We all want our people to be fully engaged and to be high performing, yet the language leaders use so often demotivates and disempowers our people. This then sees them being used and not at all valued for who they are and what they bring to their organisation.

It was a comment in an article by Adriana Stan and Tom Goodwin that triggered this Authentic Conversation between Gary Ryan and myself. They said:

“The worst thing we ever did in corporate America (and we did it in Australia as well) was to take the most vital part of any company – the people powering it – and label it so dismissively as ‘human resources’.”

We discuss how unreflective we too often are about the language we use in our organisations, our professional jargon, and how disempowering it can be for our employees. As leaders we need to ask whether our words reflect the values of our organisations and whether they inspire and motivate engagement and high performance from our people.

Gary and I discuss this in this 15 minute video below.