TL;DR
Organizations keep using the surface word for their hardest problems and prescribing the wrong fix. Every wrong word sends the intervention down the wrong path while the real problem compounds underneath. This edition is about the diagnostic shift: the one question that changes where the intervention lands.
Inside this issue:
A leader whose organization was solving the wrong problem for months. Why we keep reaching for the surface word. And the one question that changes where the fix lands.
She’d lost her husband suddenly a year earlier. In the months since, she’d become reactive in meetings she used to run well, short with people, interrupting conversations she used to navigate with care. She’d been beating herself up about it, convinced the problem was too much emotion. She thought the grief was making her a worse leader.
I told her the opposite.
When grief doesn’t have anywhere to go, it takes up the space that used to hold everything else. The patience she used to bring to a difficult conversation, the warmth that came naturally when someone on her team was struggling, the ability to sit with a hard moment instead of pushing through it. All of that takes emotional capacity. Grief was using all of it. What was left over was sharp and reactive because grief had consumed the reserves she used to lead with.
Her organization saw a behavior problem. She saw a regulation problem. The real word was grief. And once she could name it, everything shifted. She stopped trying to fix her reactions and started rebuilding access to the warmth that was always her real operating system. Naming it for herself gave her the ability to name it for the people around her, to say what she actually needed.
I keep seeing this. Different leader, different word, same pattern. A leader says overwhelmed, the organization hears capacity and adjusts the workload, but the real word is isolation or loss of agency or a values conflict that no workload adjustment will touch. A team is labeled disengaged, the organization prescribes a culture initiative, but the real word is fear or the accumulated weight of conversations that never happened. The surface word sends the organization down one path. The real word points to a different intervention entirely.
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the use of sentiment-laden words in published text declined systematically starting around 1850, replaced by the language of rational analysis. We got more precise about data and less precise about people. The vocabulary for what’s actually happening inside a leader or a team got thinner every decade while the vocabulary for metrics and outcomes got richer. When you don’t have a word for what you’re looking at, you reach for the closest one available. Burnout instead of loss of agency. Disengagement instead of grief. Attitude problem instead of fear.
Another leader came in describing herself as exhausted. After a while she corrected herself: she was depleted, and the difference mattered. Exhaustion could be about workload, and rest is the fix. Her depletion was shame running underneath, a belief that she should have been further along by now, that the gap between where she was and where she thought she should be meant something was fundamentally wrong with her. She’d been prescribing herself rest for months. Nothing changed, because the word was wrong and the wrong word kept sending her down a path that couldn’t touch the real problem. The moment she named it as shame, the intervention changed completely.
Same question in both conversations: what is the word underneath the word I’m using?
This week, pick one problem you’ve already labeled. Ask yourself: what is the word underneath the word I’m using? See if the answer changes what you do next.
My chapter in Luminaries: Women Leaders Who Light the Way, is out July 7, is about this pattern at organizational scale.
The diagnosis can only be as good as the word you’re willing to use.
