Why leadership needs less jargon

Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.

The lighthouse

Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.

Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.

The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.

There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.

Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?

Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.

It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.

Why jargon prevails

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Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.

Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.

Altitude without traction

Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.

A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.

A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.

The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.

The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.

In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.

The cost of comfort

When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.

Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.

KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.

The quiet power of saying what you mean

None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:

• What do I mean by it? 
• What will my audience hear? 

A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.

Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.

This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.