Book excerpt: Manage your language

MarilynWright January 27, 2020 in Business and industry, Education and skills Tagged Culture, Management, Soft skills - 5 Minutes

Want to get ahead in the health sector? You’ll need Carolyn M Holmes’ table of handy phrases to help you decode the language.

Reading time: 5 minutes

“Remember that if plan A fails, you have 25 letters left.” Anonymous

“Reverse is sometimes the best way forward.” Oliver Burkeman

“We need to manage upwards, downwards, inside and outside.” Anonymous

At work, we are always moving, either tapping our feet, getting a cup of tea, helping a patient, a colleague or a manager. We are sending emails, making telephone calls, attending meetings, providing care and support, but how do we do this? The answer is: in many ways!

Read on … and start using some different words to explain your style!

When talking about moving, here are some useful words to use:

Bedding, bounce, branched, breakthrough, bring, cascade, catch, caught up, come, churn, connect, crossover, delivery, down, download, drop, dynamic, evolve, falling, floating, forward, grow, impact, inflate, jog, jump, leap, leave, lift, linking, momentum, move, movement, nip, offload, pick, ping, pop, progress, push, putting, run, shifted, splash, stalling, start, stretch, take, throw, tick, transition, turned, upend, upwards, whipped, and wrap.

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Phrase	Suggested Translation
The next 3 weeks are bedding down and getting on with it.	We haven’t planned for the next 3 weeks, but it will give us time to work out what we really need to do and then we can get started.
Do we need to bounce this back!	I’m not sure what to do. Are you? Let’s send it back to them.
People are bouncing around health and social care services.	Do you know where the patients are? Yes, we sent them over there to see you. Please send them back when you have finished.
We branched out to see if there were wider people to involve.	I’ve sent the information to some of my friends. They’ve helped me out before.
I’ve had a breakthrough in the past couple of days!	Eureka! At last, I’ve worked out better late than never.
There is a ray of sunshine. Bringing people on the bus with you helps bring joy at work!	Well, if you can persuade enough people to look at things your way, you have done a great job that day.
We will cascade this via email.	We will send this information to as many people we can think of in the hope that somebody will find it interesting.
We need to put some time in to have a bit of a catch-up.	I haven’t seen you for ages. Let’s meet for lunch for good gossip.
We are catching people falling through the net!	There are a lot of holes in the nets, so that’s why there are a lot of people falling through them
Come and join the party! The best is yet to come!	We’re having such a great time here. Come and meet our team. We’re having a fab time. There is no stopping us now.
Unless anyone else would want to come in?	Can anyone fit a word in edgeways or should I carry on talking?
I’ll come back with a form of words.	I’ll quickly write something on the back of an envelope and come back to you when I’m ready.
It will be very interesting to see what comes out of it. Do come back to me if you need to!!!	Come back to me with all the gossip. Tell me what they’re doing, please. Don’t be shy.
This is an opportunity to shape the things to come.	Can you listen to me? I need to persuade you somehow; I’ve got a great idea!
Is the money coming down?	Which pot of money are we going to use now? Have you spoken to the powers that be about our predicament?
It’s stinky and smelly and needs to go in the washing machine and will come out all fresh for the line!	Right now, everything is going wrong, but trust, me I am your leader. It will all be alright in the end!
The consultants are coming to do some change management.	They are paying a lot of money for people to come in and tell us what we already know. Do they ever learn?
There is a lot of churn here.	People keep leaving and I don’t know why.
The problem is that it gets lost in your day-to-day churn.	The issue is that we have so many important things to do that we don’t know what to do first. The most important things are lost, so we can’t see the wood for the trees!
We need to connect the system with itself!	Do you understand what I’m talking about because I don’t! What I mean is that nobody is talking to each other across all the different organisations.
It went down like a cup of cold sick!	Well, they didn’t like that one. I can tell you that for nothing!
I need to download. Moving swiftly on…	I am so frustrated I want to scream! Anyway, what were you saying?
Everything is ticking along nicely. We have used the very best evidence base and we are getting the model pinned down.	We have stolen everybody else’s good ideas and passed them off as our own, so we are getting on marvellously!
Do you want to drop her?	Well, do you want to just leave her out of the meetings going forward?
I’ll drop her an email. Do you want to drop her number down?	Why am I asking for her number when I’m going to send her an email?
We all need to pick up and drop!	To get on, you just need to start one thing and then switch to something else whenever your manager says.
The interesting dynamic in this is that we need to go where the energy is.	In a nutshell, we’ve just got to get on with it.
The document will continue to evolve.	I’ve just said that for effect. I haven’t finished it really and I’ve moved on to something else far more interesting.
Patients are falling through the cracks.	Have you seen the patients? Where are they?