How Do the Names We Call Each Other Matter?

This is the September 2024 Create an Adaptable Life Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.

When I went to college, I referred to my female friends as “women.” My mother laughed at that, saying we were still girls.

I asked her, “When do male people become men? They start off as boys. Are they still boys in college?”

While she still thought I was more than slightly nuts, we had a great conversation about acknowledging when people became adult enough to be men and women.

She decided it was when people got jobs and worked full-time. I decided it was when they took responsibility for large portions of their lives. For me, that meant before they started to work.

However, we agreed on this: regardless of what we called people, we could start off with respect for them. That included the names we used to refer to other people.

Work Names Matter

What do you call the people you work with, especially if you are in a leadership position? For example, leaders can change the culture just with their choice of “individual contributor” or “team member.” (I wrote about that in my other blog here: Individual Contributor vs. Team Member.)

One name I hate is “kids,” or worse, when managers say, “my kids.”

When we refer to adults as kids, we create and reinforce a paternalistic culture. Some people love paternalistic cultures at work, often because they can wait for other people to tell them what to do. Other people like paternalistic cultures because they can focus on the niceties about the work, not the work itself. (See Leadership Tip #7: Be Wary of Spending Time on Non-Promotable Tasks.)

Paternalistic cultures emphasize seniority and experience—regardless of possible success, the expertise people learned from that experience.

In addition, I’ve noticed many paternalistic cultures tend to have senior leadership team members who look similar. Those companies might not have all tall white men at the top, but the people at the top tend to share demographic characteristics. Some of those are country of origin, school they attended, and hobbies, such as golf.

That’s because the senior teams tend to hire similar people because they feel most comfortable with those similarities. Then, these same people tend to name others in ways that emphasize the differences with the rest of the organization.

That’s why I need to say more about calling people “kids.”

“Kids” Don’t Work in Organizations

“Kids” is a particularly pernicious name for people at work. That name reduces the adult to a child. Worse, it discounts the value of the people doing the work.

I don’t know of a child who works for a living.

Instead, I know people with plenty of other responsibilities, such as people or pets who live with them; other beloved family members, and monetary responsibilities such as a mortgage or rent payment. Definitely not “kid” things. (If you work with coop students or part-timers, those people are probably balancing other responsibilities, such as school work with their paying work.)

And unless you literally had something to do with the birth of these adults, they are definitely not “your kids.”

When we call people “kids” at work, we discount their contributions. We create a default framing that discounts other people, too.

Our Default Framing Creates the Work Culture

Whose other contributions does your culture discount? Often, it’s the people with the least power—the less experienced people, and any minorities, such as women. And especially those people doing the niceties around the culture.

While I don’t have experience as a person of color, I have plenty of experience as a women with less perceived power in the organization. My experience and expertise, combined with plenty of self-esteem allowed me to push back on my senior managers and their thinking.

Too many of my senior managers thought that all leaders had useful experience, and most junior people did not. That’s because too many of them had only worked in the kind of culture that reinforces the stereotypes that women mother the people in the organization (moral support) and men lead. That’s one way to think about work—and I find that way insufficient.

That’s why the names we call each other matter.

When We Change the Names, We Can Reframe the Conversation

The more we adapt and reframe our language, the more we can challenge our assumptions:

Why can’t men offer moral support and women lead?
Why can’t more junior people lead the more senior people?

Those are just two questions. The more we recognize that the names we call each other matter, the more consciously we can choose.

Let’s assume that all the people we work with are adults. That will prevent the “kids” name problem.

Even better, we can choose how we want to accomplish work and then use names that reflect those preferences. Want to create a team-oriented culture? Use team member. Want to focus on individual work? Try fire-fighter. (Which I find so interesting, because real firefighters, the people who fight fires, often work as teams. Yeah.)

The names we call each other matter. We can consider language that does not emphasize meaningless differences. That’s more likely to create a culture of respect, where we can do work that matters.

Announcements…

My writing workshops are full for the rest of this year. If you want to know when I’ll offer the 2025 workshops, sign up for that notification list on Writing Workshop 1: Free Your Inner Writer & Sell Your Nonfiction Ideas. If you write fiction, I have options for how you can use this workshop for your content marketing.

Work Names Matter

“Kids” Don’t Work in Organizations

Our Default Framing Creates the Work Culture

When We Change the Names, We Can Reframe the Conversation

Announcements…

Read More of Create an Adaptable Life

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