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One of the most important roles a corporate communicator can play in their organization is that of the Chief Simplicity Officer. By championing the cause to simplify business processes, abbreviate policies and procedures, eliminate bureaucracy and encourage a culture of colloquialism and candor, you can help free your executives and employees up to get real work done.

I love this quote from a recent BusinessWeek article in which the author argues against overdone policy manuals:

You know who’s making money for your employer right now? Workers who are selling, building, or inventing stuff. You know who’s spending the business’s money right now? Other employees (most easily found in HR, IT, and Finance) who’ve been commanded to write, administer, and enforce the 10,000 policies that make up your company’s employee handbook. Overblown policy efforts squelch creativity, bake fear into your culture, and make busywork for countless office admins, on top of wasting paper, time, and brain cells. What to do instead? Nuke one unnecessary or outdated policy every week and require the CEO’s signature to add any new ones.

Though communication may not have direct control over your company’s policies and procedures, you can have a strong influence in setting the tone for simplicity. Recently, a Fortune 500 client of ours reworked their employee code of conduct manual under the editing eye of the employee communications team. The result? The hundreds-of-pages-long “snooze fest” that was became a 12-sheet page turner, filled with relatable anecdotes and plain ole’ English.

Long live the CSO.

We’ve all done it – slipped into “business-speak” and used overly complex jargon to explain simple issues. It’s easy to do, but it really can inhibit your communications (read: complicate your conversations).

Several of my colleagues have been working with a client’s communications team to help them embrace a less formal, more conversational form of communicating, all of which makes good sense to me. Why use technical or complicated language to communicate when you can get the same point across (likely more successfully) by speaking in straightforward, concise terms?

Lately, I’ve been trying a lot harder to think about how I say things. And I admit, it’s not easy and I can’t say I’ve been overly successful. Perhaps it’s because while I really like the concept of avoiding business-speak, I have needed to see it in action. Then I did.

I was watching the movie New in Town. For those unfamiliar with the film, in a nutshell it’s a romantic comedy about a Miami executive who is trying to adjust to her new leadership role in a small Minnesotan town. The leading lady, Renee Zellweger (Lucy), faces quite a few hardships along the way, some because she is without her “modern comforts” but others (more apparent to us communicators) because she fails to communicate in a way that makes sense to her audience. While there are examples of this throughout the movie, there’s one that really stood out to me. Having met up with the plant’s foreman and several employees at a local bar, Lucy finds herself surrounded by employees. The past several days have been especially hard (due to miscommunication with the plant employees) and she says to them, “I’m so glad that we’re dialoguing”… to which a voice from the background says “D-word, double drink!” (ala Big Lebowski) and everyone raises their glass. In her effort to “communicate,” she was being overly complicated. And as a result, what she was saying was not heard but instead mocked. While I’ve probably said similar lines and thought it sounded totally normal, hearing it come from someone else really made it clear. It made me wonder, “Wow…How many times have I sounded like that?”

The bottom line is that it’s as much about how you say something as what you say. If you’re over complicating what you’re saying, you might not be getting much of anything across; in fact you may be sending a totally different message. So next time you’re dialoguing (D-word…), think carefully about the words you chose. They may say more than you intend.