I’ve been reflecting lately on the power of language in leadership. Specifically how founders (and leaders more generally) talk about their teams and team members, and how that language shapes the company’s culture.
When I ask founders to tell me about each member of their team and their respective roles, two recurring responses stand out:
- “S/he is helping us build/figure out/achieve/set up/identify…”
- “What I’m trying to get out of him/her is…”
Neither phrasing is “right” or “wrong” – we’ve probably all said similar things at different times.
What I’ve found is that the founder’s predominant phrasing is highly predictive of the company culture, effectiveness, and resilience.
- “S/he is helping us…” recognizes team members as contributors. It’s an appreciative stance that recognizes the value of team members’ contributions, the nature of the journey as one of discovery and learning, and the founder’s limitations, name s/he can’t do this alone.
- “What I’m trying to get out of him/her is…” reflects more of an extractive mindset.. The team member is viewed as a vending machine of expertise and/or labor from which the founder is trying to extract performance.
Again, neither is right or wrong, and in both cases, the ultimate goal is task performance that enables the company to make progress. What’s different is how these mindsets shape the relationships that, in turn, form the company culture, which in my experience strongly affects a company’s resilience.
- The appreciative stance tends to yield – unsurprisingly – an appreciative culture where team members are aware of and value one another’s contributions. This appreciation and valuing tends to translate into higher levels of creative collaboration. When challenges arise or disaster strikes, the team already has a deep understanding of their individual and collective strengths and resources and have developed the communication channels that enable them to reconfigure and deploy those resources rapidly.
- The transactional stance tends to yield a more siloed, task-focused culture with “hub and spoke” communication, where the founder(s) engages separately with each team member or subgroup, giving task-specific instructions and feedback. As a result, team members have little idea of what others are doing or how their respective tasks fit into an overarching whole. Team members in these companies tend to steer clear of projects or teammates they perceive to be struggling. The resulting culture tends to be competitive and territorial with an undue amount of energy invested in CYA.
Don’t get me wrong, the appreciative stance doesn’t guarantee a conflict-free, smooth sailing journey. Building a company is hard work. There will still be market surprises, manufacturing breakdowns, product malfunctions, personnel issues, and regulatory delays.
The difference is that the appreciative stance and collaborative culture are better able to rally, identify solutions, and keep moving forward in the face of challenge. Transactional companies are more dependent on the founder having “the answer.” If team members see that s/he doesn’t, they are more likely to jump ship, and turnover further complicates the picture.
That’s my $.02. Is it consistent with what you’ve experienced?
