June 10, 2025 • 50 mins
Have you ever noticed how strange the language of a new workplace seems when you first join? Even disorienting, yet how fast you pick up the new language? That shared way of speaking isn’t just habit—it’s culture in action. In this episode, Gill Ereaut reveals how analyzing everyday language inside organizations can unlock deep insights into their true culture—and how becoming conscious of it can open the door to meaningful change.
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Working on Purpose is broadcast live Tuesdays at 6PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Working on Purpose is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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(00:20):
for choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome back to the Working in Purpose program, which has
been brought to you with passion and pride since February
of twenty fifteenth. Thanks tuning in again this week. Great
to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortes. If
we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm
an organizational psychologist, management consultant, LOCO therapist, speaker and author.
My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to
enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high
(01:25):
performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose.
And did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line.
You learn more about us and how we can work
together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site at
least Coortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have
(01:45):
with us today. Jill iro She is a British researcher, author,
speaker and organizational consultant. She's the founder of the consultancy
Linguistic Landscapes, pioneering the commercial application of language sciences, linguistic
and discourse else Is to real organizational issues. We'll be
talking about her brand new book, The Way We Talk
around here, how your organization's culture shows up in your language,
(02:08):
and why it matters. She joined us today from Oxford. Jill,
welcome to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Thank you great to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
It is wonderful to have you. And you know, since
we each of course have books published through practical inspiration,
that's that's how I met you. I want to give
a shout out to Elison Jones. She's magnificent and I
really really enjoyed your book. I learned a lot, and
I want to first start by celebrating. I'm not sure
if you call yourself a linguistic anthropologist or how do
you call yourself.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I usually try to avoid giving it a name, actually,
but yes, anthropologist is is a pretty good description in
that linguist anthrologists are all about how language influences social
and cultural life, and linguistic anthrology is about how you
can study culture through the use of linguistic tools. So
(02:58):
the difference, I guess between me and an academic linguistic
anthropologist is the subject of study, which in my cases
organizations beautiful.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
It's wonderful and I love you that you're just obsessed
with language. I think that's wonderful, and we're going to
talk about your approach to discourse analysis as we go,
but first I just want to situate. I really liked
how you opened the book and talked about how you know,
when newcomers come into an organization, they immediately detect the
subtleties of the culture as and whereas their tenure brethren can't.
(03:31):
So if you could just start by kind of helping
us step into that place where that is such a
very powerful way to detect culture through the ears, eyes
and experiences of those newcomers.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Sure, most people have the experience or recognize the experience
of first few days in a new organization, first few
days in a new job. For the first few days weeks,
you can hear the way it talks this organization, even
if you've come from within the same industry, there's something
about this new place. And most people spend that first
(04:04):
few weeks months just basically trying to learn the language,
the acronyms, the code. But what you're also doing when
you absorb the languages, you're absorbing what's not being said,
the subtext, if you like the culture that's sitting beneath
that language. And then after a while you can't hear
it anymore so when you're a newcomer, you're in a
(04:24):
very powerful but not powerful position. You can hear it,
and you can sense the kind of the way things,
you know, the way we think about things around here
in this new place, but you're often not in a
position to comment on it because that would be rude
or seem aggressive and so on.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And the one thing that strug me as you talked
about that was how powerful it would be if organizations
had the practice of engaging in conversation with the people
that are coming into the organization and just asking them,
what do you see? What are you noticing about how
we do things here? What are you picking up on it?
That would be so powerful to gain age are we doing?
Are we actually putting out what we want it to
(05:04):
be in terms of our culture in the way that
we're operating. And I don't know too many organizations that
do that, do you.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
I think that's true. I think I wish I could
remember who it was, But there was, I believe, a
chief executive officer of a very large corporation who made it,
made it a habit to have one or two of
his newest recruits in for I mean, they must have
been terrified in for coffee or lunch with him, and
he wanted to know their first impressions. He wanted to
(05:30):
know what they'd noticed. But I don't think that's a
common practice. What I often say to people who are
interested when they first join an organization is themselves, is
to keep a notebook. You know, just write down all
the things that you notice in those first few weeks, because,
particularly if you are in a position a manager or
a leader, that will be a resource because you won't
(05:53):
be able to you won't be able to hear it
after a half, so your notebook will be a resource.
Thinking I remember noticing that's a weird way talk about
customers around here. I've never heard that before. It's not
that we necessarily have a different name for them, but
that's a weird position that we kind of put them
in when we're talking about them. Often people don't quite
have the language to talk about the language, but they
(06:14):
recognize that there's something powerful going on in how an
organization I would say constructs the technical term is how
they're constructing the customer through the habits of language that
surround them.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
You're social scinct, that's not surprising, right, but you're social
syinct and appreciate that. One of the things that you
talk about, which of course I agree because I do
also some culture work as well, is that how important
it is to be able to presence this right. And
what I really love too is that we talk and
we'll get to a little bit later, but when you
start to share back what you're hearing how people are
(06:52):
using language, like, for example, I just did something. Let's
see in February, I was working with an organization and
I kept hearing they were using as I did the interviews,
they were using language like well, that would get me
in trouble, and so there was a lot of that
language and I put it back up to them and
they were like, we had no idea we were even
seeing that clearly indicating a lack of psychological safety. And
(07:15):
you could see how it was impacting how they were
putting forth ideas and whether or not they were willing
to engage with those ideas. So I like the fact
that and it's important for this conversation to share with
our listeners and viewers how important it is to make
it explicit what's actually being said and utilized for language
inside an organization.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
I think you can sometimes make it explicit yourself. I
think sometimes it takes a shared conversation for everyone to
share that experience and say we do, don't we that's weird?
Where does that come from? And what's the implication? What
is it we're saying about ourselves or about the culture
here that we're always using that and crucially is that
(07:57):
helpful to us? Is that something that we want to
carry on with? But it's is a repeat very difficult
to see when you're inside the organization. Most newcomers just
have to get on and learn it in order to
do the job they've been hired to do. You know,
you don't have any spare bandwidth or time or you know,
relationships that you can work when you're when you're new,
(08:20):
so you need to you need to note it down
and then find a way of having conversations with people later.
I'm just working with them a group of young police
officers in fact, you know who are graduate graduates into
through into the British Police through a particular scheme and
talking with them two years in about the opportununity they
(08:44):
have while they're still that new and they can hear
the language and think and talk with their colleagues about
what's the implication of that language and maybe start to
change it or maybe start to go what's funny, isn't it?
I wonder why we do that? Do you think that
helps our our cause? Do you think that helps what
we're doing? And when we have those habits of how
we talk about people.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Mhm. I think it's useful too to share with their
listeners of viewers, just really how you talk about culture,
because it's it's one of those kind of words that
is thrown about a lot, but I don't know that
so many people really fully understand it. But I like
what you say in the book. You say culture is
the sum effect and enactment of unwritten norms and unspoken assumptions.
It's not what's dictated from above, but is made and
(09:28):
sustained every day by everyone. And it comes down to
simple shared beliefs, habits and rules of thumb. For most
of the organizations we work with, there there were perhaps
up to seven key ideas at the heart of how
people operated at that time. I think that's a really
important idea of you know, up to what you say,
(09:48):
seven key ideas that really dictate how an organization is
really run. That's powerful and if you knew those.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Things absolutely, and the the trick, I guess is to
find a way to surface those things and for me specifically,
to hypothesize them, if you like, to look at an
organization and help it to hear itself and then to say, well,
I'm not saying this is your culture, but from the
(10:16):
way you talk around here, it looks like these are
the things you say to yourselves all the time, but
you don't say them. These are the implicit rules that
everybody works to like, you know, you better watch out.
You know, you're get into trouble very easily around here.
You know, don't stick your head above the parapet because
you get shot down, or other kinds of rules that
(10:36):
can look quite perverse on the surface, and it's important
that people then have the opportunity to recognize them, and
they usually do if you get it right, and they
are you know, we all need shortcuts. People need shortcuts
in very complex in a complex world. And so when
you I think about culture in a number of ways,
one is what it's you know, an organization doesn't have
(10:59):
a culture, it does culture, and culture is something you
do day after day in every decision in every I mean,
you can people, you know, set priorities and write strategies.
But culture is how people operate and interact every day
in the jobs they're doing. So it's in the micro
decisions they make. Do I do this thing, or do
(11:21):
I do this thing? Of all the tasks I've got
to do, do I choose this promotion or that promotion
to send to customers? Do I go and consult these
people or these people within an organization? So that sort
of if you're like small decisions that actually make up
organizational life. And I think culture is therefore a kind
of living, breathing, moving, fluid thing which a makes it
(11:44):
difficult to hang onto, but really the optimistically it makes
it easier to change because it's not fixed in stone.
