When knowing the language becomes proof that you know the work

Sometimes an ordinary question comes back wearing a much more expensive outfit, and these days, it might have a matching AI accessory. Someone asks how departments could share information more reliably, and suddenly we are discussing an integrated stakeholder engagement ecosystem with its own Center of Excellence. Somewhere in that conversation, the shared document we needed has become a much larger undertaking.

I’m interested in how we respond when that happens, particularly when we hear words we don’t recognize. It is reasonable to think the person using them knows something we don’t. They might. But there is still some distance between knowing how to describe an idea and knowing how to put it into practice, and we don’t always give ourselves permission to ask the questions that would help us understand the difference.

In my first post, I introduced the Flexicon, our household name for the ever-shifting collection of professional language that follows us into meetings and workplaces. I wrote about what happens when understanding the assignment terminology becomes the first assignment. Here, I want to spend a little more time with the conversation before that, when we are listening to someone explain an idea and deciding how much confidence to place in it.

I understand the appeal of having the right words. When you are new to a role, a profession, or even a particular team, learning how people talk is part of finding your way. You learn the acronyms, discover which books everyone has read, and eventually stop wondering whether an unfamiliar term is a method, a department, or someone who should have been invited to the meeting. As those conversations become easier to follow, it can feel as though you are finding your place.

That shared language can be useful, but we also learn something from the way people respond to it. If an idea gets more attention once we describe it in the accepted terms, we may start using those terms more often. Over time, it becomes harder to tell whether the vocabulary is helping us explain the work or helping us establish that we belong in the conversation.

Researchers have examined that urge to sound the part. In a 2020 paper on jargon and status, Zachariah Brown, Eric Anicich, and Adam Galinsky found that feeling lower in status/hierarchy could increase jargon use, with concern about how others would judge the speaker helping explain the pattern. That finding gives us something more to consider than the familiar complaint that people use complicated words to impress everyone. Sometimes they may be trying to make sure they are taken seriously at all in the workplace communities they are in.

Imagine joining a team where everyone seems to speak fluent business. You have experience and something useful to contribute, but your explanation sounds different from everyone else’s. Borrowing their language might feel like a sensible way to get your point heard. If it works, you have learned something about what the group rewards, whether or not anyone intended to teach that lesson or not.

For those of us already comfortable in these rooms, that is worth sitting with. We might encourage people to speak plainly while giving more attention to the person whose explanation sounds familiar, especially if it resembles the language we use ourselves. Meanwhile, someone with a good understanding of the problem may be describing it in words we have learned to associate with less responsibility or experience.

Consider two people discussing a delayed approval process. One suggests improving cross-functional alignment through a revised governance model. The other says requests sit for days because nobody knows who can approve them when the manager is away. They may be describing parts of the same problem, yet the first can sound like leadership material while the second sounds as though they are complaining.

Yet the person describing the stalled requests has given us something we can investigate. We can look at where the requests are sitting, who has authority to approve them, and what happens when that person is unavailable. Their explanation may not account for everything, but it offers a starting point for a conversation with the person proposing a different governance model. Perhaps that model would address the gap. Perhaps the example reveals something the proposal has overlooked. We have a better chance of finding out if we bring the two views together and ask how the proposed change would work for the people handling those requests.

Of course, that takes a little more patience than accepting the explanation delivered with the most confidence. In research published in 2012, Cameron Anderson and colleagues found that overconfidence could help people gain status because others perceived them as more competent. The study concerned confidence rather than jargon, but I find the connection useful to think about. How sure someone sounds can influence the credit we give them before we have much evidence of what they can do.

That is not a reason to distrust a confident person or assume that an awkward explanation hides some great insight. A person can know a subject deeply and struggle to explain it to a particular audience. Someone else can give a polished presentation and still need help putting the idea into practice. We need enough conversation to understand what each person is bringing, rather than expecting their delivery to tell us everything.

This is where a few ordinary questions can do useful work. What problem are we trying to solve? Can we walk through an example? What would someone do differently if we tried this? Asked with interest, those questions give the person presenting a chance to develop the explanation and everyone else a way to connect it with what they know.

The answer might reveal a thoughtful plan, a missing piece, or an idea that needs more time. We should be comfortable with any of those, provided we can acknowledge what we have learned. We should become more concerned when a request for clarification produces another layer of terminology, or when the person asking is left feeling that they should have understood without needing an explanation.

People in leadership positions have considerable influence over how those moments go. When a leader asks what a term means, someone else may feel more comfortable admitting they were wondering too. When they ask the person handling the requests to explain the delay, they make room for knowledge that might otherwise remain outside the discussion. Those choices help people learn whether questions and observations are welcome, or whether it is safer to arrive with the right vocabulary and keep the uncertainty to themselves.

What stays with me is how much we might miss while listening for the right words. The person describing the stalled requests may understand something the proposed governance model needs to account for. The person proposing that model may know how to address a problem that reaches beyond those requests. Neither explanation gives us everything on its own, but a conversation between them could get us somewhere.

It would be nice to see more room for that exchange before we decide who has the better grasp of the work. If we keep giving the most credit to the people who sound the part, we should not be surprised when everyone spends more time learning how to sound the part. We may end up with a room full of people who speak fluent business while the person who knows why the requests are stuck has stopped offering an explanation.