Is business speak just a dialect?

“...and they termed him with only 2 weeks’ severance! In the second week of December! That’s not enough runway to find another opportunity without an income gap! Talk about retaliation!”

I paused to give my friend chance to validate my outrage.

“I... I don’t know what to say...” she said. “Frankly, I had trouble following that whole story. I didn’t know anyone actually talked like that.”

Devastating.

It brought me up short. I’d called this friend because she was one of the most insightful, emotionally intelligent people I knew. I thought my minutes-long rant about offsites, reimbursable expenses, performance evaluations, and COBRA subsidies would make the situation clear.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the words themselves would sound foreign to someone who had spent half of our call feeding goats.

My friend was a professional dog trainer.

Her job wasn't really to teach dogs, but to teach humans how to read nonverbal cues and behavioral dynamics. Her lessons had changed my life. That day, I'd called her to help me put words to the workplace dynamics that were eating me up inside.

She understood the dynamics. She even understood the words I'd used to describe them. The words just made her eyes roll. (A social cue that you're being an insufferable twit.)

When someone doesn’t know the industry jargon in a work setting, we think it discredits them. But you don't need fancy buzzwords to have eyes to see. Different vocabulary just means they come from a different context.

It doesn’t mean that they don’t have relevant experience. Like a dog can alert you to signals you didn't pick up on, different perspectives ead to new insights, giving you an edge on the market.

At networking events, people’s eyes go dull when the person they’re talking to doesn't know the "right" word. When it’s their turn to speak, they abruptly end the conversation.

The message is, “this rube isn’t worth my time.”

I’ve seen the candidate feedback where the interviewer deducts points for candidates who don’t articulate a situation according to the industry script. The feedback says, “I don’t think this person will fit in here.”

The feedback belies the blindspot. These are the people who could most benefit from having their mind pried open to a different perspective.

I could go on for hours about the benefits of hiring people from nontraditional backgrounds. In our third episode of HR Peep Show, AnnE Diemer, Krista Lane and I talked about it for 41 minutes. Give it a listen. 👇

Listen here