Speaka da lingo?

You have to understand the rules. You have to know there are rules to understand. You have to speak the language.

Organisations have ways of speaking, a language that shows you are 'one of them' or an outsider. This language has rules but, of course, they are not written down. You learn them, slowly, through repetition and habit until, one day, you find that you are now part of the tribe, accepted in to the group. Then they show you where the coffee is kept and a short cut to the toilets that you never knew about plus a great wheeze to park for free. And you can then talk in the secret language about the outsiders.

How long this assimilation takes depends on the size, scale and psychotic nature of the organisation. If you were to live in a Welsh village, for example, it would take over 60 years for the locals to stop calling you 'the newcomer.' So it depends. I've been in my current role for 18 months and still appear to be speaking in Ferengi. 

Why is this important? It's important so that you are not bundled into a large wicker man and set alight for one. It's also important in that you haven't got a hope in hell in making any progress through an organisation's hierarchy if you speak the equivalent of Vulcan and it's a case of speak to the hand every time you open your mouth. And it's useful knowing that short cut to the toilet.

Let me give you an example. Let me give you several until I run out of them or get bored.

A senior IT manager, with an exclusive private sector background, is being interviewed by a Higher Education establishment. He gives a blinding presentation, he understands the problems, demonstrates how he would overcome the issues facing the HE college and evidences his competencies to do the job. He seeks feedback afterwards. 'Brilliant' he is told 'Except none of the academics on the recruitment panel had a clue what you were talking about.' Had he been talking about arcane IT architecture, about mysterious electronic components or long term strategies involving nascent technology? Nope, he'd been talking about churn, profit, bottom line, ROI and the normal (now there's judgmental for you, 'normal') business concepts that are taken for granted in the private sector. Academics are not used to such ideas - they are spenders of funds, not profit motivated, they are interested in the purity of research and peer recognition, not ROCE. The mistake the IT manager made was to monetize the issues and not talk in their language. No doubt if he had this would have included such words as paradigm, interventions, pedagogical and how can I spend my discretionary fund on a trip to the States?

Example 2 (because my quest is to make your world substantially better and brighten up your day) involves an HE administrator who wished to move to the private sector. He too made the penetrating presentation to the employer of his dreams but was met with the 'but you are a spender of funds, not a profit taker, you employ more and more people and do not seek operational efficiencies, you believe in organisational transparency and therefore get bogged down in multi-layered meetings. Plus you have so many holidays and we don't like that.' He had to turn it around so that it showed performance against budget, output in terms of graduates per head employed and quality of employment and so on.' All in the presentation. Same facts different spin.

Example 3 (this is a good one because I made the mistake). I presented a way of saving £500,000 annually to a public sector employer. I made the presentation in terms of efficiencies, productivity, outputs, reduction in heads, ROI and used lots of statistics to back up my assessment. I did this in an objective, dispassionate way. I thought I did well, achieving the objectives set of me. Until...I ran into the biggest flak storm of my business life because I hadn't understood the language. The language of the organisation was based on care of its employees, viewing  the staff in a very patriarchal way. That's not meant to be demeaning because that's the way they worked. If I had presented the same facts in a way that focused on the staff, the improvements for them, the way they could redeploy them into other more productive positions I'd have been in a much stronger position. And been able to walk when I left the meeting. As it happened I felt battered and bruised and severely worked over at the end. Mind you the outcome was still the same - they accepted my findings. Well to be accurate they accepted someone else's findings that were based exactly on mine. After that public attack they couldn't really accept mine straight away could they? Bastards.

So what can we learn from this? Good question. I've learnt that to make progress you have to present yourself in a way that can be recognised. I'm taking advice where I work now because I feel like a fly just bumping up against a window when it comes to getting interviews and being offered promotion. My CV, which worked very well for me in the private sector and got me interviews and good jobs, is being assessed for HE speak. At the moment it's full of objectives and quantitative outcomes e.g. I did this and 100% improvement was seen in 1 hour, I kicked serious ass and the customer was delighted. This is how the outplacement company told me to present my self as brand EOTP. I fully expect to have to say that 'I can now hold strokey beard meetings that last six days where no decision is made without referring it to sub committees and that lots of chocolate biscuits are eaten.' Or am I wrong? I'm reasonably confident that my aggressive CV is scaring the doodads of HR resulting in an early paper-shift rejection. Though I suppose I might just be crap. No I'm not, they just do not recognise my wonderfullness yet but they will do. Or I'll leave. So there.

There is one other thing. Sexism. Everywhere I've applied so far is staffed entirely by women and the successful candidate is always a woman. Coincidence? That's for another blog.