The only way it gets fixed in stone is that
we need shortcuts. So people need a kind of I
sometimes think it an if in doubt, I'll do this
kind of set of rules. If in doubt, keep your
(12:04):
head down. If in doubt, always consult legal. If in doubt,
go to the shop floor and talk to them. You know,
the sort of we need. We need easy ways to
make those decisions without processing them cognitively every single time,
and I think culture sort of sits at that semi
conscious level, and not unconscious in a kind of Freudian sense,
(12:26):
but certainly not conscious all the time. And it's it's
like that it runs in the background all the time.
If you can't see it, you can't change it. So
you need to help people to be able to become
conscious of it in order to consider how useful it
is in order to change it, and so on. So
I think if you think about that it's culture is
(12:50):
what you do and that we have, that instantly changes
your view. And then if you insert the idea of
habits and sort of I sometimes think about out thinking grooves,
you know, they're kind of we will all our thinking
will always go down the easiest groove. It's quite difficult
to push yourself out of a habit of thought, and
(13:11):
that way things just to get done the same all
the time. And a culture which has perhaps outlived its
usefulness will be perpetuated, not because people are being stupid,
and not because they're being evil, or not because they're
being stubborn or any of those things, but just because
it's a habit and it's easier to follow a habit. Yeah,
that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Indeed absolutely completely understand that. Yeah. And the other thing
that I want to call out here is just how
you talk about how culture is the answer to three
big questions. You talk about those those big questions.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Sure, So, over the twenty plus years that have been
developing this approach to culture, I realized that what we
were finding all the time in mattering out patterns in
organizations language. So essentially, just to go back a step,
what I would do is to sample language across an organization,
(14:10):
so internal like how they speak internally, and how they
speak externally, formally, informally, written, spoken, and so on, and
look for patterns are quite subtle and over but also
at subtle levels. And then when you see those patterns,
what we're trying to work out is what does it mean?
And sorry, I've completely lost my there's ree big questions.
(14:35):
We realized that we were doing this inductively the whole time,
and what can we see? What can we see? What
can we see? And then realize that those they fall
into a set of three sort of clusters, if you like,
of beliefs or types of idea. The first question, if
you like, is who are we like? Who are we
you know, really questions of identity and existence and you know,
(14:58):
who are we? And what's important around the second question
is who are they out there? Whether they is customers
or competitors or regulators or whoever the non organization group is.
And the subject to the subject to that one is
who are they out there? And what do we really
(15:18):
think of them? You know, what's our what's what's our
position with regard to them, because again, you sometimes find
quite surprisingly toxic ideas we work with an organization once,
for example, where it just became clear as we analyzed
language that they fundamentally believed that customers were stupid, their customers,
(15:39):
their own customers were stupid, and how can that be?
You know, how how does that kind of work? And
it dated back actually when we excavated it to a
time when it was a financial services organization and had
a very long history and many decades ago. We kind
of wanted our financial services institutions, for all our institutions,
(16:02):
to be clever, you know, we just wanted them to
know the stuff, and we weren't that interested as culturally
at the time in understanding things ourselves. And we don't
have that trust in institutions anymore, whether financial or governmental
or anything. And so they were continuing to basically strut
around and say, well, you know, we're we're the people
(16:24):
who know all the stuff, and they, you know, the
thing is they buy these things. They don't know what
they are, which is actually what they were saying. You said,
they've bought these pensions, and trouble is they don't understand them,
not for a second seeing that has anything to do
with them or anything that they could or should be addressing.
And so and of course the world had moved on
(16:44):
around them, and their competitors were cleaning up because they
were addressing people like they weren't stupid. This is different stuff,
but you're not stupid, you know, let's help you understand this,
or let's give you the information you need to make
an informed choice here. And I think it was it
was really really getting in their way. So that's the
first one is who are we? The second one is
(17:05):
who are they out there? And what's the relationship we're
assuming with them or the attitude we assume towards them.
And then the third one is how do we do
relationships around here? So we've worked with companies organizations where
their position in most relationships is one of a slight
(17:26):
arrogance is perhaps too strong a word, but a kind
of well, we are you know, we are clearly the best,
you know, obviously obviously the best, and that leaks out
into communications. That's the thing about these internal attitudes, especially
ones when it comes to the communications with customers. If
(17:47):
you essentially believe that you, as an organization are the
best the bee's knees, you know, we would say, I
don't have used that expression in the US. Then that
will come out in a set of language patterns particular organization.
While I have in mind would always start any communication
with a little kind of linguistic fanfare. At Exit Tex Company,
(18:09):
we are always striving to do sounds and so and so,
and halfway down the page, I'd get to the bit
that was actually for me and about me, and it
was such a habit, and I didn't see it as
a habit until and then, of course you show them
the pattern.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
And they go, oh, of course, yeah, of course that's
what we do.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
And I can see why that's not helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Let us let our listeners and viewers to on that
while we take our first break thinking about those things
that you're doing that may actually be running customers away
from you or even your employees away from you. I'm
your host, Doctor Releasee Cortez. We've been on the air
with jail Errol. She's a linguistic she's ad linguistic landscapes.
She's pioneering the commercial applications of language sciences, linguistics and
(18:50):
discourse and elsa's to real organizational issues. We've been talking
a bit about culture, what is it, how to recognize it?
After the work, We're going to get into her actual method,
which is discourse. I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to invite
a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(19:40):
at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
a lease Ali s at a Lastcortes dot com. Now
(20:03):
back to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I
am dedicated to help them create a world where organizations
thrive because their people thrive, are led by inspirational leaders
that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we
do business at betters the World. I keep researching and
writing my own books, so one of my last ones
came out. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning
and purpose can radically in liven your business. I wanted
(20:32):
to help leaders understand the lay of today's workforce land,
what do they want, and then I provide twenty two
best practices to help equip you to provide that for them.
You can find my books on Amazon or my personal
site at Leastcoortes dot com if you are just now
joining us. My guest is Jill Errol. She's the author
of the Way we Talk around here, How your organization's
culture shows up in your language, and why it matters.
(20:54):
So I was very intrigued to see your methodology, Jill
of discourse Analysis. It's just really, really interesting. So for
our listeners and viewers who probably have never heard of that,
you did mention it a little bit before and help
what you're analyzing. But if you could just situate a
bit about how you use discourse analysis in the internal
and external ways of speaking or communicating.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Sure, many many of you of viewers, I think we'll
be familiar with the work of egg Shin, who's one
of the biggest names in organizational culture, and Seine talked
about three CIPHU light levels of culture. He talked about artifacts,
which are the things on the surface that you can see,
so the way the organization looks, and rituals and practices
(21:40):
and so on. Then he also talked about his spouse values.
I mean, we tend to call them planes and wishes.
They are the things that an organization says it's about,
and often since the he believes it's about but may
not necessarily match up with what happens. And then his
third level, that the deepest level. He calls basic and
set assumptions, and we usually abbreviate those settling assumptions. What's
(22:04):
most interesting about artifacts is they are of many, many
different kinds. I mean, he talks about the physical environment,
how people dress and so on. But our method uses language,
as I call it in the book, a super artifact.
It's a very very powerful artifact, and it's great for
a number of reasons. One is it gets everywhere. Everyone
uses language an organization. There's no shortage of data like
(22:27):
in fact, quite the opposite. It's also everybody uses it,
so we're not just analyzing culture, if you like has
represented by the senior ranks or indeed by any one
part of the organization. The other brilliant thing about language.
Two other brilliant things is you can collect it and
analyze it offline, out of the organization. Don't have to
(22:49):
crawl all over the place for weeks to gather data.
But the most important thing is that there is an
enormous range of very well grounded academic work in looking
at how language works in social and cultural terms, so
how we create and co create our worlds linguistically, And
that's where the anthropology piece comes in, and what discourse.
(23:13):
Those methods collectively are called discourse analysis, and what they
offer are these extremely well grounded, empirically based frameworks and
ways of thinking about language. So that means that you
can use it as a particular kind of artifact, take
stuff away and analyze it in a systematic way. It's
(23:34):
qualitative work, so we're not counting things, use some semi
quantified some quantified approaches to very large bodies of data,
but mostly it's qualitative. What you're looking for is meaning
significance that is systematic, and it means that we can
show people in the organization, can show them the patterns
and the language. So we will gather internal and facing language.
(24:01):
It might include We would of course look at all
of those levels of shine, so we'd look at what
the espoused values and strategies and so on. So I'd
want to look at strategy and policy documents. I'd want
to look at high level statements of values and purpose
and intent and so on. I'd want to look at
those actually, though primarily as examples of the culture and action.
