While I was in high school, I had the good fortune to receive a scholarship to attend college from my father's employer, the Santa Fe Railway Company. In addition to paying for almost all of my tuition expenses, I also received free train rides for most of my trips between home and school.
As much as I appreciated all that financial support, I was helped even more by the attention that the senior executives at Santa Fe paid to me while I was in college. My trips between school in Boston and home in California required that I change trains in Chicago where the railroad was headquartered.
I would usually arrange for a few hour layover before the next train left so that I could head over to see my sponsors and to thank them for their support.
On one of these visits, one of my sponsors asked me if I would mind joining him for lunch at an executive gathering rather than eating in the company cafeteria. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was happy to be cooperative and went along.
The event was being held in the ballroom of one of Chicago's largest hotels, and I was astonished to see literally thousands of executives packed into one space. But I was even more surprised to realize that I did not understand what the other people were talking about, either during lunch or later when the speaker rose to make his comments.
Although I am a native speaker of American English and the people around me were using English words, I felt like I had just landed in China. The sentences just didn't mean a thing to me, but it was clear that the people understood one another quite well. I smiled a lot and hoped no one would expect me to comment on what they were saying.
I later asked my host how to learn to understand what had been talked about at lunch. He laughed and said that you just have to hang around a corporate headquarters. In those days, relatively few business people had or considered getting a business education.
Keeping that conversation in mind, I took a summer job at the headquarters of another large American company based in Chicago, Inland Steel, hoping to learn some business language. And you know, I gradually did.
I asked lots of questions and decided it was all very interesting. From that summer on, I began to think about going to business school to earn an MBA degree. It was a valuable lesson.
From my business school and work experiences, I learned the language of business well enough to work as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group where I met dozens of CEOs and hundreds of executives. From conversations with those people, my knowledge of business language and concepts quickly expanded.
I also noticed that one reason people in companies had difficulty accomplishing what they wanted was because very few other people in many organizations shared a knowledge of their business language and concepts. While helping clients, I often felt like I was, in part, playing the role of interpreter for people from far-off lands.
What's it like today to communicate in business? Let me share a second and much more recent example of the language and concept barriers in business, one that affects many more people these days because companies have become more global.
Ms. Susan Yew was born in Malaysia and is fluent in English, Chinese, and Malay. With those excellent language skills, Ms. Yew did well in her school work, earning a diploma
in accounting (for taking courses in accounting, statistics, and economics) and an external diploma in costing, based on doing well on an examination.
With that solid background she did well in her initial jobs, which involved accounting, human resources administration, and costing.
Her career took a new turn when she accepted a position in sales for orthopedic implant products. She now had the responsibility to teach surgeons, operating room technicians, and nurses in how to use the most advanced operating techniques, tools, and implants. Clearly, she had to master the language of medicine and the concepts involved in those types of surgery.
Ms. Yew made that adjustment quite successfully and soon led her organization in sales results by providing great education and service.
But she soon found new language and concept challenges: She was asked to supervise other members of the sales team and to work with executives who were involved in other functions for her company. The messages she shared with those who worked for her didn't always seem to sink in. Sometimes the words and concepts the executives used also didn't make a lot of sense to her.
Looking around at her organization, she also realized that promotion prospects were limited unless she earned a bachelor' degree or an MBA. In particular, she was concerned that she didn't know how to package her ideas into proposals that others would understand and support.
Ms. Yew's response, like mine, was to seek more knowledge about executive business language and concepts. She chose to enroll in an online MBA program at Rushmore University and focused much of her course work on improving her job performance in her new administrative roles. By studying in the evenings and weekends, she did not have to leave her job.
Initially, the MBA work was daunting. There were many new ways of looking at things and different methods of describing what was going on.
She persevered and, through her hard work, soon gained facility in MBA-level concepts and language. Because she could understand more of the issues brought up during meetings, she was able to take on greater responsibilities and gain more visibility in her organization.
An unexpected benefit of Ms. Yew's studies was to learn how to accomplish more in less time. Otherwise, the burden of working full time while earning an MBA would have quickly become intolerable. After graduating, she was able to use this skill in time management to improve her quality of life, especially in terms of being able to spend more time with her family.
Since graduating, she has been pleased to find that she's more often playing an internal role as a coach or leading projects to implement ideas she has developed, rather than doing everything as an individual performer. Her supervisor has become more impressed with her work, which bodes well for future promotions.
Those encouraging responses from her company should be no surprise. Her MBA coursework was often based on creating important innovations by applying the leadership, management, and creativity skills she was learning. In the process, she began to see herself as an important innovator and to seek out opportunities to work on such tasks.
Encouraged by this career progress, she now aims to gain a position where her responsibilities would include supervising staffs in several different offices.
Now, think about yourself. Are you ever in conversations at work where you understand what the words mean . . . but can't make sense of what the speakers are trying to say? If so, you too may be lacking some important knowledge of business language and concepts.
How will you overcome that lack?
Author Resource:-
Donald W. Mitchell is a professor at Rushmore University, an online school, who often advises MBA candidates who wish to become more successful business leaders. For more information about ways to engage in fruitful lifelong learning at Rushmore to increase your effectiveness and improve your career, visit
http://www.rushmore.edu
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