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Managementese

4 min readStatus:Seedling

What It Is

Managementese is the specialised vocabulary that managers develop through cross-functional coordination, executive-level interface, and sustained exposure to organisational context that individual contributors (ICs) rarely access. The dialect includes terms like “action items,” “bandwidth,” “circle back,” “leverage,” “move the needle,” “low-hanging fruit,” and “take this offline.”

Michael Lopp identifies Managementese in Managing Humans - Lopp - 2019 (Chapter 13) as simultaneously a legitimate productivity tool and a social risk — its value depends entirely on audience register.

The Legitimate Function

Between managers who share equivalent organisational visibility, Managementese is efficient shorthand. When a VP says “let’s align on bandwidth before we socialise this,” every other manager in the room decodes this precisely and quickly. The shared vocabulary compresses context that would otherwise require extensive unpacking.

Weirup and Taylor (2024) frame this as a “jargon literacy” phenomenon: specialised terminology enables high-bandwidth communication within communities of practice where the terms carry precise, shared meaning. The problem is not the language itself — it is the assumption that the audience shares the register.

The Downward Problem

When managers direct Managementese at ICs who lack the organisational context to decode it, three compounding problems emerge:

  • Processing impairment: Experimental evidence (Bullock & Bisbey, 2025) shows jargon reduces processing fluency and self-efficacy — employees become less confident in their own ability to execute, and less likely to seek clarification or share information
  • In-group signalling: Specialised language enacts an involuntary boundary between manager (in-group) and IC (out-group), creating distance rather than collaboration (Suzuki, 1998)
  • Trust erosion: Supervisory communication that prioritises empathy and clarity drives significantly higher employee trust than direction-giving language (Men, Qin & Jin, 2022); opacity undermines the relationship that makes management communication effective

Lopp’s diagnosis is direct: managers who speak Managementese to engineers have forgotten what it means to be one.

Status and Identity Signals

Brown, Anicich & Galinsky (2020) found through nine studies that low-status individuals use more jargon as compensatory status signalling — they adopt the language of the role before they have internalised its substance. New managers often unconsciously overuse Managementese as identity adoption, trying on the vocabulary of the new role. Counterintuitively, secure and senior leaders tend to use less jargon and prioritise clarity.

The Skill: Code-Switching with Intent

The competence is not eliminating Managementese — it is conscious register selection:

  • Peer settings: Managementese appropriate; shared context enables efficiency
  • IC-facing settings (1:1s, team meetings, written updates): Translate to plain language
  • Translation test: Can you restate the key message without any specialised terms? If not, the message may lack substance beyond its vocabulary

The audit question: “Would a new hire understand this without organisational context?” If the answer is no, translate before speaking.

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4. Available: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-3713-1

    • Chapter 13: “Managementese” — primary source for the concept, its dual function, and the downward-use problem

  • Brown, Zachariah C., Anicich, Eric M., and Galinsky, Adam D. (2020). “Compensatory conspicuous communication: Low status increases jargon use.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 161, pp. 274-290. DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.07.001. Available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597820303666

    • Nine-study programme (including 64,000 dissertations) establishing causal link between status insecurity and jargon use; secure high-status actors use less jargon

  • Bullock, Olivia M. and Bisbey, Tiffany (2025). “Jargon in the Workplace Reduces Processing Fluency, Self-Efficacy, and Information Seeking and Sharing.” International Journal of Business Communication. DOI: 10.1177/23294884251364525. Available: https://doi.org/10.1177/23294884251364525

    • Experimental study (1,826 participants) demonstrating jargon suppresses self-efficacy and information-seeking; direct empirical evidence of the downward-use cost

  • Suzuki, Shinobu (1998). “In-Group and Out-Group Communication Patterns in International Organizations.” Communication Research, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 154-182. DOI: 10.1177/009365098025002002. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/009365098025002002

    • Establishes social identity theory basis for in-group language as boundary-enacting mechanism; explains why jargon “feels” like a power signal regardless of intent

  • Men, Linjuan Rita, Qin, Yufan Sunny, and Jin, Jie (2022). “Fostering Employee Trust via Effective Supervisory Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” International Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 193-218. DOI: 10.1177/23294884211020491. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23294884211020491

    • Empirical evidence that empathetic supervisory language drives employee trust (β=.53); direction-giving language alone has weak trust effects; establishes the trust-erosion mechanism of opaque communication

  • Weirup, Amanda and Taylor, Phylicia (2024). “What Do You Mean? Developing Jargon Literacy for the Workplace.” Management Teaching Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 95-106. DOI: 10.1177/23792981241266465. Available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/23792981241266465

    • Introduces “jargon literacy” — the ability to recognise, deploy, and translate specialised terminology; frames code-switching between registers as a teachable managerial competence

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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