(24:22):
So there's sort of manifestations of a culture rather than
a definite or definitive description of it. So we use
that language, and I think a different way to the
way that some other analysts might. We also would look
at things like induction materials, like new Joiner materials, because
again they sometimes make explicit things which are implicit and
(24:45):
showing up everywhere. Sometimes you might find an piece of
induction material that runs absolutely counter to what we can
see on the ground. And that's quite important, you know,
for recruitment, for development and all sorts of tasks where
where people are trying to get a group of people
(25:05):
aligned behind purpose and values and meaning as you talk
about Alice. So we look at that kind of if
you like, the shine's surface stuff is vowels, values, but
we also want the really informal stuff that people don't
pay any attention to. It's littering the place.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:24):
We like language and listens, so internal memos, minutes, reports, emails,
internet pages, notices that are stuck on the walls and
in the kitchens, you know of offices really interesting. And
we work with one organization where one of their unspoken
(25:47):
kind of habits and values was essentially everyone will behave
like a child unless you tell them not to. It
was a very parental kind of position, and it wasn't
just a top down and although there was some of that,
you know from leadership behaving and acting in that way,
but almost everyone in the organization took that stance. So
if a junior person had to send an email to
(26:09):
all their colleagues. They would do it with a very
parental voice. And one of the pieces of one of
the data points that we could show actually made people laugh,
which is a helpful thing. Is amongst all of the
dos and don't send emailss on were notices in the
kitchen where there was there were three versions of a
note above a sink saying don't leave the dirty dishes
(26:31):
in here. Make sure you wash up your dishes. Don't
leave the dirty dishes here. It was a sort of
kind of shouting again and again of this is our
position here. You must do this. You will behold like
a child nurse. We tell you not to. It's silly,
but it's not silly. It's a tiny data point. But
in the midst of all the other pieces that we
could see, it was it was a great example because
(26:53):
people it was completely familiar to people, they'd never seen
it before. So we collapsed stuff, you know, from LLI
and so on, all the way through to internet pages
and notices on walls and notice boards. We would listening
to conversations. Obviously with invitation to conversations between colleagues and meetings,
we would have some conversations with people we want to
(27:15):
look at things like organization charts. Job titles are really revealing.
We once worked with an organization where, for various reasons,
they had a kind of very tightly protected group within
the organization, which itself saw itself as tightly protected against
the world. It had to have this kind of almost
(27:36):
like a medieval note around it, and there was an
app there were a set of people whose job title
was actually gatekeeper. That was what they wanted was to
stop exactly, was to stop people getting in or out
to this wholly sort of keep in the middle where
the extremely important people were. And I mean it was
(27:56):
a gift in a way. When we saw gatekeeper, we'd
already begun to see that through lots of less over language.
But to have a job an organization, a job title
in an organization of gatekeeper, we've never seen before. So
that's that's what I mean by looking for patterns across
different forms of data. We would look at a public website,
we look at social media, we look at if elevant
(28:19):
customer or user communications and so on. So what we're
looking for. I keep saying patterns because that is what
it's about. It's a bit like I often say, if
I hadn't discovered this world, I think I would probably
be an archaeologist or a forensic scientists. Lots of looking
looking a whole load of messy stuff, whether it's you know,
(28:42):
mud in the ground or whatever it is, and seeing
very small indicators of a pattern, like very low signal
to noise ratio pattern data, and as an archaeologist says,
what might have been there, what must have been there
in order to account for this patent they can see
on the ground. What we're saying is maybe this is
(29:06):
what's there, the unspoken staff to account for the other
way around the way, what's under in order to account
for these bits popping up In terms of language choices
on the surface, so we would look at things like
pronouns and labels, you know how our customers or colleagues
or different parts of the organization referred to. We worked
(29:27):
with government organization in the UK, a very powerful government
organization that was attached physically in the same building to
another extremely powerful government organization. They had a relationship that
was necessary but not always comfortable, and the first organization
(29:48):
we're working with would talk about our colleagues at the
other end of the building in a very meaningful way,
and effectively the colleagues at the other end of the building.
Was a subtext for those absolute pains in the neck,
you know, who think they run us and they don't
run us. And it was just a little kind of
a mantra that people would say. And when you see
(30:08):
something repeated like that, and particularly where there's euphemism, there's meaning.
So when people are using a euphemism so as not
to say what they mean, there's all. That's always where
we start digging. We get our trials out and start
kind of scraping away and seeing what's there. We would
look at styles of discourse. So sometimes in an organization
(30:32):
you'll get a dominance, for example, of a particular kind
of language, so dominance of a legal way of thinking
and talking which spills out well beyond the legal department,
or a dominance of marketing discourse that spreads across and
into other parts of the organization. These are not we're
(30:54):
not commenting often on whether this is a good thing
or a bad thing, But what we're doing is observing
and reflecting. Checking it means, checking it's recognizable to people
inside and then together working out what this means for them.
So we would also look at stories, we'd look at metaphor.
Metaphors immensely value. But I talked earlier about the organization
(31:18):
that effectively constructed itself as a castle, you know, with
a big wall and a moat round, a very very
powerful metaphor. And when they were able to see that,
it made sense of a lot of their difficulties. It
didn't solve them, but it helped them make sense of difficulties.
And if you can have some sense of why you're
(31:40):
in the state you're in, then that's the first step
to change in something.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
So wonderful. Oh go ahead, you'll was something she wanted
to say.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
No, no, no, no, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Okay, well let's go ahead and grab our last break
here and let our listeners and viewers chew on that.
Just think about, if you will, ladies and gentlemen, think
about how this language, the way that it's using your organization,
is either helping you get the results that you want
or preventing you from getting the results that you want.
This is a really really powerful stuff, that powerful work
that you do. Jill, I'm your host, doctor Elie Cortes.
(32:13):
We went on the air with Jill Erro. She's a
she's a linguistic landscapes and she's pioneering the commercial application
of language sciences, linguistics and discourse analysis to get real
organizational to get to real organizational issues. We've been talking
a bit more about her actual methodology. It's very, very powerful.
After the break, we're going to get into also talking
about gender and language patterns, as well as how this
(32:34):
starts to show up in terms of results and what
we could do with the data itself. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to invite
Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at
(33:16):
elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your
employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with
doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to
open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise
A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working
(33:40):
on purpose.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. As I mentioned in
my last break that my lady's book came out the
great realization. What I did for you is I created
a simple three page organizational assessment that you can pull
off my whip pite gustodeshnail dot com and it will
help you understand the extent to which your organization is
meeting the listening needs of today's workforce if you are
(34:09):
just now joining us. My guest is Jillie Rose. She's
the author of the Way we talk around here, how
your organization's culture shows up in your language, and why
it matters. So I want to just briefly touch on
this idea of gendered language patterns and just consider the
ramifications of that. That's so so powerful, and I certainly
work with other organizations as well that we're wondering why
can't we attract women around here? Why don't why don't
(34:31):
women want to come to work for this organization or
why why don't they stay? So give us kind of
a peek on you talk about feminine discourse, and then
of course masculine discourse.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
I mean, I think it's from observation. It seems to
me over the years that pretty well all organizations are,
if you like, gendered, masculine. And I don't mean they've
got more men in them than women, although obviously maybe
they have. But if you think about the idea of
gender as something you not something you have, but something
(35:04):
you do, so we can do being feminine and we
can do being masculine. I mean that's how That's how
actors work. You know, if somebody wants to walk in
a particularly masculine way, you know, you know what they
would do it, how they do it. They'd swagger and
so on. And similarly, we can walk or talk in
(35:25):
a particularly feminized way regardless of our biological sex. So
if you think of gender as something that can be done,
then organizations do it too. So in how an organization
not so much stresses, but certainly in how it talks,
And a lot of organizational discourse across the board traditionally
(35:46):
has been masculinized. And by that I mean, so I
go here now to you know what's known and written
about widely about the patterns in how I always has women,
but how people talk when they are doing being feminine,
and that means regardless of their state, if you're like
(36:10):
their bodily state or their but how do you perform
being feminine? How do you do being feminine? And what
we would tend to do to perform being feminine would
be to be conversational. There is a lot of evidence
that women use unassertive strategies, so hedging and I'm probably
doing it now, you know, saying well, sort of and
(36:30):
kind of and maybe and adding tag questions and so on.
And this is observational. This is just observing what happens.
Is putting labels or value judgments on. This just tends
to be what people are doing today. Historically would have
been different. In the future, it may be different, but
right now today women if they are offering expertise or advice,
(36:55):
they will tend to offer it rather than assert it
and so on offer and they may offering it, they
may offer it only when they're pretty sure it's being
asked for or will be welcome, rather than just because
they want to give it. Asking questions is a very
feminized form of language, and it's where necessarily and useful
(37:18):
asking questions It's not seen in this form of talking
as being weak or as betraying a lack of status,
and feminine talk. Feminized talk tends to be collaborative, so
not competitive. Now you can see where I'm going with
the opposite of this at the extreme, and I'm characterizing
almost like caricaturing vasculine discourse. Masculine talk will tend to
(37:42):
be showing ritual opposition and competition. Jokes banter are sort
of play fights. If you like linguistic play fighting is
banter teasing. You'll see a lot of war metaphors, sporting metaphors, debate,
open debate, open agreement. And interestingly, as many of us know,
(38:04):
many men will do anything other than ask a question
or ask for directions. I mean, let's not go there.
But because asking questions betrays a lack of knowledge or status,
asking question kind of puts you in a position of
having to confess you don't know and so on. And
this obviously runs counter to all the other stuff about dominance.
