Put corporate-speak on the backburner for now, we’ll circle back later

? To touch base with your employees, you have to break down silos, leverage all existing resources, and take actionable steps towards fostering synergy. While grammatically sound and LinkedIn-ready, this sentence is little more than than good-intentioned white noise completely void of meaning. While corporate jargon has long fulfilled its duties as a means through which complex ideas are seamlessly and efficiently conveyed throughout the professional sphere, its overuse may just have an inverse effect on workplace culture and corporate strategy, according to the Harvard Business Review.

The road to corporate hell is paved with good intentions. Professional shorthand, once intended to unify, has begun to show faults, especially when conveyed on a macro level, such as overarching corporate strategies and visions. Phrases such as “customer-first,” “disruptive innovation,” “maximizing value,” may be — and are — widely misinterpreted from one department to another. To a marketing department, disruptive innovation may be interpreted as low-budget guerilla strategies designed for shock value; to R&D it may mean breaking the bank to actualize the latest and greatest in tech; to finance, may mean frugality in favor of returns. HBR refers to this phenomenon as an execution drift — widening gaps between leadership intent and subordinate action.

While the strategies may not be inherently flawed, how they’re communicated can make them backfire. According to a recent study published in the International Journal of Business Communication, corporate jargon “significantly impairs processing fluency,” and negatively impacts productivity.

For jargon to fulfill its purpose, abstractions must be extinguished, and “mirage language” omitted. HBR argues that a hallmark of an effective strategy is the ability to balance specificity with possibility. For this to be achieved, strategies need to clearly address tangible behaviors and desired outcomes and present a precise framework that can function as an actionable guide for which behaviors and outcomes should be actualized.

This isn’t to discourage ambitious lingo. While proclamations of the spirited sort may grant leadership convenient flexibility — and at times, provide loopholes when promises go unfulfilled — they’re catalysts for wasted effort. But this should not be reason enough for their elimination — instead, ambitious statements should be supplemented by realistic and solid demonstrations of intent, with language placed within proper functional context to avoid potential miscommunications.

Growth, excellence, and optimization — all inherently vague umbrella terms — should be accompanied by explanatory metrics like revenue increase percentages, customer retention rates, and time-to-completion benchmarks or error reduction figures that give them concrete meaning. Not doing so would make them ineffective abstract ideals — the real “game changer” would be giving them real, actionable definitions.