The Power of Language

Recently, as we re-center our work around building regenerative businesses and practicing matriarchal leadership, our team has become increasingly curious about the word “culture” and what it really means within the context of the workplace.

Which led us to consider the relationship between the language of a business and its corporate culture: does the language we use shape the culture of our company, or is it the other way around? Is it both?

The use of “functional” language in business originated in the Industrial Revolution, when factory owners began treating workers as infinitely replaceable resources to be “optimized” for “maximum efficiency.” Ouch… Outdated, dehumanizing, and mechanistic, this approach to the language of business persists today. And if you believe words matter, which we do, it seems impossible that such language wouldn’t reduce us – all of us, regardless of our role and positional power – to cogs in a machine, whose only value is to service the “bottom line.”

And while many of us continue to use and hear this language at work, who among us uses it at home? Imagine saying to a family member: “Honey, you’re really not optimized for peak efficiency right now. Perhaps we need to recalibrate your KPIs around household output.” Or telling a friend who’s venting about a rough day: “I hear you, but let’s circle back when you have a clear action plan and timeline for improvement.” Ridiculous, right? Yet, this kind of language is part of the daily script in many workplaces.

When the way we speak at work is so deeply disassociated from the person we are at home, we become fractured within, and may leave a meaningful part of ourselves at the front door each day. We can become cynical and our thinking abstract, reducing our ability to collaborate, problem-solve, and find hope and possibility within complex, seemingly intractable challenges. Such conditions produce “externalities” that disregard the human and ecological impacts of our work. We become less relational, leading to decisions that prioritize short-term gains over long-term wellbeing and resilience.

But wow, does it feel like a big deal to change all our language. The good news: we don’t need to be perfect at it. We can commit to participating in the process of unlearning, and from there seek out the language that connects us to our natural systems.

We recommend sharing with your team this study by the BCG Henderson Institute, which reveals that the language a business uses to describe itself shapes its reality. This doesn’t mean we can magically speak things into existence, but rather the words we choose can reinforce a culture that invites the whole person to our work and our impact.

Curious to see what it looks like here at Tandem, we ran a year’s worth of meeting transcriptions through ChatGPT, and it revealed the words that are trending for our team: intention, leadership, visioning, community, and values. We have to admit, we like those words. They signal that perhaps our company culture is evolving to challenge the status quo, and that our team holds a sense of responsibility to hold the tension between our vision and the values we hold dear. Now, the work is to ensure those words are spoken with integrity – lest we train each other to merely virtue signal instead of doing the rewarding but often uncomfortable work of being truly ourselves at work.