(38:28):
And what's so interesting, it doesn't take a huge leap
to see that within an organization classically happens so much now,
But classically a dominance for example, of numbers and graphs
and spreadsheets in PowerPoint presentations, you know, charts with hard
lines and numbers and so on, rather than, for example,
(38:51):
an alternative. It's almost hard to imagine, but PowerPoint slides
making the same kind of argumental point, but using human
voices or using images or narratives, which be you know,
less vasculinized. And again many people will recognize that in
a masculinized kind of language or discourse, it's all about
(39:16):
problem solving, so responding to problems by offering solutions rather
than by listening or empathizing. So you know, I don't
want you to sort this out for me. I just
want you to give me a hug and say I
understand how you feel. I means equivalent of So we
have these, you know some I have caricatured them, so
(39:38):
you know, I hope people are, aren't, you know, getting
too vexed about you know, well, I'm a girl and
I don't talk like that. But they are resources if
you think of those, all the different ways that we
have to talk as resources that we can draw on
any time to do a particular job. So whether you're
(39:58):
a biological man, biological women, or something else you can
be you can use language in a way that is
assertive and dominant and so on, or you can lose
language in a way that's empathetic and so on, And
organizations can sometimes get in their own way like this,
so either it's one of the examples I use in
(40:19):
the book is of an organization that really, really, sincerely
wanted to attract more women to engineering roles, and they
have tried all sorts of things with some success, and
we looked for them at a simple job ad, you know,
an online job ad trying to attract women into a
form of it was sort of it was, it wasn't.
(40:42):
It was an engineer job at communications engineer, so somebody
who would go out to a customer's house. It was
telecoms and fix their Wi Fi essentially, and at the
overt level there was absolutely nothing that this was a
job for men. But when we unpicked it, it used
particular a whole cluster of little phrases that fitted better
(41:05):
into that masculine discourse. So the thing talked about, you know,
you need to be sort of prepared to roll your
sleeves up and get your hands dirty, which just sews
slightly that way. Each one of those data points would
not have been enough, but the cluster of them was enough.
So we kind of fixed it for them in that
we suggested a rewrite, you know, which didn't make it feminized,
(41:29):
so we weren't going, hey, girls, come and work here.
What we did was just neral, genuinely neutralize it linguistically,
and they did it before and after test, and their
expressions of interest went up by two hundred percent or something.
Very gratifying because before people had said, wellow, it doesn't
(41:50):
really stand a job for me, and after many many
women said maybe that sounds quite interesting really, and of
course then they go have to go through the next age,
so getting in their own way in terms of attracting people.
And another company we work with was certainly getting in
its own way in trying to attract female customers. It
(42:11):
was really underrepresented. It knew it was very underrepresented in
terms of female customers. And to be honest, it didn't
take an awful lot of analysis to show them how
masculinized their language was. And again we just did some
sample rewrites where we just neutralized it, toned it down
(42:32):
so that the thing read much more neutrally, and it
was very successful. You know, you don't need to overtly think, oh,
I need to make this attractive to women. What you
need to do is to is to strip out the
unconscious bias that gets put into writing like that.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
So well said and explained. You'll just beautiful, so important. Okay,
So we want to go next is we don't have
a whole lot of time left. We've only got about
five minuts still left and we're in one of Your
next is you know, sharing insights now now that you've been,
you've been, you've done this work, and you're going to
come back to your organization. And I really like how
you talk about the the two questions that you are
(43:14):
trying to do to get them to look at one
is do you recognize the picture of us and how
we are? And the other one is what what's The
second question.
Speaker 4 (43:24):
Is how far is this set of assumptions serving us well? Okay, now,
if we recognize them, does it serve us well?
Speaker 3 (43:31):
That is the powerful questions. If you could speak a
bit to those.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
Okay, certainly, certainly, So we came. We've started to call
these the aha moment followed by the oh dear moment,
but the moment if we've got the analysis right, you
know we usually do, then and sorry. One of the
(43:54):
key things I feel very strongly about this is that
we we must not present this work to people as
a in a actually in quite a masculine way, as
a this is your culture, you know where I'm telling
you this is your culture. What we do is to
hold it up. I think I mentioned this earlier to
say we're not telling you this is your culture, but
this is how this culture language thing works. And in
(44:18):
the light of from the way you guys talk around here,
it looks like these are your unspoken assumptions because look
at these patterns and will show them literally aslide with
lots of different examples on it of how they are
doing parental voice, for example, or how they are doing
or any of the other many dimensions that come through
(44:39):
in organizations. So the first question is do you recognize this?
And people generally respond viscerally in We did some customers
and client research a while ago, and it was interesting
how much the metaphor of gut came through in their language.
It was a visceral response. It's like they recognize it
(45:01):
with their gut and then the brain kicks in and
real and says, my goodness, I totally recognize this because
their data, it's they're very familiar language. I've totally recognized
this and I've never seen it before. I've never seen
that pattern, and I've never recognized the implication of that pattern.
And there's often it's very energizing and intriguing for people.
(45:23):
There's often laughter, you know, people recognize oh moment, and
that release of energy then can sometimes be swiftly followed
by as we as we gently prod them into. The
second question is and is that still helpful to you?
Because it used to an organization's culture always made sense
(45:45):
once in the past. It's that people don't make up
dysfunctional cultures. What they do is they fail to see
they're becoming dysfunctional as time passes, the context changes and
so on. So how far is this sort of assumptions
helpful to this now we need to change to thrive today?
What can we consciously rework and we sometimes talk about
(46:08):
getting people to with a bit of help, of course
from us, sorting them into like what are the burdens?
You know, what are the things that are now a
complete liability to us. We've really got to stop doing that.
Where are their gaps? So things that we could do
with boosting perhaps like for example, one organization it was
deeply uncurious about the world outside. It has so much
(46:31):
potentially to learn and gather from. It was a public
sexual organizing, it's peer organizations, and elsewhere it just was
not curious at all. So that was a definite cultural
gap is to be and one of their principles that
we devide for them was be curious. And then there's sparks,
which are things that are kind of there in the
culture that maybe have got left behind or sort of
(46:55):
that they're not strong enough and they could do with nurturing.
So little embers we blow on them and to get
the fire going. So some people change immediately. You know,
there is a kind of there is a set of
people who when we take titting through a presentation of
these findings, will go I kind of understand why this
(47:16):
thing has been so difficult, and they'll just go off
and start having different conversations and interacting differently. They are
a small number of people sometimes realize the game is
up because the old culture has suited them well, and
you know, maybe it's about to get exposed. But for
most people, they're intrigued interested, They just need then a
bit of help to shape how they can work with it.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
What it's just such beautiful work and I love to
do it as well, and you're a approach. I just
really I've learned a lot from you about how you
do your work and you and your team do your work.
I want to give you the chance to close the conversation. First,
let me say thank you very much for coming on.
It's been amazing to learn from you, to read your
work and assure you. With my listeners and viewers across
the world, what would you like to leave them with today?
Speaker 4 (48:03):
Well, I think I'm going to home one really about
when I started to say at the beginning, I think
there are three things that annoyed me about the way
that culture has often talked about. One is it's often
described as mystical and unknowable. What is not unknowable, You
just have to find the right way in culture sometimes
(48:24):
can be the thing that gets counted, you know, would
count in a survey. And I just fundamentally believe that
it's too unconscious or semi conscious and emotional to be
counted in that way. People cannot tell you about the culture,
otherwise they would do so. And the third and so
I feel that actually addressing addressing culture in this way
(48:49):
gives the power back to the people who actually can
change it. Powers may be too strong, but it puts
it equips your people to choose to behave differently. Culture
change is not because people get told to change, but
because they see the sense of changing and they are
given them some help to move in that direction. So
I think that's what I'd like to leave people. Is
(49:10):
a kind of culture is I and for everyone?
Speaker 3 (49:15):
What a beautiful way to close. Jill, thank you again
for coming and working on purpose and writing your book
and putting sharing it with the world.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Listen. You're welcome. Listeners and viewers. You're going to want
to learn more about Jiro and the work she does
at Linguistic Landscapes and her new book The Way We
Talk Around Here. You can start by visiting her website.
It's Linguistic Landscapes dot com. Linguistic Landscapes dot com. Last week,
if you missed the Life Show, we were on with
Rich Fernandez and Carolina Lasso talking about their book The
(49:43):
Purpose Reset, which teaches how to realign purpose to at
every level, individual, team, organizational, and transforming workplaces into more compassionate,
engaged in high performing environments. Next week, we'll be on
the air with Wendy Lipton Dibner talking about her new book,
What Matters Most. How leaders build impassion, engagement, unrivaled loyalty,
(50:04):
and boundless growth by measuring real world impact. See you there,
and remember work is one of the best means and
realize I'm realizing our potential and making the impact we crave.
And I can give us the chance to make to
do business that betters in the world. So let's work
on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes,
each week on W four C. Why Together, We'll create
a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion
performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the
meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work
(50:41):
on Purpose.
