What languages do you speak?
I’m sure you’ve heard of the five love languages, even if you haven’t read Dr. Gary Chapman’s best-selling book. My wife prefers Acts of Service, and I’m a fan Quality Time and Physical Touch. Neither of us is big on Receiving Gifts (my gift choices for her always seem to be close but not quite, and I’ve usually already bought the things I want for myself) or Words of Affirmation (she probably thinks I have ulterior motives when I say nice things).
The business world also has languages. If you’ve ever spent time with marketers, you’ll hear terms like click-through rate, cost-per-acquisition, PPC, SEO, MER, ROI and personas. IT specialists will often talk about agile development, requirements, MVP, sprints, APIs, servers, cloud-based solutions, documentation, UI/UX and more. Drop in on a sales meeting, and you’ll probably hear about sales funnels, needs-based selling, lead flow, CRMs, trial closes, open-ended vs close-ended questions, close rates and sales cycles, just to name a few. So too with operations, HR, finance, governance, legal (hold your lawyer jokes, please)…you get the picture. How often have you seen people speak different languages to each other in a meeting and then wonder why they are having a hard time getting their messages across?
Psychology researchers have conducted all sorts of clever studies over the years. One of my favorites was a study conducted by Elizabeth Newton, then a graduate student at Stanford. Newton’s study divided subjects into two groups: tappers and listeners. Each tapper picked one tune from a list of popular tunes and then tapped the rhythm out on a table to a listener they were paired with. Before being paired with their listeners, the tappers were asked the odds that their listener would be able to identify the song from the tapped rhythm. The tappers thought listeners had a 50% chance of identifying the tunes. As it turns out, the listeners identified the tune less than 3% of the time. Why the discrepancy? The listeners could only hear tap-tap—-tap-tap-tap. The tappers…they could hear the entire soundtrack playing in their head the whole time.
So what’s the moral of this story? Whether you're a visionary entrepreneur, integrator, leader, or simply a member of a team, learning multiple business languages can help you better communicate with colleagues, vendors, investors, customers and the like. As organizations grow in size and complexity, it's important for leaders to learn to speak multiple business languages so they can be more effective communicating both within and outside of their organizations. It's also important for organizations to have translators that can interpret the various languages, and for each function within a business to learn the languages of the other business functions they regularly interact with.
On an individual level, whenever you’re speaking in one of the languages, ask whether your audience is fluent in that language. If not, be intentional about translating for them. Here's a quick translating tip: imagine you are speaking to an interested teenager. If you can speak in language the interested teenager would understand, your business audience has a much better chance of understanding you. Otherwise, you may find yourself singing music in your head to a listener that just hears taps on the table.
When roles are reversed, try validating what you've heard using plain language. If you think this may make you sound uninformed, the opposite is true. The person speaking to you will appreciate your showing an interest in truly understanding what they are saying. And you'll be that much less likely to leave your tapper thinking you've heard the whole song when all you've heard are taps.