Managers’ Gobbledygook Turns Off Employees

 This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post in the series on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager, by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of this success. No other factor even came close.

“No child aspires to a life talking the kind of nonsense that many executives speak,” writes Philip Coggan, a news correspondent who writes the weekly Bartleby for the Economist column on work and management. “They instead become entangled in a forest of gobbledygook,” he wrote on July 31st. Consultants and advisors to public institutions and private businesses aid and abet the executives by piling on their own unique jargon replete with language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by use of abstruse technical terms. Unfortunately, this gobbledygook is self-reinforcing.

It’s easy to recognize that managers, and management consultants alike, use jargon to establish their unique would-be credentials. Bartleby writes that they are like medieval priests, who conducted services in Latin rather than in the local language, adding to the mystical nature” of what they were spouting.

The lesson of employee engagement, which Gallup’s It’s the Manager makes abundantly clear, is that, for most if not all of today’s employees, their work must have meaning. “It’s not my job, it’s my life, “ they say, meaning that they want to be engaged in meaningful and engaging work.  Gobbledygook, jargon, and overblown language turns them off, disengages them and, as a consequence, employee retention and productivity, safety, profitability, and quality of services and products suffer.

Copyright CourtMetrics 2021. All rights reserved.

Comments

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