A commonly ridiculed aspect of business culture is the overused cliche. In the course of a given day, we circle back, we touch base, and we pick each other’s brains. Sometimes, so much time is spent swapping cliches that we forget to do any actual work, but in today's world once the dust settles we'll give 110%, it is... what it is!
Of course, most of these expressions are harmless, just little shortcuts to cut to the... ahhhh! They help us get to the main points of a conversation, like verbal bullet points, and a permanent exasperation with cliches reveals an unhealthy obsession with originality. The examples work best when the speaker is describing how his or her own situation applies to common recognized categories.
But when I hear someone use cliches to describe someone else, I'm alert to a conflict. My preferred example is when someone says "so-and-so doesn't want to be here". It’s often based on nothing, just the speaker's hunch, but a cliche is so easily understood that listeners often let the comment slide, implicitly coming to an agreement with the speaker - so-and-so doesn't want to be here! I consider not letting such nonsense slide as part of my job. I remember the first time I viscerally disagreed with this expression. We had just interviewed a great candidate for my team and I had pushed to offer her the job as soon as possible. She had countered our initial offer, holding out for a higher salary. My boss became upset by the news - I don't want anybody who doesn't want to be here!
Now, maybe he was right about the candidate, maybe he had deduced something about her motivations that was opaque to me, but since it hadn't come up until the counter I suspected otherwise. I was unwilling to use this information to change my mind about her motivations. She had spent hours applying for the job and preparing for the interviews; she had spent seconds discussing her salary. On balance, her use of time indicated that she wanted to work in our team and that she wanted a higher salary. This was true of her and everyone else already in the team. Plus, since a counter-offer is among the most generic negotiation 'strategies', she was as likely in my mind to be performing to a script as she was demonstrating unwillingness to be in the team. But the boss was convinced – she didn’t want to be here.
I've probably spent too much time the past few years thinking about that comment. I've essentially narrowed my concerns down to three basic questions about the workplace. First, why do people in power forget that snap judgments about a stranger's complex motivations often leads to self-serving conclusions? Second, and more broadly speaking, why do people seek an explanation for every action? These are questions that I am content to leave open for now, given that I lack the expertise to answer them (or the cheek to invent them). The third question, though, seems much more urgent, and I'll give it a try - why do we settle so frequently for simple answers to complex questions?
I am speaking, of course, about cliches, and their more violent mutation, the buzzword. A workplace that communicates in sound bites gets in the habit of thinking in sound bites. Is that thinking? I don't think so. If my colleagues are constantly agreeing to 'touch base later', that's not necessarily unhelpful, but I've always found having a set date and time on the calendar leads to better follow up. I think a reliance on sound bites helps categorize, and in a sense working on a problem until it fits a known cliche is one way of leveraging patterns to run a better organization. But it also sounds like a perpetual quest for shortcuts, and I've never heard a CEO talk about all the shortcuts he or she took on the road to success.
If there is a lack of original thinking and a tendency to fit anything new into an existing category, there will be problems when certain ideas, opportunities, or people come along. There will be problems with clear communication, both in terms of content and intent. Someone willing to consider contingencies, possibilities, or challenges will be viewed as a potential threat, even if just in terms of cultural fit, and these behaviors will gradually disappear from the workplace. At some point, I suspect the organization becomes incapable of dealing with anything that doesn't fit an existing category, leading inevitably to a logical conclusion - a collective malaise for hard work.
A good way to sniff out a cliche is to ask whether the words are standing in place of rigorous work. Does the candidate not want to be here, or are we simply unwilling to do the work of generating the extra revenue? If colleagues suggest circling back later to tackle a stalled project, maybe they should put in a little more effort and schedule time instead. The bosses demanding all hands on deck might find less need for dramatic calls to action if they spent more of their time on deck. The danger of the cliche is like anything else in a workplace – sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference between what moves the team forward and what holds the team back. When I think about workplaces stuck in the latter pattern, their flywheel perpetually powered by cliche, I know one thing for sure – I don’t want to be there.
