Leverage: The Weight Your Words Hold.

As you grow into leadership roles, you need to weigh your words ever more carefully.

While in hindsight or when written down, this is extremely obvious, it is something I learned over the years as I grew in seniority in the corporate world. As I observe others in the workplace I believe it needs to be stated explicitly to help others on the path.

In the initial years of your career when you are fresh out of college, you can wield your mails and opinions with abandon. Your message is read by the direct recipient and by the meeting audience and is usually held within the local context of the conversation.

Ex. “I think it would be a really good idea to understand how we can improve this process”

A statement like the above will result in either a benevolent smile of agreement or in you getting an extra task/project to perform. Depending on your inclination and investment in your career, you can take up the task with gusto.

Similarly a statement deriding a report or a recommendation (ex. I don’t think this is correct, we could have done more analysis to come to a different conclusion) has a proportionately small blast radius.

You are unlikely to cause any change of alignment or major change in outcome of the project. If you are collaborative you can offer to help the person/ project thus limiting any negativity your remarks might have caused.

As you grow in to middle management the hue of outcome changes significantly.

“Speech has power. Words do not fade. What starts out as a sound, ends in a deed.”

- Abraham Joshua Herschel

A statement such as the first one is likely to result in a change of direction. It might still land you and/or your team with more work, but the impact your words create will be much more. This is still in the positive frame.

However as you grow in your career you need to watch out for those negative comments. You can easily get a reputation as a Cassandra if you keep criticising your colleagues, even if you are collaborative.

The blast radius widens and can cause rifts, this will impact outcomes.

The indulgent smiles when you are more junior will no longer apply.

Leaders of large teams need to weigh their words much more.

On the same trajectory, as you become more senior, you need to be extremely careful with your words. If you are in a role where you are expected to set directions for an organization then it is even more critical to watch what you say.

There will be enthusiastic employees, like your former self , who will take up proactive projects because of your words and will invest organization time and resources in those projects.

A statement like the first one above, about improving a process, can result in a couple of people actually spending hours coming up with a recommendation. Unless that is precisely the outcome you wanted to drive you should reconsider your words.

The leverage of your words increases disproportionately as you rise up the ranks and have more people who report to you and who look to you for direction.

This is even more true with negative comments. You need to be doubly cautious about throwaway comments regarding someone’s work. The negative impact this can have on their efficiency and motivation will be an unnecessary drag on the organization productivity.

“Kind words are a creative force, a power that concurs in the building up of all that is good, and energy that showers blessings upon the world.”
— Lawrence G. Lovasik

So, in a nutshell as you grow in responsibility the weight of your words increases significantly. If you want to be seen as a serious committed and balanced leader you need to choose your words carefully. The positive and negative impact of those words can go much further than you might have thought.