Should Leaders Swear in the Workplace?

When I want it to stick, I give it to them loud and dirty.

–Gen. George S. Patton, WW II Commander

About once a year this topic comes up in a consulting gig.  Still, I
was intrigued to see Harvard’s Dan McGinn address the issue under the
title, Do
good leaders swear
?  What initiated his blog was Obama’s comment to
NBC’s Matt Lauer on the Today Show that he “intended to kick some ass”
regarding the oil spill.  As expletives go, it was pretty mild.  I
thought it was a response to the pundits’ cry that Obama should get more
emotional about his feelings.  But as McGinn notes, presidents don’t
normally use an expletive in formal interviews.  Presidents have long
been known to use expletives in private.  JFK and LBJ were profligates,
in private. 

Actually, Obama’s use of the term appeared deliberate, an attempt to
use profane language to connect with voter’s anger.  

With my background as a rhetorician, I’ve become aware of how profane
language “works.”  Note, that I used the term “works.”   Rhetoric is
the study of how language works to achieve its objectives.  As a former
Christian minister, I also bring a unique context to the issue.  For me,
however, the purpose of language is to connect and identify with others
in order to achieve my objectives.  Those objectives may be to inform
or persuade.  And I look at cursing through those lens. 

Language to me is always instrumental and not magical.  Some,
however, take a more magical perspective on language.  When, for
example, they read in the bible that one should not use the “Lord’s name
in vain,” they’d take that literally.  Orthodox members of religion
usually take some language and images magically.  But they’re not the
only ones.  On one occasion my advisor for my Masters, a specialist in
oral interpretation,  and I got into a conversation relating to the use
of various versions of the bible in the church setting.  She was not at
all a church-goer or even religious.  This would have been in the ’60s,
and though my church was evangelical, I did not normally use the King
James, but rather preferred a more contemporary version in everyday
language.  But, she suggested, the King James has such beautiful
language.  It’s magical.  That’s precisely why I don’t want to use it, I
said.  It doesn’t connect with today’s world.  Although the Semitic
world is far more versed in cussing, that language was omitted from both
the Hebrew and Greek translations found in the King James.  The apostle
Paul, for example, almost compulsively makes his points with the use of
rhetorical questions and then an equivalent answer of “hell, no”
throughout his epistles.  Yet that language never appears in English
translation.  In each instance, Paul uses the expletive to forcefully
drive home his agenda.

My approach to expletives or cussing flows out of that background. 
Cussing has a number of useful functions, and I believe it is quite
appropriate within certain contexts.  But cussing is instrumental, not
magical.

First of all, the constant use of expletives that we see in the
movies causes them to lose their usefulness.  You can only listen to
“f____ you” so many times without it becoming meaningless and tiring.

Cussing can be used as an initiatory rite.  Dan McGinn’s blog gives a
hilarious example of such use.  In
the most memorable scene of any academic paper I’ve read lately,
(Stuart) Jenkins, after working in the packing department for a couple
of months, uses nuclear-grade profanities to challenge an alpha-male
co-worker, a guy named Ernest: “Well f—–g get on with it then, you
lazy —-.” Other workers gasped, but in fact, the incident led Jenkins
to be invited to join group activities from which he’d previously been
excluded. “[Jenkins] had identified the profane linguistic ‘initiation
rite’ for inclusion in the packers’ social group, and used it
successfully,” the authors concluded.

On numerous occasions I’ve used
cussing for similar constructive purposes with new clients.  Clients
with no personal experience of me, knowing from colleagues that I have a
ministerial background, wonder about how to treat me.  One client,
having gotten my name from an outside consultant, put his cards on the
table in the first few minutes of our face-to-face meeting.  He
indicated that he was feeling a bit oppressed by the culture, that he
had saved some “f___ you” money, and wondered about the extent to which
my ethics would apply to working with him.  I proceeded to use an
expletive early on, a strategy which immediately and obviously bonded
him to me.  As a result I consulted not only with him, but with nearly
all the execs in the firm, a project that netted more than six years of
work.  In other words, social swearing in a professional context
can convey confidence and an immunity to what people think, and in
return, people are attracted to those qualities in a leader.  Did the
ends justify the means?  Yep.

