I’m going to stir things up, but here goes: I avoid corporate jargon and unnecessary English buzzwords in my work because they make things worse for everyone.
I realise it’s hard to avoid English terms entirely at work. I use them myself.
What bothers me is a conversation that leaves the client understanding less than before, yet too embarrassed to ask a question. The expert sounds clever. The client still has no idea what they’re supposed to be paying for.
For me, the way we speak is connected to our values. It shows whether I want us to understand each other and whether I let the other person assess my work.
What does language have to do with respect?
Imagine a business owner approaching an agency because they don’t have enough customers. They know their product, can deliver it and can talk to buyers. They know less about advertising, which is why they’re looking for help.
They’re told they need to optimise the customer journey, improve performance and address the touchpoints. There may be a good plan behind all that. But the person expected to pay for it can’t tell. They either have to trust blindly or start asking what each term means. Some people feel embarrassed to do that, though they have no reason to be.
That’s why I think someone selling their knowledge should make the effort to explain it. Clients have the right to ask exactly what we’ll do, why and how they’ll know whether it helped. They shouldn’t need to take a course before having a sensible conversation about their own business.
The same applies within a team. A new colleague may not know the abbreviations everyone else has used for years. If they pretend to understand to avoid looking incompetent, we’ll pay for it later. Someone will do a different task from the one we agreed on. Someone will miss an important detail. And yet everyone was nodding along.
The cow that moos the most gives the least milk
That Polish saying may sound a little crude to some people, so I’ve prepared a business version:
‘A Senior Milk Developer who focuses on briefing often fails to deliver the KPIs.’
Joking aside, corporate language is a convenient way to talk about work without saying what it achieved. ‘We’re undertaking intensive efforts to optimise our customer acquisition process’ sounds quite good. You could put it in a report for any month. Even one in which we didn’t win a single customer.
Try being more specific: ‘We spent five thousand złoty on advertising. We received eight enquiries, but nobody bought. We’re checking where we lose those people.’ It immediately feels less comfortable. But now we can have a useful conversation about what comes next.
A good specialist may use industry language out of habit. My warning light comes on when they avoid explaining themselves and suggest the person asking isn’t advanced enough to understand.
Bullshit can close the door to better clients
In my experience, people who succeed in business often have one well-developed skill: they can separate bullshit from real value. They’ve heard plenty of promises, paid different suppliers and learnt to check what’s behind a polished presentation. Vocabulary alone won’t impress them.
You can win clients by bluffing for a while. Especially smaller ones with limited budgets who rarely buy services like yours and don’t yet know what to ask. Professional-sounding sentences may be enough for them to see you as an expert.
Over time, though, that approach can cost you the chance to work with bigger, well-paying clients you’d like to have. Across the table, you’ll meet someone who knows how to ask about results and assess whether your proposals make sense. English buzzwords are unlikely to intimidate them. But they’ll soon lose interest if every new term conceals another attempt to avoid answering.
That person may listen politely to your entire presentation, thank you for the meeting and never call again. You won’t even know when you lost their trust. You’ll be left thinking bigger companies are out of reach, even though you may have closed the door yourself.
If you want to work with people who know what they’re doing, be prepared for them to question you. I prefer clients like that.
It’s easy to start fooling yourself
An even bigger problem appears when we use this language to describe our own decisions and start lying to ourselves. A lie repeated hundreds of times starts to look like the truth.
- ‘The market isn’t ready for our solution yet’ lets us put off investigating why people aren’t buying. Perhaps we really are too early. But the offer could just as easily be unclear, or the price may not match what the customer expects to receive.
- ‘We need to improve communication.’ After saying that, we can finish a meeting feeling we’ve identified the problem. But what should change tomorrow? Is someone failing to pass on order details? Does a client wait a week for a reply? Do two people understand the scope of a service differently?
Worse still, you don’t need a single foreign buzzword to start fooling yourself. ‘There was an oversight regarding the delivery deadline’ still lets us dodge the question of who was responsible for what. So does ‘We will take appropriate action’. Be wary of any sentence that makes it hard to establish what actually happened.
When I name a problem precisely, it becomes harder to hide it from myself. ‘I didn’t send the client a proposal by the agreed deadline’ means accepting responsibility. Then I can investigate the cause and improve something. If I settle for ‘a communication challenge’, I can spend another month talking about the same thing.
Complicated words can have the opposite effect
I understand the temptation to sound clever. Especially early in your career, when you want to show you know the industry. Sometimes a few new terms are enough to make you believe in your own professionalism.
But the reader won’t necessarily think you’re more competent. In Daniel Oppenheimer’s experiments, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, unnecessarily complicated vocabulary was associated with lower ratings of the author’s intelligence. How easily people could read the text mattered. [1]
Should we translate every English term?
Let’s not go overboard. CRM is a convenient name for a customer relationship management system. SEO has an established meaning in the industry. If both people understand what they’re discussing, those abbreviations save time. In an international team, using English as a shared language is often simply the most sensible option.
Some Polish alternatives are longer or less precise anyway. I’m not going to hold a competition for the most thoroughly Polish sentence in business. I’d rather we chose our words to suit the person we’re talking to.
Try this at your next meeting
I’d take one sentence from a proposal or report and try explaining it to a client in my own words, without reading from a slide. If removing the technical terms leaves me struggling to say anything specific, it’s worth revisiting the idea itself.
- In a meeting, I’d ask: ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
- When planning work: ‘Who will do it, and by when?’
- When assessing results: ‘What changed, and how do we know it was because of our work?’
Questions like these can be more useful than another hour discussing strategy in vague terms.
It’s also worth saying ‘I don’t understand’ yourself. Especially if you’re the boss, because that makes it easier for everyone else to ask questions. Then ask someone to explain in their own words what was agreed. That reveals whether you really understood each other.
One more thing: if someone reports a mistake, don’t punish them for saying plainly what went wrong. Otherwise, they’ll quickly learn to use all those safe, vague sentences. The boss will receive increasingly polished reports and less and less information about the business.
I’d rather let a client question my work
I want people to understand their situation better after speaking with me. Even if they ultimately decide against working together. And if they do choose to work with me, they should know what we’re doing and what they can hold me accountable for.
Sometimes that means admitting: ‘We don’t know yet’ or ‘My idea didn’t work’. So be it. I’d rather have that conversation than build an authority the client is afraid to question.
That’s why I’ll keep insisting on plain language. And when I start hiding a lack of substance behind clever words myself, I hope someone asks me for the specifics.
Source
[1] Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2006), ‘Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1178
