Watch Your Language . . . words really matter

There is, of course, the need not only to evoke and invoke, but also to challenge our own thinking and that of the group or team or community we are called to lead.

Part II
(Read Part I here.) [2]

Language Creates Community
According to Daniel Goleman, writing in Social Intelligence, the human brain is wired for connectivity. One of the skills of connecting with others is language. As leaders seek to connect with their people, the market, and the world, language is the community builder — or its opposite. When President Bush told the world he was engaged in a "crusade for democracy," I doubt if he realized or anticipated the way his words would be heard, and the negative resonance they would have in the very part of the world he was attempting to influence.

A friend of mine went to work with her State Board of Education as a consultant. Thinking about the response of the very community being served by the Board of Education, and its possible negative response to the word consultant , she proposed to the Board that they view her role as that of facilitator instead. "Only a word," you might argue — and yet, words reverberate, resonate or rebound.

Leaders are Consciously Creating a Community
A certain consciousness is required of those of us who would be leaders. That consciousness embraces both a self awareness and an awareness of the effect one’s utterances (verbal and written, spoken and e-mailed) have on others. In their excellent book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, Kegan and Lahey argue that leaders are constantly shaping the organization, community, or institution they lead by the language they use. Kegan and Lahey go further, and say it is not a question of "Are you shaping your community with the language you use?" but rather, "What kind of language community are you shaping?" In other words, for the leader, there is no such thing as not having a language community.

As a leader, you always have a community. The only real question is what kind of community. In the current presidential campaign in the USA, each candidate is trying to use language in a way that grabs voters' attention, energizes them, and appeals to common values. The power of words to move individuals, communities, and whole nations has received significant attention in this current presidential campaign. Indeed, the words of Tony Blair, Prime Minister of England, spoken in 1998, have been echoed by Barack Obama (picking up from Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts): "Words really matter."

"Mark My Words"
The power and the shelf-life of a leader’s words constantly amazes me. In the work I do with leaders I often include a reference to or quotation from a poem as a means of framing a day or marking the end of a session. I may use it to invoke the spirit of learning in a group, to evoke the passion for continuous improvement, and to provoke an energized and innovative response to the pressing work at hand.

I was recently concluding a three day facilitated session with a group of internal consultants, and chose my countryman W.B.Yeats’ words:

Learning
Is not so much the filling of a pail
As the igniting of a fire.

I aimed to encourage these leaders to view the few precious days as an invitation to rekindle the fire of discovering afresh the confidence, competence and capability they have in them to lead and facilitate.

One participant lingered as the group departed and said, "You know, you brought to mind a leader who invoked, evoked and provoked me. It was years ago, but I remember his saying to me, 'Your job as a leader is to draw out the individual and collective genius of everyone on your team.' These words have stayed with me for the longest time and still inspire me."

We humans draw inspiration from and live out of many and varying scriptures. Most of these consist of words - some written, some recorded, some spoken — and all drawn from the experience of real human beings and infused with meaning by both the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader. Whether the speaker of the words quoted above was conscious of the impact of his words is hard to gauge. He certainly seems to have intended to have an impact, in the moment, on the person to whom he spoke. That his words did have an impact is made clear by the fact that the leader speaking to me at the conclusion of our session still drew on that well of wisdom. He was able not just to quote the words, but to recall where, when, and how these words were spoken.

Many of us regularly quote our parents', guardians', or teachers' words of wisdom long after the speaker has departed the planet. I can remember to this day a significant leader in my own life, Marjorie Jones, my mother. She overheard me call my younger brother an ‘idiot’. Mammy pulled me aside and looked me in the eye and said very calmly, and very directly "Michael, mark my words, never call anybody ever by that name. There are human beings who are blessed with a limited intelligence and they are usually the most lovable and most loved human beings alive. Last evening your father and I met such a person, and I promised I would never use the word in a negative way ever again."

These words of my mother have influenced my thinking and my way of using language ever since. In fact, I found myself repeating them almost verbatim to my own son recently. To the best of my knowledge, my mother never knew what effect and what affect her quick reaction to my outburst had on this listener. That she meant me to "mark her words" is without doubt, I believe.

Three Keys to Effective Language
The original framers of the concept of democracy — the Greeks — were interested in the how of getting people involved in what they called the polis , or community.

The leader is constantly reframing the conversation, using words that make sense — what Aristotle called logos. The leader displays and embodies the integrity and passion of the author of both the words and the idea behind the words — called pathos by Aristotle. The leader seeks to connect with both his or her own and the audiences' deepest values —named ethos by the Greeks.

Mortimer J. Adler, American philosopher and educator, citing these Aristotelian concepts, said, "The good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos is about moral character, the source of one's ability to persuade. Pathos is the ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. Logos is the ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually."

The following framing of what we do as leaders is from Interaction Associates' Facilitative Leadership® [3] workshop.

In the overlapping of these three circles both the challenge and opportunity for the authentic leader beckon. As the great bard of Stratford-on-Avon framed it "To Thine Own Self Be True." (Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3, 78-79.) Authentic behavior has a more positive influence on others' thinking than dramatic style.

Effective leaders:
Explain the importance of the issue.
Lay out their reasoning for taking action.
Show empathy and appreciation for their audience.

As users of words, we leaders are always evoking, invoking and provoking — and doing so with ever increasing consciousness.

Being evocative allows us to tap into our own values and to connect with the shared values of our audience. Some will be won over with the appeal to values and will be disappointed if not called to the values conversation and dialogue.

As we link with, or leverage, our own passion, we invoke the passion that lies dormant in ourselves, the connection with our dreams of youth (spoken of so movingly by Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture [4]), and of course the passion of our listeners.

There is, of course, the need not only to evoke and invoke, but also to challenge our own thinking and that of the group or team or community we are called to lead. We must have the courage to provoke them into a new or different framing of their thinking. This connects us to the logos dimension of human communication and leads us to look closer at the skills of strategic thinking. More on this next time!

For now —watch your language. Someone may be marking your words.