Recently, I sat down with a CEO whose company was experiencing its fourth leadership change in three years. Despite leading 1,500 employees, they still called themselves a “startup” —maybe they’ve been holding onto that label a bit too long (!) Even through Zoom, I could feel the weight of pressure he was feeling, determined not to make the same mistake his predecessors made.
We were discussing their upcoming executive offsite, and what unfolded was a familiar story. Quarterly strategic changes had become routine, AI adoption lagged, and their mission statement read like SEO copy rather than a rallying cry. When I broached the topic of culture, the CEO’s face became red as he deflected, “We need to stop the bleeding with strategy first,” rattling off company values as if reciting them made everything okay.
The data told a different story
- 20% of high performers had left in the last six months
- Decision-making had devolved into consensus paralysis, with routine decisions taking months to finalize
- Departments operated in silos, leading to missed quarterly objectives and failed cross-functional initiatives
- Average tenure was under a year, meaning most employees weren’t staying long enough to see a single strategy through
Every metric concerning the CEO – from attrition to operational efficiency – pointed to cultural issues. Yet I understood his reluctance to talk about “culture.” Over 70 years of organizational development have stripped this word of meaning, reducing it to ping-pong tables and happy hours rather than a strategic lever for success. It was one of the primary reasons I wrote my book, ReCulturing.
As a career-long HR professional, I’ve watched our industry create barriers through language that disconnects from strategy and dilutes real organizational leverage. Here are three other examples where our vocabulary has become our own worst enemy:
Retention: The Word That Traps Us
You see it in most annual HR strategies: Attract, develop, and retain employees. When did we start talking about “retaining” people as if they were objects to be held onto? The very word suggests containment, control, and a one-sided power dynamic that doesn’t reflect reality. Employees choose to stay, grow, and contribute—or they leave. By focusing on “retention metrics,” we’ve reduced rich, complex relationships to numbers on a dashboard. Instead of asking, “How do we retain people?” we should be asking, “How do we create an environment where people can both contribute and develop effectively?
We’re Like a Family: Good Intentions Meet Bad Metaphors
No workplace is a family. Families are unconditional, but workplaces have performance expectations and turnover. This cliché often serves as a red flag, hinting at blurred boundaries between work and personal life or expectations of intense loyalty without proper compensation. Instead of invoking family ties, let’s talk about what we actually mean: building supportive environments through peer mentorship, measuring team collaboration, and creating clear paths for growth. These are tangible, measurable aspects of a healthy workplace that don’t require emotional manipulation.
DEI: Acronyms Can Obscure Action
Since the 1960s, and especially since 2020, we’ve wrapped workplace fairness and representation in increasingly complex terminology. Organizations like SHRM stripped “equity” from their vocabulary last year, and due to political pressure, many other organizations recently took all three letters out of any strategy playbook. We are seeing how fragile acronym-based approaches can be and how these programs are much more than the letters they represent. As Joelle Emerson, CEO of Paradigm, puts it: “We all know that building representative teams, fair practices that level the playing field, and inclusive cultures isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s core to running a successful, future-ready company.”
The solution isn’t new buzzwords or frameworks. It’s about getting back to fundamentals: measuring what matters and taking meaningful action. When we strip away the jargon, we can finally have the conversations that drive real change.
Getting Back to Fundamentals
In our follow-up meeting, the CEO and I discussed “culture” without even using that word. Instead, we focused on what actually mattered: What behaviors drive success in his organization? What metrics show real progress? What outcomes signal that the right changes are taking hold?
Before gathering his executive team, we’re doing the work that matters: clarifying the specific behaviors he wants to see more of, the metrics that will measure genuine progress, and the outcomes that will show real change.
When we focus on observable behaviors and measurable results, the jargon naturally falls away, and real change begins.