I often have the opportunity to work with leaders at all levels as they try to communicate with their teams, with each other and with clients. On the surface, this might seem like a common sense task. When you add any importance to the communication, all types of strange things begin to happen.

Like me, you have probably noticed that the way we speak in corporations and government over the past decade or so has become sanitized and somewhat convoluted. This is even more evident when an organization is going through some type of change or big event. Words and phrases have been created to lessen the significance of an issue or to create a broader appeal with no real meaning underneath. If the listener has to ask what you really mean by "leveraging knowledge capital", then you have failed as a communicator.  You have all heard softer phrases used for firing someone or eliminating their job. The government is famous for speaking without real meaning. Using slippage for delay and shrinkage for stolen are some words that come to mind. The problem is that it sounds insincere and people just stop listening. Don't let this happen to you.

Here is an example of a leader speaking to a team:

"I assure you that at the end of the day, in order to meet our deliverables, we need to leverage the skill sets of our matrixed teammates across the organization. It's important that we have an integrated and organic solution that takes into account each individual contributors bandwidth and initially targets all low hanging fruit. Metrics will need to be created so that there is not a disconnect in our attempt to target improvement in both customer sat and shareholder value".

I'm sure you get the picture here.  Why do we do this to ourselves? Hurry hurry; finish that ...