Antiwork

Remainder:

People who were most impressed by corporate BS were unsurprisingly also more likely to see their leaders as “visionary.” (All they need to be impressed is a hail of random buzzwords, after all.) They were also more likely to be satisfied at work. But this contentment came at a cost. They also performed worse on the various tests of cognitive and work performance.

Here’s how Cornell Chronicle summed up the results: “Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by ‘visionary’ corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.”

Don’t let your company get buried in empty jargon

Confirming that lovers of corporate BS are often not the sharpest operators at the office might cause a little mean-spirited glee among jargon haters. It is satisfying to have scientific confirmation that the people who annoy you might not actually be all that bright.

But once you stop cackling wickedly, the study actually flags up a serious concern for business leaders. These results highlight how BS can snowball as those who are impressed by empty rhetoric admire, hire, and promote like-minded bloviators.

“Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell warns. The end result is a corporate BS death spiral.

How to fight back against corporate BS

Imprecise, empty language leads to unclear communication and bad decision making. The results are often not funny at all. So what should leaders do if they see a tendency toward corporate BS beginning to creep into their companies? When I asked Littrell, he offered several suggestions.

First, forget trying to ban BS. It won’t work.

“Unfortunately, bullshit and bullshitting are unavoidable. It’s just part of human behavior, especially in competitive environments,” Littrell explains. Technical jargon used appropriately can be useful, he also points out, further complicating the idea of issuing a blanket jargon ban.

Instead, it is “more productive to focus efforts on rewarding ‘anti-bullshit’ behavior,” he continues. This means making “communicating with clarity” a company norm and modeling clear communication from the top.

“If senior executives communicate in ‘bullshitty’ ways, then everyone else will too,” Littrell warns. “They should normalize clearly defining their terms, focus on shorter, to-the-point sentences, and resist using ambiguous buzzwords.” Rather than announce you are “focusing on our strategic realignment,” say “here’s what we’ll start doing differently on Monday.”

Finally, reward people for asking questions. “Publicly praise good-faith attempts at clarification (e.g., ‘Thanks! That’s a great question. Let me rephrase this in a clearer way …’),” Littrell says. When performance review time rolls around, make sure to explicitly credit employees for things like “communicating clearly,” “flagging empty claims,” and “turning ambiguity into actionable plans.”

If all else fails, leaders may need to force employees to speak plainly through the use of “anti-BS templates that force company-wide messaging into straightforward concrete claims (what is true/what will change), observable metrics (how will we know if X works?), and specific timelines,” he concludes.

The corporate BS receptivity scale isn’t ready for prime time

What you probably should not do as a leader is use Littell’s “corporate bullshit receptivity scale” to evaluate candidates or employees. At least not yet.

“The scale is a promising tool for researchers, but it’s not quite ready yet to be used as a high-stakes screening instrument by private companies,” Littrell clarifies. “We still need to investigate it more robustly first.”

While we’re waiting for a miracle tool that can detect and blast away meaningless jargon, this study offers a helpful step forward in the battle against corporate BS. First, it confirms what many of us have long suspected. High-falutin’ words are generally not a sign of high performance. Quite the opposite. They can also be catching.

That means leaders need to be vigilant against the spread of corporate BS and take decisive action to root it out when they start to see it spread.

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