All manager go to refind one day or another to speak another language, the language of management. This language, itimagine being spoken by a contemporary ideal of the benevolent, proactive manager, inspiring.
Whoever, in annual appraisals of its employees, is concerned with "areas of progress" and "areas for improvement", which It "gives meaning" while "leaving room for freedom", that empowers without micro-managing
What about this at de bylthe management? What are the attributes and visit traps language so widely used that he ends up describe intermediate realities, comfortable because never false without being totally true either ? How therefore redesign a managerial language which, rather than generating uncertainty, makes it possiblelinemakes it easyrait and securesrait taking action ?
The usefulness of managerial globish...
How can we explain the creation and spread of a management language that is as recognizable as it is easily mocked and imitated?
Initially, it seems to us that the business world is particularly sensitive to productivist promises, translated into concepts (lean, agile, etc.), which cause the word to overheat around a performative vocabulary and a register of general injunction.
Secondly, management carries with it the fantasy of being able to manage anyone: a good manager is a good manager in the absolute, whatever the people he or she manages. In order for the manager to manage correctly in all circumstances, he or she has to speak more or less the same language, a kind of managerial Esperanto, a miraculous language that would reconcile manager and managed, supply and demand in management. But what works every time in this model is the law of the market. It has to be said that the terms used are selected from a market where, naturally, the majority of words are used.
The lucky ones in the language competition are often words that :
- Call for an interpretation and a mode of conduct;
- Not self-sufficient (operationalize, coordinate) ;
- Describe all-encompassing, neutral realities (areas for improvement, areas of conquest) ;
- Borrow from the register of affect (empathy, benevolence, resilience) ;
- Or words that have several meanings: for example, the word leader(the one who commands or the one who trains the others?) or the word change (the fact of changing, the action of changing, the result of changing).
This language impoverishment is clever, in thea insofar as it has various functions. First, lecognition among managers on the basis of a vocabulary common that connects us and makes us one... tout by giving the illusion, via the words affect, a semblance of horizontality between managers and employees. Example: "Jenjoin you to be more attentive to your project environment".
Secondly, vagueness, which saves courage: when my manager tells me that I have several areas for improvement, what does he think? actually of my performance level?
Finally, the smooth one, which avoids confrontation: talking about obstacles to change rather than saying that a team member is opposed to the project.
...to the pitfalls of foggy speech
We then arrive at several paradoxs :
- In the first place, there is a growing demand for meaning, particularly from the younger generations, at a time when managers find themselves singularly unprepared to provide it. speak the meaning ;
- Then there's the soft, smooth, non-aggressive language that actually muffles the violence between managers and staff, and prevents conflict, which is also the driving force behind working relationships;
- In addition, words that express movement, change and transformation, without giving definite and circumscribed directions, are at the heart of the managerial act.
Other paradoxes remain: a serene and peaceful dialogue that distances managers and employees more than it brings them closer, to the point of creating mutual incomprehension and even loneliness on both sides.
Finally, an affable manager and coach who is close to the teams, but separate from production, as long as he confines himself to talking about management rather than appreciating the technical skills of the teams at work.
A few tips for (re)finding your managerial style
Without claiming to reinvent a language (and he doesn't need us for that), we want toons here suggest a few ways to find material to sayas a manager:
- Deconstruct the languages you've learned, as well as your language practices: identify your rhythm, use of tenses (do you prefer the imperative, the future, the simple past?), use of redundancy, oppositions, metaphors... in short, everything that makes up your language signature;
- Rethink your managerial language in terms of :
- Precision and care in describing the reality of the work performed, as close as possible to its technical nature and the skills of those who carry it out;
- Authorized (and encouraged) borrowings from other languages: from the street, from quantum physics, from nature ... with the idea of crossing and enriching its sources, to give more substance to its words;
- Replacement of polysemous words by monosemic words with a more direct meaning;
- Sharing language practices among peers and questioning their effects ;
- Listen to other people's language, and take the fact that they don't speak the same way as you as an asset.
- Ensuring that the language used in the workplace correctly reflects the reality of what is produced by teams on a daily basis: monitoring production indicators rather than reporting,quality control rather than continuous improvement, cooperation rather than transversality, etc.
Managing is all about speaking well and speaking fairly (sometimes speaking more, sometimes less, depending on the situation). It's not instinctive or innate, and neither is any practice, it can be learned and develops. And yet, if we are committed to developing managerial cultures and rethinking a host of reference frameworks in this field, if we train our managers to "speak in public" or to be able to "manage a team under tension", we are perhaps not working hard enough on raising awareness of language as such, the art and manner of saying things. We need to work on this.
Opinion column published in Les Echos on 12/16/2024
