Management speak

I’ve been trying to learn a foreign language for as long as I care to admit.  I wish that I had tried harder at school because the older I get the more difficult it becomes.  I’ve got by in French, dabbled a bit in Italian, German, Swedish, Icelandic and Portuguese.  I have even managed to learn a few words in Esperanto, the great language hope for a united Europe.

But my greatest though relative success has been in Spanish.  Over time I have passed a GCSE, followed by an AS level and now continue to polish my linguistic skills by trying to read novels in my adopted tongue.  My latest venture is ‘Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí’ by Javier Marias and I have now passed the half way mark through the four hundred and twenty pages of the book.

My problem is not so much the Spanish but the types of books that I insist on reading.  The more challenging for me the better and my latest battle would be a challenge, I think, even in English.  I understand the words, I understand the sentences and the paragraphs but the strain of reading something in an unnatural (to me) language means that I struggle to understand the story.  At times I get the plot but at others I lose the bigger picture and the reading becomes a slog.  I want to press on, I’ve got many pages left but I have to go back to pick up the thread where it snapped.

But this leads me to the real point of my tale.  I’ve been delivering presentations to the ICT service every other month since I started and more recently have held some feedback sessions on some engagement work we have recently completed.  Whilst these have gone to plan from my perspective and are well attended, it is obvious that only some of the messages we are trying to get across are sticking.  The team seems to be blissfully unaware of some of the things it should be aware of.

Could the problem be that I am using a different language?   Could it be that I am using management speak in which I appear to be fluent (probably more fluent than I would like to admit) and they are struggling to keep up the translation in their heads.  I’m sure that they understand the words, the sentences and even the paragraphs but is it the story that they are missing?

I hope this is not too patronising, it is certainly not meant to be but in management you become very used to talking in the abstract, the conceptual and the strategic whilst the rest of the team is more used  to talking in the immediate, the practical and the operational.

If this is the case (and I suspect it is) then I need to try harder to get my messages across, not through better communication but through better engagement and by demonstrating concepts and strategies through practical and operational examples.  Change in an organisation is limited by its ability to absorb the change and so I should concentrate on fewer but better messages rather than more conceptual ideas.

It has been great fun but hard to learn my Spanish but it will probably be even harder to un-learn my management speak.  I hope however it will be as much fun.