heard is irrelevant. How you are actually heard determines how you will be taken by the listener..
Word choice is a funny thing. The well-chosen word and well-turned phrase can motivate a team to perform beyond their limits. Conversely, a single poison-tipped word or phrase can sink deep, burrow in, and create a long festering wound. For a company culture, this dynamic critical to manage.
We talk about the need to create a healthy culture at work, so employee populations can become more positive and productive, less stressed out and burned out. But to do this effectively, it’s helpful to begin with the very basics that change communication from a poison dagger into an uplifting performance boost.
Your Own Internal Conversations
The most obvious place to see the impact of language is with your own internal conversations to yourself. If you go into a job interview or a particularly challenging event, how you think about it impacts your entire internal mental state, and your performance as a result.
If you frame the event quite honestly by calling it ‘scary’, this can trigger a physiological stress response within your body, which can make the nervousness and anxiety worse. Once this starts, the symptoms (sweaty palms, shallow breathing pattern, mental worry) themselves create more anxiety because you recognize your state.
On the other hand, if you frame the very same event – just as honestly – by calling it ‘exciting’, your internal state will be less likely to slip into this negative reinforcement loop, along with the symptoms of nervousness it brings. Your behavior then will become more confident, which itself feeds the confidence. This is the positive feed-forward cycle you want.
Now Translate This to a Company Culture
If you have a person or group of people who speak about an issue at your workplace, but do so using negative language, it creates a negativity that others absorb. Then when they repeat what they were told, they give off that same negativity to others around them, resulting in another feed-forward loop. But this cycle is one you definitely do not want.
Examples:
Negative Language: This cafeteria food sucks. I hate it. Are you going to eat this? It’s garbage. I wouldn’t give this to my dog.
Positive Language: It would be so great if we could add a couple of things to this menu, right? We should work with our manager to make this better, and that would so improve the time we spend with each other over lunch!
…
Negative Language: My supervisor is an idiot. No seriously, what a complete empty-headed asinine loser. I take that back, he totally wins … if it’s the award for worst communicator on planet Earth. I’d go talk to him, but it would be a complete exercise in futility.
Positive Language: My supervisor and I aren’t communicating as well as I’d like. We can be such a more productive team together once we get on the same page. So I’m setting up a meeting to see what we can do to communicate better than we’re doing now.
Think of it like tea. If you drop mint leaves into hot water, their essence will infuse the entire space. Language does the same thing for your company. Use constructive language and it becomes embedded into the lexicon of work that people hear and repeat to others. Use unconstructive language to describe the very same events and you create that environment as well.
Caveats
You know this about yourself. Just choosing positive wording does not instantly flip your emotional state from scared to excited, or from negative to positive. And using positive language will not change any of the stress triggers in your life either. But what it can do is move the emotional needle in the right direction.
The same is true for a corporate culture. Using constructive language at work will not instantly create a positive worksite environment, nor will it fix systemic problems. What it can do is begin to create conversations that create positive change, and move away from language that has zero positive outcomes.
This effect is that much more powerful the further up the corporate ladder it originates. When management messaging moves from a ‘this sucks’ stance to ‘let’s make this better’, employees surrounded by that environment are more likely to contribute as well. A tipping point forms in which the more destructive language becomes harder to sustain in the space. There is no listening for it. And it doesn’t get echoed back into the environment any more. At this point, the impact of moving your language in a positive direction is profound.
So be intentional. Create constructive conversations by focusing on the positive. This is as simple as it is powerful for creating a healthy productive culture.
Words do matter. For a better company culture, make the conscious choice to mind your word choice. Choose the more positive way to say what you need to say to result in an equivalently positive change in the language and even attitude of the person you’re talking with, not to mention the company you are working for.
