We love Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary V as his fans know him. His book ‘Crushing it’ has certainly been an international bestseller as well as a New York Times best seller. But there is a call here in Australia for us to review the language that we are using in our start up community.
The Australian start up community figurehead Annie Parker declared in a tweet in February that she would no longer use language such as ‘crushing, killing or smashing things’. Her tweet received overwhelming support from within the start up community.
The language we use is important
Believing that this language originated from a male dominated Silicon Valley, Annie Parker believes that words matter. The language that we use is important, and can affect the impression that you make on employees, future investors and customers. These words become part of our social structures and cultures.
Leaders have a role to play in this area. This sort of language is aggressive and can encourage aggressive behaviour. Creating environments that are inclusive, kind and supportive are more conducive to achieving strong results, particularly in the long term. It is up to leaders to set the language in the business and this will filter down to the rest of the organisation.
Culture is an area that most businesses say that they care about. Leaders know how important it is, but so many times we get it wrong. But language is really one of the areas where culture begins and therefore it is time that these aggressive and divisive words are taken out of the professional vocabulary.
Annie Parker commented that another reason this language needs to go is that it just doesn’t represent the ecosystem of the Australian start up community. She said in an interview “The startup lingo of killing, crushing or smashing things is all so negative, and the irony is it actually doesn’t represent the startup ecosystem at all. As builders and makers, we are nurturing, crafting and growing. So it’s a bit odd that we don’t use more positive words to describe our industry”.
But Luke Buckle, international growth manager at Houzz believes it is even worse than this. He has raised concern over the digitisation of people. With terms such as ‘lets take this offline’, people needing to ‘unplug’ or have ‘downtime’ and even a reference to people having low bandwidth meaning they are slow on the uptake. This is dehumanising and is further degrading relationships in the workplace. Luke has even suggested that LinkedIn, a platform designed to bring people together has contributed by referring to people as ‘connections’.
So where do we draw the line between jargon and trivial language versus that which is damaging to the culture and progression of both the business and the people within it?
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