If you are a young person or new to the business world, you could easily get the idea that business is very complicated and confusing. You could easily feel intimidated by the formal language and all the terms and acronyms people throw around in the business world.
Let me take some pressure off your shoulders! Most of the complicated and intimidating stuff you run across in the business world is weenie garbage. It means nothing. In fact, an easy way to distinguish real people from zombie pod people in the business world is to listen to them talk.
The more jargon a person throws out, the less you can trust him. That's not because the person is necessarily a bad person, but because they've fallen into a kind of pit. A lot of people end up in there. In the pit, you're afraid to be yourself. You spout corporate acronyms so you sound like you're part of the insiders' club. The jargon is protective coloration.
You were a kid on the playground. You know that bullies are fearful people. You know that kids who show off and try to make other kids feel bad have a hole inside themselves. It's all very sad, but you can't waste your time with people like that. No matter where you work, you have to find the real people and speak to them like a real person, too. You and your real friends can create a zone of authenticity in your workplace, even if you're surrounded by zombies and weenies. There are a lot of them around.
You'll hear an enormous number of three-letter acronyms in the business world. Get into the habit of asking right away "What does that stand for?" If someone snickers at your question, that's their problem.
Never, ever pretend you know what someone is saying when you actually don't. When you pretend to understand something only so that you won't risk looking foolish, you feed Godzilla. Can you imagine how many millions of people are clamping their lips shut and pretending to understand stuff that they don't understand just in order to fit in, even as you read these words?
You're not going to be one of those people.
Here are a few of the goofy acronyms you'll hear in the business world, with their definitions:
SLA stands for Service Level Agreement. Organizations create Service Level Agreements with their vendors, for instance. That makes sense. If I have my website hosted by a hosting company, I want them to commit to a certain percentage of up time during the month -- let's say ninety-nine percent.
That means that my site won't be down, at least not due to hosting problems, more than one percent of the time during the month. I can sleep more easily if I know that my hosting company has committed to a certain level of service.
The problem with SLAs comes in when we create SLAs between groups in the same company and even side-by-side co-workers! If we define all of the relationships around us through commercial agreements, then there's no room to flex. I'm always on the hook to you, and you're always on the hook to me. That's not a relationship where trust will blossom.
It's a relationship where the terms of our communication are governed through a contract (called an SLA) rather than through organic human interaction.
There's no human give-and-take when our relationship is defined contractually through an SLA.
If I'm an HR person and my SLA with you says that I must return your phone calls with two hours and your email messages within four hours, suddenly my job is to monitor and measure my own timeliness versus to build a healthy workplace, a much higher-level and more strategic goal.
If you don't trust me to manage my time and my communication in perfect context, bending and flexing based on the importance of the other things going on around me, why have me on the payroll at all? SLAs between co-workers send the message "Big Brother is watching you!"
We can manage our businesses in the weeds and measure everything. We can give ourselves a gold star when we hit our marks, but that won't help our customers, our shareholders or the planet.
I believe in SLAs between organizations and vendors. I don't believe in internal SLAs, which are just more weenie metrics and paperwork to slow us down.
KPI means Key Performance Indicator. The idea behind KPIs is that if you measure certain aspects of a person's performance or a group's performance, you'll have nailed the most important elements of the job. I'm not a fan of KPIs, either.
I'm a musical theatre and opera person. In a theatrical production, everybody is focused on creating a wonderful experience for the audience. If I'm in the cast, I have to know my songs. I have to remember my blocking. I have a lot of details to look after, and so does everyone else involved in the performance.
My director is never going to say "We're going to be looking at how well you hit that high C in Act I, Liz, and we'll also be measuring how accurately you hit your marks in Scene II of Act Three. These are your Key Performance Indicators."
No director would ever do that, because directors want their actors completely immersed in the role. They don't want them to focus on tiny things when the big goal, the show itself, is all that counts. Directors want their actors to be completely focused on the performance, not picking apart tiny pieces of it in order to hit a pointless, tiny yardstick.
It's no different in the business world. Focusing on our employee's tiny, day-to-day goals is the worst thing we can do as leaders. We want our employees focused on the big win, so let's talk about that all the time!
We want them to be in their zone at work - flying forward on their path, excited and happy. We don't want them stopping to check on their performance all the time, or ever.
One of the biggest problems with our system of mechanized work, the one we call Godzilla, is that it takes people's eyes off the big win and tells them to focus on insignificant things like Key Performance Indicators.
We can get rid of KPIs, SLAs and hundreds of other weenie business terms and the policies they rode in on. It's a new day, and we can hire people we trust and set them loose to amaze us!
