Language as Leverage

Speed doesn’t only stall from lack of effort. It stalls when meaning breaks.

This post is part of my “Culture Catalysts” series: an inside look at how systems, rituals, and language shape high-trust, high-clarity teams.
It's about the invisible levers that drive momentum: not perks or vibes, but the architecture of how people align, communicate, and compound.

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Speed rarely stalls because people aren’t working hard.

More often, it slows down in quieter ways, like when “impact” means something different to every team or when “strategy” floats without a shared definition, or when that acronym that everyone uses means something just a bit different to your key stakeholders.

Burnout often has less to do with pace than with the kind of friction that builds when teams are using the same words but meaning different things.

In this post, I unpack how language quietly governs trust, speed, and execution, and why most teams don’t realize it until things break.

As Google’s Project Aristotle showed, teams rarely fail because they lack talent. They fail because they lack shared understanding. When meaning slips, execution slows. When language decays, culture follows.

In the last two posts, we explored what happens when leaders scale without tending to team energy. But beneath energy debt is something deeper: communication decay. Not cadence. Not tooling. Language.

The missing lever most teams ignore: shared vocabulary

Notion, GitLab, and Stripe all treat language as infrastructure. Because they’ve learned the hard way: execution relies on shared syntax.

One word with three meanings becomes three weeks of rework. “Impact,” “shipped,” “strategic” “insert your acronym here”. These aren’t definitions. They’re decision accelerators. Or friction multipliers.

When leaders don’t design language intentionally, it designs itself through shortcuts, power gradients, and unspoken assumptions.

We over invest in tools and rituals (docs, Slack, async stand-ups) but skip the substrate: the words those rituals are built on.

And the cracks show up in subtle ways:

• A junior teammate says, “I’m not sure what ‘own the outcome’ actually means.”

• A director hears “be more strategic” as a veiled critique.

• A product team defines “MVP” as the leanest testable thing; GTM hears “nearly launch-ready.”

These are simple examples, but you get my meaning. I hope.

Misalignment doesn’t announce itself. It compounds in the background like tech debt, but semantic.

Codifying language is leadership work

Great leaders don’t just communicate. They codify.

Language is a performance tool. Treat it as such. Language drives clarity, precision, and safety, if wielded well. And it compounds trust when modelled consistently.

At Stripe, high-leverage documents are reviewed with the same rigor as code because writing is thinking. At GitLab, the 2,000-page public handbook acts as a shared neural net. At Notion, onboarding starts with an internal language tour.

None of this is about being pedantic. It’s about speed through clarity.

Simon Sinek calls it “making meaning visible.”. Adam Grant reminds us that “clarity isn’t just kind—it’s efficient.”

This isn’t soft. It’s systems work.

And like any system, it needs regular auditing.

The Clarity Surfaces Audit:
5 places where language breaks under pressure

Here’s how to spot where semantic drift is quietly derailing your org:

1. 1:1s

• Are word choices building safety or defensiveness?

• Are phrases like “just a quick chat” spiking anxiety?

• Are we solving too fast instead of asking “What do you need?”

2. Stand-ups

• Are updates reflecting priorities or performance theater?

• Is “blocked” a safe word or a risky one?

• Do teams use consistent terms for scope and velocity?

3. Team Meetings

• Do people say “Can we define that?” before debating?

• Are trade-offs named out loud or assumed?

• Does language signal inclusion or hierarchy?

4. All-Hands / Town Halls

• Are strategy words like “focus,” “ownership,” and “impact” defined or floating?

• Is the Q&A real dialogue or signaling?

• Are values encoded in stories or buried in slides?

5. Written Docs

• Are acronyms and terms drifting without re-grounding?

• Is writing calibrated for context level and audience?

• Are definitions portable across product, GTM, and ops?

Where confusion compounds, a language fault line is often underneath.

A moment where language broke

A moment where language broke

Here’s how an entire roadmap can quietly derail from one well-meaning directive: “De-risk the launch for the SMB segment.”

A senior leader used this phrase during an offsite. Everyone nodded, then dove into planning. But no one paused to align on what risk actually meant—or whose risk they were solving for.

Product cut scope to reduce technical debt.
Legal pulled timelines forward to double-check compliance.
Marketing slashed the campaign to lower external exposure.

By launch week, the product was stable but momentum had vanished. The market didn’t notice. Internally, teams blamed each other for being “too cautious.”

The language wasn’t wrong. It was interpreted in isolation. Each team optimized for a different version of risk. No one clarified the frame. So alignment quietly fractured.

Cognitive scientists call this “assumed alignment”. It’s when everyone thinks they agree because no one asks what the words actually mean. Sticky Honey Bear, anyone?

What high-trust teams do differently

The best teams I’ve been on and led, treat language like infrastructure. They don’t just optimize rituals. They fortify meaning.

They:

• Maintain glossaries for words like “done,” “impact,” “shipped”

• Normalize asking: “What does that mean to you?”

• Dedicate retro time to: “Where did meaning slip?”

• Use metaphors and models across functions to sync mental frames

• Teach not just what terms mean but why they exist

At Shopify, our CEO Tobi Lütke banned acronyms. Not just for clarity but for access. Acronyms often gate keep context. Removing them levelled understanding, flattened power gradients, and sped up decision-making.

At Amazon and Dropbox every meeting starts with a memo, and a silent read. No slides. No assumptions. Just shared context.

At Stripe, narrative writing isn’t a tool, it’s the culture. Docs are reviewed for clarity like code. Because writing is clarity.

This isn’t about words. It’s about speed, trust, and alignment.

Small actions that shift the system

Language systems aren’t built in one meeting. They’re tuned over time.

Here’s where to start:

• In your next 1:1, ask: “Has any term we use been confusing lately?”

• In your next team meeting, clarify 3 frequently used words.

• In your next doc, write a 2-line glossary up top.

• Model “What does that mean to you?” in high-stakes rooms.

• Start a shared vocabulary doc. Revisit it monthly.

Language is how we scale trust

Language is how we scale trust.
If energy is the battery, and execution is the motor, then language is the circuitry.
It connects every function, every feedback loop, every decision layer.

Clarity isn’t just kind. It’s how you move at speed without breaking culture.
The highest-leverage shift a leader can make isn’t to communicate more, it’s to teach teams how to build meaning together.

Because speed doesn’t come from moving fast. It comes from meaning that moves.

And if you’re a growth leader, you’ve probably have backlogs of ideas and roadmaps searching for the next lever in acquisition, activation, retention. But we rarely look inward at the words we use every day to ship, align, and decide.

Language isn’t overhead. It’s a hidden lever for speed, trust, and alignment, if you choose to wield it.

Bonus:

Want to audit how language is working or failing inside your org?
I’m building a practical toolkit to help leaders score clarity across 10 key surfaces. It’s designed to be fast to run, useful to act on, and easy to share internally.

I’m testing it now as a GPT + resource bundle.

If you want early access and can give direct feedback, DM me or post a message in the comments. You’ll help shape something designed to become a go-to ritual for high-trust, high-clarity teams.

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PS: This post closes a 3-part series:

1. Energy Debt

2. Burnout & Team Scaling

3. Language as Leverage

If this series helped you see your team differently, send it to someone scaling through fog. Or forward it to your CEO. Because language work is leadership work.