#157 - It's Ok To Be Uncomfortable With Management Jargon. Now Get Over It
Plus: Why candour is hard; Hybrid work and its challenges
Manager, Ph.D. is a newsletter and community which helps people from the world of research and scholarship make their impact as excellent managers. We’ve already developed the advanced skills to be exceptional managers; we just need help with the basics.
But it’s So Corporate…
When I speak with ex-researchers who are just beginning their management journey, I am often reminded how many researchers are actively turned off by "management jargon" or "corporate speak".
It’s ok to have that reaction. Action Item! Double Click! Move the Needle! Strategic! Big Asks! Sense making! Feedback! Stakeholder Engagement! They’re extremely unacademic terms, so weird and foreign. Some of them seem hopelessly precious or unnecessary (“double click”, really? Ask as a noun when request is sitting right there?), and the rest are just weird.
But clinging to that reaction actively holds back some of the new managers I talk to. It interferes with learning from others, being able to look up approaches to common problems, and with accepting the new responsibilities of being a manager. It’s unhelpful.
I mean, we of all people shouldn’t get too snooty about at vague and made-up terms…
Our Research Fields Are Jam-Packed With Obscure Jargon and Pointless Buzzwords
The fields we came from are absolutely littered with inscrutable jargon and weird or archaic phrases.
It’s hard to notice that while you’re immersed in it, of course, but every time we tried to explain our work to someone outside the field (even just friends and family) it quickly became apparent.
I’ve had the opportunity to see this a few times, changing fields. When we enter a new field we see clearly some things that are hard to appreciate in the field we “grew up” in. The switch from computational astrophysics to bioinformatics was particularly jarring for me - learning completely new terms (I spent a lot of time nodding and smiling then running off to my desk and doing wikipedia searches), often multiple terms for precisely the same things “for historical reasons”.
And some of the terms seemed… kind of pretentious and over-used? My personal favourite was the term “translocate” frequently being deployed where I, a simple country astrophysicist, would have said “move.”
(Note that I am not casting aspersions about another field here. I come from astrophysics, where we call everything in the entire Universe that isn’t Hydrogen or Helium, “metals”. A star that has a lower magnitude is brighter than one with higher magnitude. We have our own nonsense).
And you know what? This is all fine.
Jargon Is A Tool That Helps Us Think, Communicate, and Associate
Jargon is used in every community, and for good reasons.
It's hard to communicate (or even think) clearly about things that don't have names. Without a simple shorthand to describe a concept, situation, or event, it becomes hard to talk about it, find material on it, or even reason about it.
Specialized work needs specialized terms. Different kinds of work different have concepts, situations, and events that they need to think about and wrestle with.
Common language identifies us as a community. Using the common, specialized, language identifies us as facing and understanding similar problems as others in the community.
There are downsides! Yes, once any particular piece of jargon is established, it can get over-used, or stay in the lexicon even after it’s no longer useful. And the community in-group identification can be used to enforce exclusivity, to gate-keep people or ideas from other communities.
But it’s still worth it. Jargon is a communication accelerator, and persists because accelerating communication within a community is valuable. We need to be careful how we use (and judge) language precisely because language matters.
The new managers who wrestle with accepting management jargon understand the point about jargon identifying a community extremely well.
Changing Jargon Is Part Of The Career Change (Which Is Why It’s So Hard)
I used to think that instinctual revulsion some ex-academics have for “management speak” was just another instance of academic snobbery, but it’s a lot deeper than that.
That reaction comes from a challenge to our identity. In academic research we spend a lot of time distinguishing between the academy and “industry”. We build up a lot of largely imaginary distinctions between the work of “the academy” and work done elsewhere. And taking management seriously is definitely an “elsewhere” thing.
It might be hard to accept that we’re one of "those people" now, but the problems we face and issues we wrestle with as managers are just different than what we dealt with as subject matter experts.
We manage teams of people. People problems are messy and ambiguous and complex but also common, and management jargon reflects that.
We need to have a common toolbox of terms and phrases that we can use to communicate with each other and problem-solve together with; terms we can search for and read about.