Still on other occasions,
cussing is used not only to bring focus to issues, but also to identify
issues of value.  In a previous blog, I commented that one of my
favorite clients understands my occasional use of ordinary language as
cussing.  In a team setting, he once made what I viewed as a stupid-ass
suggestion, to which I  commented, “that’s an intriguing notion.” 
Understanding my term “intriguing” as an expletive, he came right back
with, “so you think I’m full of shit.  Explain your reasoning.”  The
team howled with laughter and I proceeded to answer his request.  I’d
argue that in some settings you have to use an expletive to gain
attention or to get people to think.

My wife would say that I can be
thick-skulled, and have to be hit hard with language to get the
importance of some issues.  Indeed, I have only one memory of her use of
an expletive in more than 50 years of marriage.  A use so shocking,
that I immediately got her point.  Twenty-five years ago, when I finally
decided to leave teaching to go into business, I muddled around with
that idea a long time before making a decision.  Sitting on the couch
one evening, I said that I’d finally decided to leave the seminary and
go into business for myself.  Her response?  “It sure as hell took you a
long time to make a damned obvious decision.”  Two expletives in one
sentence, and years later, I’ve not forgotten the import of her
statement.  She got my attention.

It should be obvious from the
above that swearing is context specific and works well only when you
know and understand your audience.  You can misevaluate your audience,
but I’ve found that there are occasions when the most appropriate and
intelligent action is use swearing precisely because you know your
audience will disapprove and you know you’ll be able to gain and keep
their attention.  It’s a calculated action because some audiences so
strongly disapprove of swearing (a common middle class allergy) that
they can’t think after you do it on them.

Research by Baruch and Jenkins,
mentioned above, groups profanity into two types:  “social swearing”
that’s used in casual conversation and “annoyance swearing,” the “Oh
s–t” that surfaces in stress environments.  When I’m frustrated by some
actions in private, I typically cuss.  I’ve found “nuts” inadequate for
my feelings of frustration and much prefer “s—t.”  However, I’ve also
found it absolutely fascinating how my Kentucky, Methodist grandmother
expressed her affection of me after I committed a humorous, smart alecky
action.  Typically, and with a big smile, she’d say, “You little
shit.”  It was clearly a term of endearment.  Yet, I never remember her
“cussing” and using that term. It was obviously not a magical swear
word.

I should also say that I do not
swear around my grandchildren, although I have a high school freshman
now.  In a couple situations where I’ve alluded to a cuss word, I
noticed that he really got it and smiled, maybe snickered at me.  One
client in marketing research, a well-educated single mom (PhD in
psychology) once asked me how to stop her junior high boys from
swearing.  Their teacher had called her about the problem.  I suggested
that she reframe the issue, and have a conversation about when/where it
was OK to swear, and when/where swearing would get you into trouble. 
She loved it!  I learned later that her boys paid close attention to
that conversation and followed her recommendation. 

I’d thought about Obama’s
cussing for several days and thought I should write about it, suggesting
that it might be viewed as a form of pandering, but wasn’t quite
certain how I wanted to go about it.  A big thanks to Dan McGinn and his
blog for a few suggestions.  Actually, I’ve thought for years about how
swearing really works, what it sounds like, and how our expletives,
beginning with the letters a, s, f, b are only the tip of the iceberg. 
Organizations such as churches, synagogues, political parties, and
non-profits do a lot of swearing at the their opposition.  They just
don’t use expletives.  The Old Testament writers could be pretty pointed
with their cursing.  In one of the Psalsms, the writer addressing an
oppressor affirms, “Happy be those who take your little ones (your
little bastards) and dashes them against the rock.”

I’m curious.  Is it appropriate
to using swearing as a bonding or motivating device?  Do smart managers
use cussing as a tool?  What do you think?

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