my office is overrun with corporate buzzwords

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

Recently in my office, corporate buzzwords have picked up like crazy among my colleagues. Sometimes it feels like senior management’s entirely vocabulary is only buzzwords. In a presentation last week, for example, a director said that a “new piece of work is a runway to manifest our brand value proposition.” What does that mean?

Now my peers are using the same buzzwords in presentations, and they’re seeping into meetings and conversations. Another example that makes my eye twitch: Suddenly everyone is using the word “solutioning,” as in, “Thanks, Matt, for solutioning our IT request.” You know. Like a detective solutions a murder.

I’m all for language evolving, but morale is poor right now and there’s been a lot of water-cooler griping about senior leaders acting inauthentically. I think buzzwords may be contributing to this. When senior leadership’s talking a lot but not saying anything, it doesn’t make anyone feel that what we do has much real-world value.

I’m sick to death of conversations that don’t mean anything and waste everyone’s time. Am I overthinking this, or is it something I should address? If so, what’s the best way to do it?

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

• Should I correct clients who call me “Mrs.”?
• Can I talk to multiple acquaintances about the same job at my old employer?

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