Management Speak

I don’t have one word that too many people use to take aim at, but a whole language of words! One of the most irritating developments in the last 20 years or so has been the proliferation of management speak. It was, at first, a language used by mediocre people to disguise the fact that they were mediocre.

Yuppies in the 1980s were the forerunners of the trend with their huge ‘brick’ phones and flashy clothes. Many of them succeeded on the basis of image and they developed a communication style that excluded others, a very common tactic. Once you exclude others you feel that you are better than they are.

Then somewhere along the line, probably when LinkedIn became necessary for so many, it became essential for managers to use it. It turned them into, as one of my former colleagues put it, soulless drones. The use of an exclusionary vocabulary excluded the workers they were supposed to mentor and support, and management became their own self congratulatory cadre of ‘talent’ who were somehow better than the rest of us.

If you want to take one example of management speak that has done untold damage to the places we work, it is the change from Personnel, when I started working in 1983, to Human Resources. In an instant those in charge had rebranded us from people, the root of the word obviously being person, to resources that they could use up and throw away with little thought and less guilt. The vast majority of people who worked in Personnel cared about us as fellow human beings, whereas the vast majority of people who work in Human Resources see us as company owned factors of production on a par with computers.

So there you have it, I would get rid of management speak and watch the slow move away from the worst management class I have seen in 40 plus years of working. There are obviously decent managers, but they tend to hit a ceiling of middle management or, as in the case of a very good CEO I worked for, are summarily dismissed when they start talking to employees about what they need. The power of words is that we often fail to recognise their power until it is too late.