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests and not
those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We
make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No
liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W four
CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or
comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you
(00:20):
for choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome back to the Working in Purpose program, which has
been brought to you with passion and pride since February
of twenty fifteenth. Thanks tuning in again this week. Great
to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortes. If
we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm
an organizational psychologist, management consultant, LOCO therapist, speaker and author.
My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to
enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high
(01:25):
performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose.
And did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line.
You learn more about us and how we can work
together at gustodashnow dot com or my personal site at
least Coortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have
(01:45):
with us today. Jill iro She is a British researcher, author,
speaker and organizational consultant. She's the founder of the consultancy
Linguistic Landscapes, pioneering the commercial application of language sciences, linguistic
and discourse else Is to real organizational issues. We'll be
talking about her brand new book, The Way We Talk
around here, how your organization's culture shows up in your language,
(02:08):
and why it matters. She joined us today from Oxford. Jill,
welcome to Working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
Thank you great to be here.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
It is wonderful to have you. And you know, since
we each of course have books published through practical inspiration,
that's that's how I met you. I want to give
a shout out to Elison Jones. She's magnificent and I
really really enjoyed your book. I learned a lot, and
I want to first start by celebrating. I'm not sure
if you call yourself a linguistic anthropologist or how do
you call yourself.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I usually try to avoid giving it a name, actually,
but yes, anthropologist is is a pretty good description in
that linguist anthrologists are all about how language influences social
and cultural life, and linguistic anthrology is about how you
can study culture through the use of linguistic tools. So
(02:58):
the difference, I guess between me and an academic linguistic
anthropologist is the subject of study, which in my cases
organizations beautiful.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
It's wonderful and I love you that you're just obsessed
with language. I think that's wonderful, and we're going to
talk about your approach to discourse analysis as we go,
but first I just want to situate. I really liked
how you opened the book and talked about how you know,
when newcomers come into an organization, they immediately detect the
subtleties of the culture as and whereas their tenure brethren can't.
(03:31):
So if you could just start by kind of helping
us step into that place where that is such a
very powerful way to detect culture through the ears, eyes
and experiences of those newcomers.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Sure, most people have the experience or recognize the experience
of first few days in a new organization, first few
days in a new job. For the first few days weeks,
you can hear the way it talks this organization, even
if you've come from within the same industry, there's something
about this new place. And most people spend that first
(04:04):
few weeks months just basically trying to learn the language,
the acronyms, the code. But what you're also doing when
you absorb the languages, you're absorbing what's not being said,
the subtext, if you like the culture that's sitting beneath
that language. And then after a while you can't hear
it anymore so when you're a newcomer, you're in a
(04:24):
very powerful but not powerful position. You can hear it,
and you can sense the kind of the way things,
you know, the way we think about things around here
in this new place, but you're often not in a
position to comment on it because that would be rude
or seem aggressive and so on.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And the one thing that strug me as you talked
about that was how powerful it would be if organizations
had the practice of engaging in conversation with the people
that are coming into the organization and just asking them,
what do you see? What are you noticing about how
we do things here? What are you picking up on it?
That would be so powerful to gain age are we doing?
Are we actually putting out what we want it to
(05:04):
be in terms of our culture in the way that
we're operating. And I don't know too many organizations that
do that, do you.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
I think that's true. I think I wish I could
remember who it was, But there was, I believe, a
chief executive officer of a very large corporation who made it,
made it a habit to have one or two of
his newest recruits in for I mean, they must have
been terrified in for coffee or lunch with him, and
he wanted to know their first impressions. He wanted to
(05:30):
know what they'd noticed. But I don't think that's a
common practice. What I often say to people who are
interested when they first join an organization is themselves, is
to keep a notebook. You know, just write down all
the things that you notice in those first few weeks, because,
particularly if you are in a position a manager or
a leader, that will be a resource because you won't
(05:53):
be able to you won't be able to hear it
after a half, so your notebook will be a resource.
Thinking I remember noticing that's a weird way talk about
customers around here. I've never heard that before. It's not
that we necessarily have a different name for them, but
that's a weird position that we kind of put them
in when we're talking about them. Often people don't quite
have the language to talk about the language, but they
(06:14):
recognize that there's something powerful going on in how an
organization I would say constructs the technical term is how
they're constructing the customer through the habits of language that
surround them.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
You're social scinct, that's not surprising, right, but you're social
syinct and appreciate that. One of the things that you
talk about, which of course I agree because I do
also some culture work as well, is that how important
it is to be able to presence this right. And
what I really love too is that we talk and
we'll get to a little bit later, but when you
start to share back what you're hearing how people are
(06:52):
using language, like, for example, I just did something. Let's
see in February, I was working with an organization and
I kept hearing they were using as I did the interviews,
they were using language like well, that would get me
in trouble, and so there was a lot of that
language and I put it back up to them and
they were like, we had no idea we were even
seeing that clearly indicating a lack of psychological safety. And
(07:15):
you could see how it was impacting how they were
putting forth ideas and whether or not they were willing
to engage with those ideas. So I like the fact
that and it's important for this conversation to share with
our listeners and viewers how important it is to make
it explicit what's actually being said and utilized for language
inside an organization.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
I think you can sometimes make it explicit yourself. I
think sometimes it takes a shared conversation for everyone to
share that experience and say we do, don't we that's weird?
Where does that come from? And what's the implication? What
is it we're saying about ourselves or about the culture
here that we're always using that and crucially is that
(07:57):
helpful to us? Is that something that we want to
carry on with? But it's is a repeat very difficult
to see when you're inside the organization. Most newcomers just
have to get on and learn it in order to
do the job they've been hired to do. You know,
you don't have any spare bandwidth or time or you know,
relationships that you can work when you're when you're new,
(08:20):
so you need to you need to note it down
and then find a way of having conversations with people later.
I'm just working with them a group of young police
officers in fact, you know who are graduate graduates into
through into the British Police through a particular scheme and
talking with them two years in about the opportununity they
(08:44):
have while they're still that new and they can hear
the language and think and talk with their colleagues about
what's the implication of that language and maybe start to
change it or maybe start to go what's funny, isn't it?
I wonder why we do that? Do you think that
helps our our cause? Do you think that helps what
we're doing? And when we have those habits of how
we talk about people.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Mhm. I think it's useful too to share with their
listeners of viewers, just really how you talk about culture,
because it's it's one of those kind of words that
is thrown about a lot, but I don't know that
so many people really fully understand it. But I like
what you say in the book. You say culture is
the sum effect and enactment of unwritten norms and unspoken assumptions.
It's not what's dictated from above, but is made and
(09:28):
sustained every day by everyone. And it comes down to
simple shared beliefs, habits and rules of thumb. For most
of the organizations we work with, there there were perhaps
up to seven key ideas at the heart of how
people operated at that time. I think that's a really
important idea of you know, up to what you say,
(09:48):
seven key ideas that really dictate how an organization is
really run. That's powerful and if you knew those.
Speaker 4 (09:55):
Things absolutely, and the the trick, I guess is to
find a way to surface those things and for me specifically,
to hypothesize them, if you like, to look at an
organization and help it to hear itself and then to say, well,
I'm not saying this is your culture, but from the
(10:16):
way you talk around here, it looks like these are
the things you say to yourselves all the time, but
you don't say them. These are the implicit rules that
everybody works to like, you know, you better watch out.
You know, you're get into trouble very easily around here.
You know, don't stick your head above the parapet because
you get shot down, or other kinds of rules that
(10:36):
can look quite perverse on the surface, and it's important
that people then have the opportunity to recognize them, and
they usually do if you get it right, and they
are you know, we all need shortcuts. People need shortcuts
in very complex in a complex world. And so when
you I think about culture in a number of ways,
one is what it's you know, an organization doesn't have
(10:59):
a culture, it does culture, and culture is something you
do day after day in every decision in every I mean,
you can people, you know, set priorities and write strategies.
But culture is how people operate and interact every day
in the jobs they're doing. So it's in the micro
decisions they make. Do I do this thing, or do
(11:21):
I do this thing? Of all the tasks I've got
to do, do I choose this promotion or that promotion
to send to customers? Do I go and consult these
people or these people within an organization? So that sort
of if you're like small decisions that actually make up
organizational life. And I think culture is therefore a kind
of living, breathing, moving, fluid thing which a makes it
(11:44):
difficult to hang onto, but really the optimistically it makes
it easier to change because it's not fixed in stone.
The only way it gets fixed in stone is that
we need shortcuts. So people need a kind of I
sometimes think it an if in doubt, I'll do this
kind of set of rules. If in doubt, keep your
(12:04):
head down. If in doubt, always consult legal. If in doubt,
go to the shop floor and talk to them. You know,
the sort of we need. We need easy ways to
make those decisions without processing them cognitively every single time,
and I think culture sort of sits at that semi
conscious level, and not unconscious in a kind of Freudian sense,
(12:26):
but certainly not conscious all the time. And it's it's
like that it runs in the background all the time.
