How do you talk about your company? The words you choose can have a huge effect on employee motivation.
As a business owner, you probably keep a keen eye out for your team’s morale and avoid anything that can cause their motivation to take a hit. You carefully weigh compensation, think long and hard about rewards and recognition, and work to communicate the impact of your team’s efforts. But are you missing one tiny and easily fixable thing that might be sucking the motivation out of your employees?
That’s the question posted by VC Brad Feld on his consistently interesting blog this week. As a member of venture capital firm Foundry Group, Feld interacts with lots of entrepreneurs and CEOs and through personal experience has grown sensitive to a quirk of language used by many of them that, while small, has an outsize impact on their teams’ motivation. He explains:
I saw an email from a CEO the other day. In it, he said “I” over and over again. There were numerous places where he referred to “my company,” “my team,” “my product,” and “my plan.”
It bummed me out. I know the people on “his team,” and they are working their asses off. The company is an awesome company, and the CEO is a great leader. But there was a huge amount of “we” in the effort, and when I read the note, all I could think about was how demotivated I would be if I was on “his team” and heard “I, I, I.”
…to read this article in full, visit leading US small business resource, Inc.
