Do You Speak 'Corporate'?

One of the first pieces of advice I give to people who attend my bio workshops is to eliminate clichés from their writing. Words and phrases like ‘seasoned’, ‘detail-oriented’, ‘experienced’, and ‘dedicated’ are so overused in professional resumes and LinkedIn profiles, they’re all but meaningless.

How do we talk about ourselves in a way that makes sense, but isn’t so tired it’s comatose?

Conversely, there’s corporatespeak that’s meant to be a language that only ‘insiders’ can understand. Not two days ago, a friend sent me a link to this piece that articulates the problem far more eloquently that I could, and in a way that only someone who has experienced this type of hyper-branded, self-important corporate environment could understand.

The author terms the problem “garbage language”, the perfect descriptor due to “their facility to warp and impede communication”. This kind of talk exists for one reason: to build walls; to create distance between the speaker and the listener.

When someone uses highfalutin language to explain a simple concept, they’re using language as a gatekeeper. Calling meetings ‘syncs’; using the word ‘evangelist’ in job titles… this idea that “if we give it a name, it means it’s more important” is pervasive in companies of all sizes and industries.

I shared my ‘3 Ps of corporate life’ on LinkedIn last week—pretense, politics, and posturing—and people related to it. So much of our time and energy in corporate is spent navigating office politics and maintaining a certain image: imagine what we could accomplish if we weren’t beholden to these expectations.

Self-employment has fundamentally changed the way I view work in many ways, and language is just one of them. I don’t trust people in expensive suits; I’m wary of people who have convinced themselves that ‘money’ is a personality.

In my work now, I advertise myself as a ‘creative with a corporate streak’: someone who has worked in conservative office environments, but has figured out how to make a career out of self-expression. My mission is to get people into work scenarios that they want to be in; to write people into the professional stories they want to be a part of.

Do you speak fluent ‘corporate’? Is it helping or hampering your life—and is your ‘professional’ negatively affecting the ‘personal’?


(The image for this post is me at work back in 2006 or 2007, clearly demonstrating the fact that I’m the consummate professional (wink). Despite appearances, I took that job very seriously: incidentally, it’s also where I learned some of my first ‘corporate-speak’ words and phrases.)