If you can't see it, you can't change it. So
you need to help people to be able to become
conscious of it in order to consider how useful it
is in order to change it, and so on. So
I think if you think about that it's culture is
(12:50):
what you do and that we have, that instantly changes
your view. And then if you insert the idea of
habits and sort of I sometimes think about out thinking grooves,
you know, they're kind of we will all our thinking
will always go down the easiest groove. It's quite difficult
to push yourself out of a habit of thought, and
(13:11):
that way things just to get done the same all
the time. And a culture which has perhaps outlived its
usefulness will be perpetuated, not because people are being stupid,
and not because they're being evil, or not because they're
being stubborn or any of those things, but just because
it's a habit and it's easier to follow a habit. Yeah,
that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Indeed absolutely completely understand that. Yeah. And the other thing
that I want to call out here is just how
you talk about how culture is the answer to three
big questions. You talk about those those big questions.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
Sure, So, over the twenty plus years that have been
developing this approach to culture, I realized that what we
were finding all the time in mattering out patterns in
organizations language. So essentially, just to go back a step,
what I would do is to sample language across an organization,
(14:10):
so internal like how they speak internally, and how they
speak externally, formally, informally, written, spoken, and so on, and
look for patterns are quite subtle and over but also
at subtle levels. And then when you see those patterns,
what we're trying to work out is what does it mean?
And sorry, I've completely lost my there's ree big questions.
(14:35):
We realized that we were doing this inductively the whole time,
and what can we see? What can we see? What
can we see? And then realize that those they fall
into a set of three sort of clusters, if you like,
of beliefs or types of idea. The first question, if
you like, is who are we like? Who are we
you know, really questions of identity and existence and you know,
(14:58):
who are we? And what's important around the second question
is who are they out there? Whether they is customers
or competitors or regulators or whoever the non organization group is.
And the subject to the subject to that one is
who are they out there? And what do we really
(15:18):
think of them? You know, what's our what's what's our
position with regard to them, because again, you sometimes find
quite surprisingly toxic ideas we work with an organization once,
for example, where it just became clear as we analyzed
language that they fundamentally believed that customers were stupid, their customers,
(15:39):
their own customers were stupid, and how can that be?
You know, how how does that kind of work? And
it dated back actually when we excavated it to a
time when it was a financial services organization and had
a very long history and many decades ago. We kind
of wanted our financial services institutions, for all our institutions,
(16:02):
to be clever, you know, we just wanted them to
know the stuff, and we weren't that interested as culturally
at the time in understanding things ourselves. And we don't
have that trust in institutions anymore, whether financial or governmental
or anything. And so they were continuing to basically strut
around and say, well, you know, we're we're the people
(16:24):
who know all the stuff, and they, you know, the
thing is they buy these things. They don't know what
they are, which is actually what they were saying. You said,
they've bought these pensions, and trouble is they don't understand them,
not for a second seeing that has anything to do
with them or anything that they could or should be addressing.
And so and of course the world had moved on
(16:44):
around them, and their competitors were cleaning up because they
were addressing people like they weren't stupid. This is different stuff,
but you're not stupid, you know, let's help you understand this,
or let's give you the information you need to make
an informed choice here. And I think it was it
was really really getting in their way. So that's the
first one is who are we? The second one is
(17:05):
who are they out there? And what's the relationship we're
assuming with them or the attitude we assume towards them.
And then the third one is how do we do
relationships around here? So we've worked with companies organizations where
their position in most relationships is one of a slight
(17:26):
arrogance is perhaps too strong a word, but a kind
of well, we are you know, we are clearly the best,
you know, obviously obviously the best, and that leaks out
into communications. That's the thing about these internal attitudes, especially
ones when it comes to the communications with customers. If
(17:47):
you essentially believe that you, as an organization are the
best the bee's knees, you know, we would say, I
don't have used that expression in the US. Then that
will come out in a set of language patterns particular organization.
While I have in mind would always start any communication
with a little kind of linguistic fanfare. At Exit Tex Company,
(18:09):
we are always striving to do sounds and so and so,
and halfway down the page, I'd get to the bit
that was actually for me and about me, and it
was such a habit, and I didn't see it as
a habit until and then, of course you show them
the pattern.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
And they go, oh, of course, yeah, of course that's
what we do.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
And I can see why that's not helpful.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Let us let our listeners and viewers to on that
while we take our first break thinking about those things
that you're doing that may actually be running customers away
from you or even your employees away from you. I'm
your host, Doctor Releasee Cortez. We've been on the air
with jail Errol. She's a linguistic she's ad linguistic landscapes.
She's pioneering the commercial applications of language sciences, linguistics and
(18:50):
discourse and elsa's to real organizational issues. We've been talking
a bit about culture, what is it, how to recognize it?
After the work, We're going to get into her actual method,
which is discourse. I'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to invite
a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(19:40):
at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get
your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose
with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or
to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to
a lease Ali s at a Lastcortes dot com. Now
(20:03):
back to working on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I
am dedicated to help them create a world where organizations
thrive because their people thrive, are led by inspirational leaders
that help them find and contribute their greatness. And we
do business at betters the World. I keep researching and
writing my own books, so one of my last ones
came out. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning
and purpose can radically in liven your business. I wanted
(20:32):
to help leaders understand the lay of today's workforce land,
what do they want, and then I provide twenty two
best practices to help equip you to provide that for them.
You can find my books on Amazon or my personal
site at Leastcoortes dot com if you are just now
joining us. My guest is Jill Errol. She's the author
of the Way we Talk around here, How your organization's
culture shows up in your language, and why it matters.
(20:54):
So I was very intrigued to see your methodology, Jill
of discourse Analysis. It's just really, really interesting. So for
our listeners and viewers who probably have never heard of that,
you did mention it a little bit before and help
what you're analyzing. But if you could just situate a
bit about how you use discourse analysis in the internal
and external ways of speaking or communicating.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Sure, many many of you of viewers, I think we'll
be familiar with the work of egg Shin, who's one
of the biggest names in organizational culture, and Seine talked
about three CIPHU light levels of culture. He talked about artifacts,
which are the things on the surface that you can see,
so the way the organization looks, and rituals and practices
(21:40):
and so on. Then he also talked about his spouse values.
I mean, we tend to call them planes and wishes.
They are the things that an organization says it's about,
and often since the he believes it's about but may
not necessarily match up with what happens. And then his
third level, that the deepest level. He calls basic and
set assumptions, and we usually abbreviate those settling assumptions. What's
(22:04):
most interesting about artifacts is they are of many, many
different kinds. I mean, he talks about the physical environment,
how people dress and so on. But our method uses language,
as I call it in the book, a super artifact.
It's a very very powerful artifact, and it's great for
a number of reasons. One is it gets everywhere. Everyone
uses language an organization. There's no shortage of data like
(22:27):
in fact, quite the opposite. It's also everybody uses it,
so we're not just analyzing culture, if you like has
represented by the senior ranks or indeed by any one
part of the organization. The other brilliant thing about language.
Two other brilliant things is you can collect it and
analyze it offline, out of the organization. Don't have to
(22:49):
crawl all over the place for weeks to gather data.
But the most important thing is that there is an
enormous range of very well grounded academic work in looking
at how language works in social and cultural terms, so
how we create and co create our worlds linguistically, And
that's where the anthropology piece comes in, and what discourse.
(23:13):
Those methods collectively are called discourse analysis, and what they
offer are these extremely well grounded, empirically based frameworks and
ways of thinking about language. So that means that you
can use it as a particular kind of artifact, take
stuff away and analyze it in a systematic way. It's
(23:34):
qualitative work, so we're not counting things, use some semi
quantified some quantified approaches to very large bodies of data,
but mostly it's qualitative. What you're looking for is meaning
significance that is systematic, and it means that we can
show people in the organization, can show them the patterns
and the language. So we will gather internal and facing language.
(24:01):
It might include We would of course look at all
of those levels of shine, so we'd look at what
the espoused values and strategies and so on. So I'd
want to look at strategy and policy documents. I'd want
to look at high level statements of values and purpose
and intent and so on. I'd want to look at
those actually, though primarily as examples of the culture and action.
