“We’re not curing cancer…”
We hear it constantly from different industries, different functions, across all levels. It’s meant as humility, said in passing, usually with a shrug.
It’s also the clearest evidence of something leaders rarely account for: how much weight offhand language carries. Leaders tend to think about communication as the big moments — the all-hands, the mission statement, the annual review. But, most communication doesn’t happen there. It happens in the sentences you don’t plan. And those off-the-cuff moments, in turn, shape a business and its teams more than the planned ones do.
Sweat the small stuff
Compare the volume. A leader might deliver a handful of formal, planned communications in a given month – a review, a memo, an all-hands. In that same month, they’ll have hundreds of exchanges: a comment before a call, a quick reassurance after a mistake, the way a task is described, etc. Almost everything a leader says never happens on a stage. It happens in passing.
Edgar Schein’s foundational work on organizational culture found that leaders shape culture less through formal statements and more through what they repeatedly pay attention to and react to. Not the announcement — the pattern. One polished message doesn’t outweigh a hundred casual ones. It’s the other way around.
One sentence, two messages
Here’s why that matters more than it sounds like it should. Most soft language is actually trying to manage two different things at once — and it usually only manages one.
Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson, who coined the term “psychological safety,” separates team dynamics along two axes: how safe people feel admitting mistakes, and how much accountability they’re still held to for the result. The best teams are high on both — people take risks and own their misses, and the standard never moves.
Most soft language — “no worries,” “it’s fine,” “when you get a chance” — is aimed at the safety half only. Said without the accountability half attached, it doesn’t just read as reassurance. It reads as permission to lower the standard too. The words themselves can’t distinguish between the two. The listener has to guess which one you meant — and they usually guess down.
Self-effacing vs. culture-effacing
There’s a familiar piece of advice adjacent to this: cut the “weak language.” Drop the “justs” and the “I thinks” and the hedges, because they undermine how confident you sound. That advice is about the speaker — whether you come across as authoritative or meek.
The same soft, hedging, in-passing language doesn’t just make the person saying it sound less sure of themselves. When people in leadership positions or who have a lot of visibility in their roles use soft language, it actively resets the standard. It’s not self-effacing. It’s culture-effacing. You don’t just sound less confident — you make an entire team less certain of what’s actually expected of them.
Say it with purpose
Listen for your own hedge words. Not for how they make you sound, but for what they quietly tell everyone else is optional. One clearly stated standard doesn’t survive a hundred casual exceptions to it. Consistency in the small stuff beats clarity in the big stuff.
People don’t calibrate their effort off the thing you said once, on stage, that one time. They calibrate it off the things you say consistently.
- Listen for your own hedge words — “just,” “no worries,” “when you get a chance” — and check whether they’re doing the job you intend, or quietly doing a different one.
- When something goes wrong, separate the two messages instead of folding them into one: the mistake is fine, and the standard still isn’t moving.
- Remember the math: one clearly stated standard doesn’t equal a hundred casual exceptions to it.
Interested in a closer look at how your team talks about its own work?
Reach out at info@snpnet.com to learn about classes like Meeting Facilitation or Delivering Hard Feedback.
