Imagine if you will: You are mourning your father, watching the smoke rise from a wood stove in a rural Guatemalan village. The grief in the air is palpable. You turn to your mother and say, in Mam, your Mayan language: "Nan, waji chix tuj Kytanum Meẍ," – "Mum, I want to go to the white men's nation," meaning, the United States. One year and four months later, you arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area carrying nothing but a photograph, a few family contacts, and your language.
For Aroldo—whose story was recounted by the BBC—Mam is not a relic of the past. It's a living medium of belonging, one that allows him to retain identity and community in a strange land. And herein lies our first clue: language is not just communication—it is coordination, recognition, and power. Strip it away, and people disappear from view.
Organisations, especially those aspiring to high(er) performance, suffer from the same invisible erosion when shared language is missing. Despite mission statements, alignment workshops, and team-building exercises involving an alarming number of sticky notes, we often find people talking past each other, rowing in different directions. Worse, some row diligently without even knowing the boat has changed course.
Language Is a System of Visibility
The first thing to understand is that language is not neutral. It reveals or conceals. It can include people in a conversation—or erase them from it. When the U.S. government lumps all Central American migrants under the label 'Hispanic', it creates a monolingual, monocultural fiction. In reality, Mam and K'iche' speakers bring not just different tongues, but distinct social experiences, historical lessons, and community needs.
The same mislabeling happens in boardrooms when terms like 'resistance to change' are used to explain pushback from front-line staff. If you fail to distinguish between confusion, exhaustion, and principled disagreement, you end up stigmatising the very people you need to understand.
Organisations often operate in what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) termed a category error—confusing shared labels for shared meaning. The result is cultural blindness masquerading as efficiency.
It has been argued that even the rarefied world of executive coaching has fallen into this trap. Despite coaching being a multibillion-dollar industry, the actual language of coaching—the things people say to one another in those sessions—has largely flown under the radar of critical thinking—darkly ironic given the magnitude of what executives are empowered to do, often on the back of coaching. Yet this vacuum can be filled with air by introducing a linguistic hierarchy based on five speech functions: expressive, descriptive, argumentative, advisory, and promissory. Think Maslow's hierarchy, but for talking.
At the base is expressive language—"I'm frustrated"—which signals inner states but does little else. At the top is promissory language—"I will prioritise my team's feedback this quarter"—which implies a willingness to be held accountable. Between these poles lie descriptive truth, argumentative reasoning, and advisory clarity.
| Speech Function | Description | Example | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expressive | Expresses emotions, thoughts, or feelings | "I'm frustrated with this project" | Signals inner state, builds rapport |
| Descriptive | Describes facts, events, or situations | "The project is behind schedule" | Provides information, sets context |
| Argumentative | Presents a point of view, supports with evidence | "We should prioritize feature X because it will increase user engagement" | Persuades, convinces, or negotiates |
| Advisory | Offers guidance, recommendations, or suggestions | "I think we should consider outsourcing this task to a specialist" | Provides expertise, helps decision-making |
| Promissory | Makes commitments, promises, or assurances | "I will deliver the report by Friday" | Builds trust, establishes accountability |
Table: Hierarchy of organisational speech functions and their impact
What distinguishes highly capable leaders is their use of what Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) termed 'noble language'—language that enables autonomy, cooperation, and responsibility. An example of this would be a person who magnanimously says "this idea came from you, not from me", when an insightful comment emerges from conversation. In contrast, 'base language' disempowers. It dodges, flatters, obscures, or infantilises. It says: "Let's not get into that right now," when what it really means is: "I'm uncomfortable being challenged".
A telling example comes from two coaching transcripts. In one, a peer tells a struggling manager to "dump some of your work on your people" and "go hire someone else." The conversation ends with a limp "Whatever" from the manager. In the second, the coach asks open questions, helping the manager reframe the problem and commit to concrete actions. By the end, the manager says, "I guess I'm smarter than I thought." Now that's performance improvement—no ropes course required.
Organisations Speak in Tongues
So what does this mean for the rest of us—those managing teams, crafting strategy, or simply trying to stop our inboxes from burying us alive?
It means we need to treat language not as an afterthought, but as the very architecture of coordination. Just as Aroldo's use of Mam helped him stay visible in an unfamiliar nation, shared language within teams ensures individuals remain recognisable to one another. And recognisability is a precursor to trust.
Take, for instance, the case of an engineering team refactoring code. To developers, that means rewriting code for efficiency without changing what it does. To executives, it can sound like unnecessary fiddling. If this isn't clarified, the team may get approval for a code refactor and then be criticised for not delivering new features. When language collapses, so does legitimacy.
Or consider the phrase customer value. To sales, it means closing deals. To design, it means usability. To finance, it means margin. Without a shared framework, cross-functional alignment becomes little more than a slide deck catch phrase.
This brings us to the late Pope Francis, who—surprise—also had something to say about moral reasoning and by extension organisational development. In Amoris Laetitia, a document primarily about family life, Francis addresses the idea of 'gradualness'. People don't become good overnight. They develop conscience, and with it, the ability to act wisely, over time. In other words, conscience is not a switch to be flipped; it's a muscle to be exercised.
In organisational terms, this means new language needs constant practice and reinforcement. You don't create a culture where people feel comfortable speaking-up by issuing an all staff email or running a town hall. You cultivate it by rewarding truth-telling—most particularly when it's uncomfortable.
In short: there are no linguistic shortcuts to cultural integrity.
A Call to Action (and to Grammar)
For language to move beyond being mere words or sounds requires discernment—a reflective capacity to judge what is appropriate in morally complex situations. In practice, discernment relies on the ability to re-describe situations with greater accuracy. For example: we shouldn't say "our metrics are flat", rather "our customers are leaving us". Not "she's not a good cultural fit", rather "she challenges our assumptions, and we don't know how to respond".
In business, such re-descriptions are not just rhetorical flourishes—they are acts of moral visibility. They make the hidden consequences of action (or inaction) legible. They allow people to step into the shoes of others—often those with less power—and see what the world looks like from there.
Discernment is knowing that saying "it's not personal, it's business" is an idiotic phrase because the person you laid off still had to tell their child they can't afford to go to camp—which is as personal as it gets. Instead, try the more honest: "the decision your role was no longer required was taken without regard to your circumstances." In short, it is taking accountability for our actions rather than passing the buck onto someone or, in the case of language, something else.
If organisations are to perform—not just in the economic sense, but in the ethical and cultural sense—stakeholders must attend to their language. This means investing in coaching, yes, but also in practices that elevate noble speech: performance reviews that invite reflection rather than recitation; town halls that surface real concerns, not rehearsed applause.
It also means listening better. When a frontline worker resists a new system, ask whether it's confusion, fear, or wisdom being mislabelled as inertia. When a colleague challenges you, resist the urge to call them difficult. Ask what language they're using—and what language you've been ignoring.
Good night, and good luck.
