Trish's Blog

How do you talk about the people you work with?

Not to their faces; in your head, in your emails, in your meetings. Do you say “the board needs to understand…” or “the IT crowd just don’t get it…” or “the direct care workers always push back…”? Maybe it’s “the leadership team”, “the execs”, “those people over in ops.”

When you use language like that, you are treating a group of human beings as a Collective. One mass. One set of predictable behaviours. One problem to manage. And the moment you do that, you have made a decision about them before they’ve opened their mouths.

The Collective keeps Diversity of Thought buried. Because when you see a group, you stop seeing the individuals inside it. You stop noticing the person on the board who thinks completely differently from everyone else at that table. You stop hearing the direct care worker who spotted the problem six months ago. The thinking that could change everything is already in the room. The Collective is just making it invisible.

Maybe the most practical leadership move you can make this week has nothing to do with strategy or structure. It’s simply this: start treating every group as a Collection of Individuals. Not the IT crowd. The people in IT. Not the leadership team. The individuals around that table, each carrying a completely different way of seeing the world. Each one shaped by a different history, a different set of experiences, a different wyrd.

When you make that shift, their weird wisdom is available. All of it. For the very first time.