(24:22):
So there's sort of manifestations of a culture rather than
a definite or definitive description of it. So we use
that language, and I think a different way to the
way that some other analysts might. We also would look
at things like induction materials, like new Joiner materials, because
again they sometimes make explicit things which are implicit and
(24:45):
showing up everywhere. Sometimes you might find an piece of
induction material that runs absolutely counter to what we can
see on the ground. And that's quite important, you know,
for recruitment, for development and all sorts of tasks where
where people are trying to get a group of people
(25:05):
aligned behind purpose and values and meaning as you talk
about Alice. So we look at that kind of if
you like, the shine's surface stuff is vowels, values, but
we also want the really informal stuff that people don't
pay any attention to. It's littering the place.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (25:24):
We like language and listens, so internal memos, minutes, reports, emails,
internet pages, notices that are stuck on the walls and
in the kitchens, you know of offices really interesting. And
we work with one organization where one of their unspoken
(25:47):
kind of habits and values was essentially everyone will behave
like a child unless you tell them not to. It
was a very parental kind of position, and it wasn't
just a top down and although there was some of that,
you know from leadership behaving and acting in that way,
but almost everyone in the organization took that stance. So
if a junior person had to send an email to
(26:09):
all their colleagues. They would do it with a very
parental voice. And one of the pieces of one of
the data points that we could show actually made people laugh,
which is a helpful thing. Is amongst all of the
dos and don't send emailss on were notices in the
kitchen where there was there were three versions of a
note above a sink saying don't leave the dirty dishes
(26:31):
in here. Make sure you wash up your dishes. Don't
leave the dirty dishes here. It was a sort of
kind of shouting again and again of this is our
position here. You must do this. You will behold like
a child nurse. We tell you not to. It's silly,
but it's not silly. It's a tiny data point. But
in the midst of all the other pieces that we
could see, it was it was a great example because
(26:53):
people it was completely familiar to people, they'd never seen
it before. So we collapsed stuff, you know, from LLI
and so on, all the way through to internet pages
and notices on walls and notice boards. We would listening
to conversations. Obviously with invitation to conversations between colleagues and meetings,
we would have some conversations with people we want to
(27:15):
look at things like organization charts. Job titles are really revealing.
We once worked with an organization where, for various reasons,
they had a kind of very tightly protected group within
the organization, which itself saw itself as tightly protected against
the world. It had to have this kind of almost
(27:36):
like a medieval note around it, and there was an
app there were a set of people whose job title
was actually gatekeeper. That was what they wanted was to
stop exactly, was to stop people getting in or out
to this wholly sort of keep in the middle where
the extremely important people were. And I mean it was
(27:56):
a gift in a way. When we saw gatekeeper, we'd
already begun to see that through lots of less over language.
But to have a job an organization, a job title
in an organization of gatekeeper, we've never seen before. So
that's that's what I mean by looking for patterns across
different forms of data. We would look at a public website,
we look at social media, we look at if elevant
(28:19):
customer or user communications and so on. So what we're
looking for. I keep saying patterns because that is what
it's about. It's a bit like I often say, if
I hadn't discovered this world, I think I would probably
be an archaeologist or a forensic scientists. Lots of looking
looking a whole load of messy stuff, whether it's you know,
(28:42):
mud in the ground or whatever it is, and seeing
very small indicators of a pattern, like very low signal
to noise ratio pattern data, and as an archaeologist says,
what might have been there, what must have been there
in order to account for this patent they can see
on the ground. What we're saying is maybe this is
(29:06):
what's there, the unspoken staff to account for the other
way around the way, what's under in order to account
for these bits popping up In terms of language choices
on the surface, so we would look at things like
pronouns and labels, you know how our customers or colleagues
or different parts of the organization referred to. We worked
(29:27):
with government organization in the UK, a very powerful government
organization that was attached physically in the same building to
another extremely powerful government organization. They had a relationship that
was necessary but not always comfortable, and the first organization
(29:48):
we're working with would talk about our colleagues at the
other end of the building in a very meaningful way,
and effectively the colleagues at the other end of the building.
Was a subtext for those absolute pains in the neck,
you know, who think they run us and they don't
run us. And it was just a little kind of
a mantra that people would say. And when you see
(30:08):
something repeated like that, and particularly where there's euphemism, there's meaning.
So when people are using a euphemism so as not
to say what they mean, there's all. That's always where
we start digging. We get our trials out and start
kind of scraping away and seeing what's there. We would
look at styles of discourse. So sometimes in an organization
(30:32):
you'll get a dominance, for example, of a particular kind
of language, so dominance of a legal way of thinking
and talking which spills out well beyond the legal department,
or a dominance of marketing discourse that spreads across and
into other parts of the organization. These are not we're
(30:54):
not commenting often on whether this is a good thing
or a bad thing, But what we're doing is observing
and reflecting. Checking it means, checking it's recognizable to people
inside and then together working out what this means for them.
So we would also look at stories, we'd look at metaphor.
Metaphors immensely value. But I talked earlier about the organization
(31:18):
that effectively constructed itself as a castle, you know, with
a big wall and a moat round, a very very
powerful metaphor. And when they were able to see that,
it made sense of a lot of their difficulties. It
didn't solve them, but it helped them make sense of difficulties.
And if you can have some sense of why you're
(31:40):
in the state you're in, then that's the first step
to change in something.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
So wonderful. Oh go ahead, you'll was something she wanted
to say.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
No, no, no, no, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Okay, well let's go ahead and grab our last break
here and let our listeners and viewers chew on that.
Just think about, if you will, ladies and gentlemen, think
about how this language, the way that it's using your organization,
is either helping you get the results that you want
or preventing you from getting the results that you want.
This is a really really powerful stuff, that powerful work
that you do. Jill, I'm your host, doctor Elie Cortes.
(32:13):
We went on the air with Jill Erro. She's a
she's a linguistic landscapes and she's pioneering the commercial application
of language sciences, linguistics and discourse analysis to get real
organizational to get to real organizational issues. We've been talking
a bit more about her actual methodology. It's very, very powerful.
After the break, we're going to get into also talking
about gender and language patterns, as well as how this
(32:34):
starts to show up in terms of results and what
we could do with the data itself. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies
visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired
leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and
commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to invite
Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at
(33:16):
elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your
employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with
doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to
open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise
A Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working
(33:40):
on purpose.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. As I mentioned in
my last break that my lady's book came out the
great realization. What I did for you is I created
a simple three page organizational assessment that you can pull
off my whip pite gustodeshnail dot com and it will
help you understand the extent to which your organization is
meeting the listening needs of today's workforce if you are
(34:09):
just now joining us. My guest is Jillie Rose. She's
the author of the Way we talk around here, how
your organization's culture shows up in your language, and why
it matters. So I want to just briefly touch on
this idea of gendered language patterns and just consider the
ramifications of that. That's so so powerful, and I certainly
work with other organizations as well that we're wondering why
can't we attract women around here? Why don't why don't
(34:31):
women want to come to work for this organization or
why why don't they stay? So give us kind of
a peek on you talk about feminine discourse, and then
of course masculine discourse.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
I mean, I think it's from observation. It seems to
me over the years that pretty well all organizations are,
if you like, gendered, masculine. And I don't mean they've
got more men in them than women, although obviously maybe
they have. But if you think about the idea of
gender as something you not something you have, but something
(35:04):
you do, so we can do being feminine and we
can do being masculine. I mean that's how That's how
actors work. You know, if somebody wants to walk in
a particularly masculine way, you know, you know what they
would do it, how they do it. They'd swagger and
so on. And similarly, we can walk or talk in
(35:25):
a particularly feminized way regardless of our biological sex. So
if you think of gender as something that can be done,
then organizations do it too. So in how an organization
not so much stresses, but certainly in how it talks,
And a lot of organizational discourse across the board traditionally
(35:46):
has been masculinized. And by that I mean, so I
go here now to you know what's known and written
about widely about the patterns in how I always has women,
but how people talk when they are doing being feminine,
and that means regardless of their state, if you're like
(36:10):
their bodily state or their but how do you perform
being feminine? How do you do being feminine? And what
we would tend to do to perform being feminine would
be to be conversational. There is a lot of evidence
that women use unassertive strategies, so hedging and I'm probably
doing it now, you know, saying well, sort of and
(36:30):
kind of and maybe and adding tag questions and so on.
And this is observational. This is just observing what happens.
Is putting labels or value judgments on. This just tends
to be what people are doing today. Historically would have
been different. In the future, it may be different, but
right now today women if they are offering expertise or advice,
(36:55):
they will tend to offer it rather than assert it
and so on offer and they may offering it, they
may offer it only when they're pretty sure it's being
asked for or will be welcome, rather than just because
they want to give it. Asking questions is a very
feminized form of language, and it's where necessarily and useful
(37:18):
asking questions It's not seen in this form of talking
as being weak or as betraying a lack of status,
and feminine talk. Feminized talk tends to be collaborative, so
not competitive. Now you can see where I'm going with
the opposite of this at the extreme, and I'm characterizing
almost like caricaturing vasculine discourse. Masculine talk will tend to
(37:42):
be showing ritual opposition and competition. Jokes banter are sort
of play fights. If you like linguistic play fighting is
banter teasing. You'll see a lot of war metaphors, sporting metaphors, debate,
open debate, open agreement. And interestingly, as many of us know,
(38:04):
many men will do anything other than ask a question
or ask for directions. I mean, let's not go there.
But because asking questions betrays a lack of knowledge or status,
asking question kind of puts you in a position of
having to confess you don't know and so on. And
this obviously runs counter to all the other stuff about dominance.