Just like our research jargon let us communicate with researchers in the same field from other institutions and around the globe, management jargon helps us learn from managers elsewhere, including managers of different kinds of teams
And that’s important, even internally in our organizations. Managers from different parts of the org need to be able to communicate clearly with each other. Even though we’re doing different work, the issues we face as people managers are the same.
When you’re part of a larger organization, managers in the data science team need to be able to communicate with the finance team and managers in the marketing team, each of which have mutually unintelligible jargon for their domain work. We need a common language for the issues we face in common.
Use the Right Jargon With The Right People
That “different jargon for different audiences” point is important. Leaning too heavily on the wrong jargon for the people we’re speaking with right now can cause its own problems.
If we use the management jargon with our expert teams, we’ll sound like we’re no longer “one of them”. If we use the jargon of our domain expertise with our fellow managers, we’ll sound like we “don’t get it”, and we’re still clinging on to our individual contributor work.
One of our key functions as team leaders and managers is to be able to translate back and forth between the needs and language of the experts on our teams and the language of the broader organization. That means staying comfortable in both worlds, and being “bilingual” in the multiple jargons that now define our roles.
It’s tricky, and easy to occasionally slip-up. But being that bridge matters. Understanding, and accepting as important the problems that both communities deal with, is the the crucial first step to becoming a successful expert leader.
Do you have any examples of management jargon you or a colleague wrestled with? Any stories of misunderstandings that came from jargon mismatches? Let me know! Hit reply, or leave a comment below.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
TWH#57: Why Candor is Hard - Paulo André
André’s assessment of why it’s so hard to be candid in the workplace is especially relevant for those of us from the research world. He identifies eight reasons why it’s so tough to express negative feedback in with candour:
Fear of conflict and relationship damage
Desire to be liked
Confusing candour with harshness and rudeness
Lack of skill and practice
Lack of incentives - overcoming all of the above is hard if there’s nothing pushing us to do it!
Lack of trust - fearing consequences
Lack of role model
Jadedness
And as he points out, withholding this candour is selfish. We’re denying people, especially our team members but also our peers, the opportunity to improve by not providing our feedback.
It being hard doesn’t absolve us from the duty to be candid.
The principle I subscribe to is to model candor as a leader from day one. Think ahead to those inevitable difficult conversations—what can you do or say today that will make tomorrow easier?
André describes setting context from the first one-on-one that respectful candour is expected and to be expected. It can be harder to start this in a pre-existing situation, but we can start small. We can model the behaviour we’re looking for with feedback and asking for feedback. It’s hard but worth it.
Managing Teams
6 Trends Leaders Need to Navigate This Year - Ben Wigert and Ryan Pendell, Gallup
Almost all of our teams have moved to some kind of hybrid model. (To connect with the pro-jargon writeup earlier in this issue, it’s hard to talk intelligently about hybrid because we don’t actually have terms yet for the different arrangements that fall into the “hybrid” category. Some remote, some on-site; hot-decking on demand; some expectation about fraction of time spent on site; standard “in-office” days for the whole team; these are all very different arrangements that have different challenges and benefits).
There’s two items on hybrid work from this Gallup report at the start of the year that are particularly relevant to us.
The first is: Don’t confuse being in the office with culture. Hybrid teams have at least as much connection to team or company culture as on-site teams do:
This is a pretty heartening result! Honestly I think some measure of remote work requires more clarity about culture and expectations - we can get away with a lot being unstated when we’re doing things in-person, where many more standards can be expressed implicitly and even unintentionally by our actions (for better or worse).
On the other end of the spectrum, doing this well is hard: the hybrid workplace will challenge managers in new ways.
We don’t have easy best-practices to follow yet for hybrid teams - there’s not even one kind of hybrid work yet - and this requirement that we be more intentional and explicit about the work expectations we’re trying to create takes a lot.
I’m confident that things will get better over time, but if you’re not finding this new way of working easy, you’re not alone.
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming week week with your team,
Jonathan