Language can be subtle; the inflection put on a word for instance can change the meaning of that word. Consider, for instance, the British term “quite,” or Southern saying, "well bless his heart." Depending on the inflection and your knowledge of the slang, you may have no idea what is actually being said. Many fields have their own terminology that for the average person can be quite obscure, such as gedankenexperiment, avulsion, or muntin. Various fields can fill volumes with terms that can only be understood by those trained in those fields. My own field of industrial organizational psychology throws around terms such as job analysis, competency models, orthogonal rotations or even more mundanely employee engagement, lifecycle surveys, linkage analysis, validity (of various types), among thousands of other terms. Part of becoming expert in a field is learning the language of that field.
But of course, language is only one part of communication. Saliency of the words can have very differing impacts depending on who is speaking and who is listening. “You will go far here,” spoken by an executive, might be viewed as a simple platitude, unless you are the newly graduated, newly hired person it is spoken to. Non-verbal communication can also impart meaning and varying emphasis to words. A simple handshake accompanied by the phrase “it is very good to see you” is different from an embrace accompanied by the phrase “it is very good to see you”.
And the phrase “actions speak louder than words” implies that what a person or organization says might not be what they actually do. Their words themselves might be misleading but their actions tell you who they truly are.
At one point it was thought that only humans had the ability to communicate with language. That notion has fallen by the wayside as evidence grows that many types of species use language and non-verbal communications to get information to a recipient. Whales sing (and new studies suggest that some of their songs are as complex and information rich as human language), elephants rumble with subsonic communications, bees dance, ants use pheromones. Dogs tilt their heads as if to say “what are you talking about?”. And cats, well no one understands cats (just kidding). Cats are very good at telling you what they want and who is in charge. It has even been found that cows use stares and ear movements, in additions to various moos to communicate. Once when I was a kid, I was in a barn on a dairy farm where a bull was having its horns cut off. Every cow in that barn knew what was going on and they clearly didn’t like it. No one should be surprised by this. The point is that there are many aspects to communication and language and when studying them it is necessary to throw a wide net.
Many organizations also have a language all their own. Certain words within an organization may carry very different meanings than those same words to an outsider of the organization. And don’t get me started with acronyms.
Organizations use language and also non-verbal communications to tell us who they are and what they believe. At times their actions also speak louder than words. It is pretty common for organizations to have statements of their Mission, Vision, Values, Strategy and Tactics, or some combination thereof. These statements form a roadmap of what the organization stands for and how they will accomplish their goals. At least some of those statements often have an aspirational component. A vision is not necessarily who you are now, but what you want to become. From a behavioral standpoint it has been shown that if you can visualize something, a future state, it becomes more likely that you can achieve it.
Unfortunately, it is also not uncommon for an organization to reward something that is not aligned to their statements. For instance, an organization may say customer service is our number one priority, but then cut back on customer service staff or measure how quickly a customer service person can get off the phone with a customer rather then was the issue resolved to the customer’s satisfaction on the first contact. And how many of us have heard “Our call volumes are unusually high. Expect longer wait times”? Well, if you know your call volumes are unusually high, that means you are tracking call volumes and rather than staffing for those higher call volumes the organization decided to make the customer wait. A number of times over the years I have been part of studies that showed the alignment or lack of alignment between what the organization says they want to reward and what they actually reward. This disconnect will have an impact on the organization achieving its stated goals. The behavior within an organization is based on what you actually reward, not what you say you want to reward.
Non-verbal language communications are abundant in organizations. Everything from who is the last one to get to a meeting and has a certain spot at the conference table, to who is hoteling vs who gets an office. Who gets to be comfortable when traveling vs. who has to take budget flights and stay at budget hotels. I once had a job where you had to be at a certain level to get a higher backed chair and a door on your office that locked (regardless of the kind of information that resided in your office). The non-verbal communications in these cases were all about organizational status.
There are many forms of communications going on in organizations. Some of it is direct through written or spoken language, some is indirect through reward systems, status indicators, alignment or lack of alignment with stated strategies, measures being collected, budgets and resources being allocated among others. Some of this communication is clear to organizational leadership and some of it is unknown, or at least the extent of how things are perceived broadly in the population is unknown.
There are ways to begin to get a handle on organizational communications, its meaning, its nuances, both hidden and explicit messages. One way is to collect employee perceptions, alignment to objectives, opinions on critical topics, and a general diagnosis of organizational functioning through strategic surveys. This information helps the organization understand both its written and spoken language as well as its non-verbal communications. Once that information is in hand actions can be taken to align the communications to stated goals and objectives, creating a strategic advantage. This helps the organization achieve its vision of what it wants to be and it can add clarity to which strategies are working and which are not.