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Ask A Manager: Our new strategy name is a sex act
First question at the link
My sister has a conundrum I would love your take on. The director of her division has recently revealed its priorities for 2022, and one is to enact a new pricing strategy.
The division director has named this strategy “soft pegging.” My sister has now seen multiple PowerPoints with this term. Lots of (mostly) younger workers at the company who know what it means are making fun of it. They keep saying at meetings that it is their favorite strategy yet and they want to get t-shirts for it.
Some of her other colleagues want to speak up, but are worried to say anything because this director is known to take feedback poorly. Also, my sister doesn’t believe the director’s colleagues, who are mostly older, even know what it means.
She just found out that the term might be presented at the company’s other offices nationwide. Should she say anything? On the one hand, it could make her division look bad, but clearly there are communication issues at the company given that the hundreds of people in her division and office are too scared to mention it.
In normal circumstances, yes, someone should speak up! In fact, someone should have spoken up as soon as it was clear that the term was being used. It wouldn’t need to be a big deal — just “that term has a highly X-rated meaning — we should find another name.”
Even with a director who takes feedback badly, I’d still advise speaking up! “This term has another meaning that we should be aware of” isn’t particularly challenging feedback, and even people who take feedback badly would generally appreciate knowing. But if the director has cultivated an environment of so much fear that no one is willing to do it … well, that’s what happens when you manage by fear: you lose access to important information when people suspect they’ll suffer for sharing it. If that’s the case, though, then your sister’s coworkers should stop making fun of the name, proposing t-shirts, etc. — because if at some point the director figures out that they all knew, that’s likely to be a problem too.
My sister has a conundrum I would love your take on. The director of her division has recently revealed its priorities for 2022, and one is to enact a new pricing strategy.
The division director has named this strategy “soft pegging.” My sister has now seen multiple PowerPoints with this term. Lots of (mostly) younger workers at the company who know what it means are making fun of it. They keep saying at meetings that it is their favorite strategy yet and they want to get t-shirts for it.
Some of her other colleagues want to speak up, but are worried to say anything because this director is known to take feedback poorly. Also, my sister doesn’t believe the director’s colleagues, who are mostly older, even know what it means.
She just found out that the term might be presented at the company’s other offices nationwide. Should she say anything? On the one hand, it could make her division look bad, but clearly there are communication issues at the company given that the hundreds of people in her division and office are too scared to mention it.
In normal circumstances, yes, someone should speak up! In fact, someone should have spoken up as soon as it was clear that the term was being used. It wouldn’t need to be a big deal — just “that term has a highly X-rated meaning — we should find another name.”
Even with a director who takes feedback badly, I’d still advise speaking up! “This term has another meaning that we should be aware of” isn’t particularly challenging feedback, and even people who take feedback badly would generally appreciate knowing. But if the director has cultivated an environment of so much fear that no one is willing to do it … well, that’s what happens when you manage by fear: you lose access to important information when people suspect they’ll suffer for sharing it. If that’s the case, though, then your sister’s coworkers should stop making fun of the name, proposing t-shirts, etc. — because if at some point the director figures out that they all knew, that’s likely to be a problem too.
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That said, it doesn't have to be a person.
I would make a QR code that links to google.com?search="soft pegging" (or whatever the links is for 'how do you google that') and post it to the director with a printed letter that says, "You should probably learn what that term means before you go nation-wide with it." If they think it's worth it to deflect attention from any one person, perhaps point out that the environment of fear means nobody has spoken up about it. That way director gets informed but doesn't have a specific target to pick on.
But, yeah, if the director figures out that they knew and didn't tell him, then they're going to be in deep shit. Even if he's cultivated a workplace of fear - actually, especially because he's cultivated a fear of offending him - then the shit is most definitely going to hit the fan.
true story
At my first professional job, my company was doing brokerage services for a company that specialized in financial services for queer people. Our division president insisted my team get the 1-800 and 1-877 numbers for any number of related terms, such as 1-800-GAY-CASH. He didn't listen when we assured him that literally no toll free numbers beginning with GAY were going to be available, nor were they a good idea. He got angrier and angrier as it turned out none of the numbers were available.
We broke when he insisted we look for 1-800-GAY-TRADE. That's when the most flamboyant man in the department went to explain to him, in detail, what the phrase would indicate.
He stopped asking for the numbers after that.
Re: true story
Re: true story
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Very soon thereafter, someone used "tea bag" in an internal document. I don't know what the exact context was, but there were many sarcastic comments about how they might've known better if only the web searches could return *all* the results.
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ETA Reading the discussion -- it's also a finance term, so the supervisor didn't get it from nowhere.
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Oh definitely. It's still not the right term to use for a proposal given to mostly non finance people.