(38:28):
And what's so interesting, it doesn't take a huge leap
to see that within an organization classically happens so much now,
But classically a dominance for example, of numbers and graphs
and spreadsheets in PowerPoint presentations, you know, charts with hard
lines and numbers and so on, rather than, for example,
(38:51):
an alternative. It's almost hard to imagine, but PowerPoint slides
making the same kind of argumental point, but using human
voices or using images or narratives, which be you know,
less vasculinized. And again many people will recognize that in
a masculinized kind of language or discourse, it's all about
(39:16):
problem solving, so responding to problems by offering solutions rather
than by listening or empathizing. So you know, I don't
want you to sort this out for me. I just
want you to give me a hug and say I
understand how you feel. I means equivalent of So we
have these, you know some I have caricatured them, so
(39:38):
you know, I hope people are, aren't, you know, getting
too vexed about you know, well, I'm a girl and
I don't talk like that. But they are resources if
you think of those, all the different ways that we
have to talk as resources that we can draw on
any time to do a particular job. So whether you're
(39:58):
a biological man, biological women, or something else you can
be you can use language in a way that is
assertive and dominant and so on, or you can lose
language in a way that's empathetic and so on, And
organizations can sometimes get in their own way like this,
so either it's one of the examples I use in
(40:19):
the book is of an organization that really, really, sincerely
wanted to attract more women to engineering roles, and they
have tried all sorts of things with some success, and
we looked for them at a simple job ad, you know,
an online job ad trying to attract women into a
form of it was sort of it was, it wasn't.
(40:42):
It was an engineer job at communications engineer, so somebody
who would go out to a customer's house. It was
telecoms and fix their Wi Fi essentially, and at the
overt level there was absolutely nothing that this was a
job for men. But when we unpicked it, it used
particular a whole cluster of little phrases that fitted better
(41:05):
into that masculine discourse. So the thing talked about, you know,
you need to be sort of prepared to roll your
sleeves up and get your hands dirty, which just sews
slightly that way. Each one of those data points would
not have been enough, but the cluster of them was enough.
So we kind of fixed it for them in that
we suggested a rewrite, you know, which didn't make it feminized,
(41:29):
so we weren't going, hey, girls, come and work here.
What we did was just neral, genuinely neutralize it linguistically,
and they did it before and after test, and their
expressions of interest went up by two hundred percent or something.
Very gratifying because before people had said, wellow, it doesn't
(41:50):
really stand a job for me, and after many many
women said maybe that sounds quite interesting really, and of
course then they go have to go through the next age,
so getting in their own way in terms of attracting people.
And another company we work with was certainly getting in
its own way in trying to attract female customers. It
(42:11):
was really underrepresented. It knew it was very underrepresented in
terms of female customers. And to be honest, it didn't
take an awful lot of analysis to show them how
masculinized their language was. And again we just did some
sample rewrites where we just neutralized it, toned it down
(42:32):
so that the thing read much more neutrally, and it
was very successful. You know, you don't need to overtly think, oh,
I need to make this attractive to women. What you
need to do is to is to strip out the
unconscious bias that gets put into writing like that.
Speaker 3 (42:52):
So well said and explained. You'll just beautiful, so important. Okay,
So we want to go next is we don't have
a whole lot of time left. We've only got about
five minuts still left and we're in one of Your
next is you know, sharing insights now now that you've been,
you've been, you've done this work, and you're going to
come back to your organization. And I really like how
you talk about the the two questions that you are
(43:14):
trying to do to get them to look at one
is do you recognize the picture of us and how
we are? And the other one is what what's The
second question.
Speaker 4 (43:24):
Is how far is this set of assumptions serving us well? Okay, now,
if we recognize them, does it serve us well?
Speaker 3 (43:31):
That is the powerful questions. If you could speak a
bit to those.
Speaker 4 (43:34):
Okay, certainly, certainly, So we came. We've started to call
these the aha moment followed by the oh dear moment,
but the moment if we've got the analysis right, you
know we usually do, then and sorry. One of the
(43:54):
key things I feel very strongly about this is that
we we must not present this work to people as
a in a actually in quite a masculine way, as
a this is your culture, you know where I'm telling
you this is your culture. What we do is to
hold it up. I think I mentioned this earlier to
say we're not telling you this is your culture, but
this is how this culture language thing works. And in
(44:18):
the light of from the way you guys talk around here,
it looks like these are your unspoken assumptions because look
at these patterns and will show them literally aslide with
lots of different examples on it of how they are
doing parental voice, for example, or how they are doing
or any of the other many dimensions that come through
(44:39):
in organizations. So the first question is do you recognize this?
And people generally respond viscerally in We did some customers
and client research a while ago, and it was interesting
how much the metaphor of gut came through in their language.
It was a visceral response. It's like they recognize it
(45:01):
with their gut and then the brain kicks in and
real and says, my goodness, I totally recognize this because
their data, it's they're very familiar language. I've totally recognized
this and I've never seen it before. I've never seen
that pattern, and I've never recognized the implication of that pattern.
And there's often it's very energizing and intriguing for people.
(45:23):
There's often laughter, you know, people recognize oh moment, and
that release of energy then can sometimes be swiftly followed
by as we as we gently prod them into. The
second question is and is that still helpful to you?
Because it used to an organization's culture always made sense
(45:45):
once in the past. It's that people don't make up
dysfunctional cultures. What they do is they fail to see
they're becoming dysfunctional as time passes, the context changes and
so on. So how far is this sort of assumptions
helpful to this now we need to change to thrive today?
What can we consciously rework and we sometimes talk about
(46:08):
getting people to with a bit of help, of course
from us, sorting them into like what are the burdens?
You know, what are the things that are now a
complete liability to us. We've really got to stop doing that.
Where are their gaps? So things that we could do
with boosting perhaps like for example, one organization it was
deeply uncurious about the world outside. It has so much
(46:31):
potentially to learn and gather from. It was a public
sexual organizing, it's peer organizations, and elsewhere it just was
not curious at all. So that was a definite cultural
gap is to be and one of their principles that
we devide for them was be curious. And then there's sparks,
which are things that are kind of there in the
culture that maybe have got left behind or sort of
(46:55):
that they're not strong enough and they could do with nurturing.
So little embers we blow on them and to get
the fire going. So some people change immediately. You know,
there is a kind of there is a set of
people who when we take titting through a presentation of
these findings, will go I kind of understand why this
(47:16):
thing has been so difficult, and they'll just go off
and start having different conversations and interacting differently. They are
a small number of people sometimes realize the game is
up because the old culture has suited them well, and
you know, maybe it's about to get exposed. But for
most people, they're intrigued interested, They just need then a
bit of help to shape how they can work with it.
Speaker 3 (47:40):
What it's just such beautiful work and I love to
do it as well, and you're a approach. I just
really I've learned a lot from you about how you
do your work and you and your team do your work.
I want to give you the chance to close the conversation. First,
let me say thank you very much for coming on.
It's been amazing to learn from you, to read your
work and assure you. With my listeners and viewers across
the world, what would you like to leave them with today?
Speaker 4 (48:03):
Well, I think I'm going to home one really about
when I started to say at the beginning, I think
there are three things that annoyed me about the way
that culture has often talked about. One is it's often
described as mystical and unknowable. What is not unknowable, You
just have to find the right way in culture sometimes
(48:24):
can be the thing that gets counted, you know, would
count in a survey. And I just fundamentally believe that
it's too unconscious or semi conscious and emotional to be
counted in that way. People cannot tell you about the culture,
otherwise they would do so. And the third and so
I feel that actually addressing addressing culture in this way
(48:49):
gives the power back to the people who actually can
change it. Powers may be too strong, but it puts
it equips your people to choose to behave differently. Culture
change is not because people get told to change, but
because they see the sense of changing and they are
given them some help to move in that direction. So
I think that's what I'd like to leave people. Is
(49:10):
a kind of culture is I and for everyone?
Speaker 3 (49:15):
What a beautiful way to close. Jill, thank you again
for coming and working on purpose and writing your book
and putting sharing it with the world.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Listen. You're welcome. Listeners and viewers. You're going to want
to learn more about Jiro and the work she does
at Linguistic Landscapes and her new book The Way We
Talk Around Here. You can start by visiting her website.
It's Linguistic Landscapes dot com. Linguistic Landscapes dot com. Last week,
if you missed the Life Show, we were on with
Rich Fernandez and Carolina Lasso talking about their book The
(49:43):
Purpose Reset, which teaches how to realign purpose to at
every level, individual, team, organizational, and transforming workplaces into more compassionate,
engaged in high performing environments. Next week, we'll be on
the air with Wendy Lipton Dibner talking about her new book,
What Matters Most. How leaders build impassion, engagement, unrivaled loyalty,
(50:04):
and boundless growth by measuring real world impact. See you there,
and remember work is one of the best means and
realize I'm realizing our potential and making the impact we crave.
And I can give us the chance to make to
do business that betters in the world. So let's work
on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes,
each week on W four C. Why Together, We'll create
a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion
performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the
meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work
(50:41):
on Purpose.
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