The Power of Words: Communicating Effectively in Business with Janet Livingstone
Corporate jargon and convoluted language can hinder effective communication in business. In this episode, we discuss the pitfalls of using overly technical language and how it can alienate people who don't share the same expertise. We examine the power of simplicity and how it can help convey complex ideas in a way everyone can understand.
In this episode, we share practical advice on communicating in a way that influences others, fosters collaboration, and ultimately earns customers' business.
After this Episode, you will be able to:
Avoid the barriers to workplace communication
Convey complex ideas in a way everyone can understand
Communicate to influence others, foster collaboration, and earn customers' business
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About our guest:
Janet Livingstone is the founder of Culture is Key, a consultancy devoted to leadership development, executive coaching, and team effectiveness. Janet helps leaders and teams take ownership of their own development through intentional work and human connection in the workplace.
As a multilingual expert on intercultural competence who has lived and worked on five continents, Janet is curious about everyone. She draws on her lived experience to expand dialogue and build trust within hybrid and international teams in established companies and startups. Janet enjoys getting people at meetings to connect with each other, studying jazz, and finding humor in everyday observations. Fun facts: she's the co-host of the Original Syndrome podcast and has traveled to 27 countries so far.
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Communication Barriers in the Workplace
Have you ever sat in a meeting wondering what the presenter was saying? Perhaps they were using corporate lingo. You weren't familiar with corporate jargon and convoluted language can hinder business communication
After this, you'll be able to avoid the barriers to workplace communication, convey complex ideas in a way that everyone can understand, and communicate to influence others.
How does language play a role in the workplace, and what are maybe some of the pitfalls you see in how we speak in the workplace?
Language in the workplace, just like in other places in life, is it's essential. It's our main tool for getting things done.
Initiating and building relationships without language, we're completely lost.
If the pilot and the air traffic control tower don't understand each other, the consequences can be dire. They can also be humorous, but most of the time they're pretty risky. So in the corporate environment, there are a lot of factors to think about, and one of them is jargon.
Every workplace has its jargon regardless of what the industry is. And what I find is that a lot of people tend to rely really heavily on jargon, the longer you're with a company, the more likely you are to rely on a million acronyms.
They may use some of the same jargon in their workplace, but maybe not the same way.
So giving context and being empathic or empathetic is really important.
A lot of times people don't want to ask the question because they don't want to appear that they don't know, and I see this often with new hires.
Don't Assume Everyone Knows What You Know
You can turn the acronyms off and you don't have to use them. You still remember what they stand for and you can explain.
But many aren't used to flexing so they have to practice and they have to learn, and they have to understand that they're assuming they're making a big assumption that the person they're talking to lives in their world when it's really not true.
So it's challenging, but it can definitely be done. Stop a little, just a moment, and go.
Who am I talking to? What is their viewpoint? Where do they come from? How much do they know? And just take it from there.
How to Use Keywords
Keywords that were used five years ago are very different than they are today.
So we may have used flexibility in the past, but now the new keyword is agile leadership and they're human skills. So it's interesting this evolution of the keywords, not only in the language that we speak but to the technical level of SEO optimization.
Observing language can tell us so much.
Here's another, we talked about search engine optimization for websites. So those of you out there who are business owners know how important that is when it comes to the top rankings within Google, and having your website be searchable, it's extremely important.
So unless you have the SEO keywords on your resume that align with the job description that they have posted, your resume either may be filtered to the top or not even be seen by human eyes because you don't have the right alignment. So when I'm working with clients, we go through their resumes.
We look at what are some of the positions that you're applying for. We look at how can we optimize their resume, their cover letter, their LinkedIn profile. So they're having a higher chance of increasing the match score when they're applying to jobs.
We need to be in the workplace. We need to be emotionally intelligent and use language.
We can flex, we can use different sorts of language for different folks.
It's gonna be an experience and not just a training.
