Watch Your Language!
From my office in the USA, I was remotely mentoring a Chinese manager who worked for an American company in China. One day he asked about the most effective ways to provide coaching feedback to his team members, so I shared tips from my experience (a topic for another post). At our next call he thanked me for the good advice and casually mentioned that it was much easier for him to give coaching feedback in English than in Mandarin. I had to learn more about this!
At that time, the Chinese business culture tended to be somewhat top-down directed (bosses telling employees what to do), while the American style was to empower the employees to make their own decisions. He told me that it sounded awkward to provide American-style coaching in Mandarin – the concepts were awkward to express in the language, so they sounded insincere. Ever since, I have remained aware of the effect that language has on thought and perception.
This concept applies even to the effect of word choice within a language. One time, a customer was complaining about device failures where a thin protective layer was disappearing from a product in use. Knowing that the protective layer was chemically inert, everyone began referring to “the erosion issue”.
After spending months unsuccessfully attempting to re-create an erosion mechanism, it was finally discovered that the protective layer itself was not failing, but an adhesion layer attaching the protective layer was being chemically attacked via tiny pores in the protective layer. By naming the issue “erosion” after the speculative cause, the thinking of the entire team was biased away from the true cause – it was “corrosion”, not “erosion”.
Lesson-learned: language and word choice influence thinking and behavior!
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