The Way We Talk Around Here

Auteur

Since 2002 Gill Ereaut has pioneered the commercial application of language analysis to tough organizational challenges. Leading the UK-based consultancy Linguistic Landscapes, she focused on the vexed question of how to define and diagnose corporate cultures so they can be understood, managed and helped to evolve.
Throughout her first career in market research, Gill became curious about how organizations talk and why it might matter. Each client company's shared language seemed to sustain a powerful internal world view - one often at odds with that of their customers, but strangely resistant to new information. She wanted to make these internal organizational worlds explicit and conscious, to reduce their obstructive effects.
This led her to discourse analysis and, over 20 years, she developed commercial processes to apply these academic ideas and tools to common business problems. She works with organizations across the UK, Europe and North America including British Airways, HMRC, American Express, NHS, Roche, British Red Cross, Oxfam GB and GlaxoSmithKline.

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GILL EREAUT

The unspoken rules and unquestioned assumptions that make up an organization's culture are so well hidden that, once we become insiders, we stop noticing them. They're just 'the way we do things around here'. But shared internal language - 'the way we talk around here' - both reflects and sustains the unconscious patterns of thought, behaviour and interaction that add up to culture. So examining an organization's language is a powerful and pragmatic way to shed light on its culture.

Gill Ereaut describes how to uncover organizational and team cultures through paying close attention to the language used by insiders. Discover:

• How and why an organization's internal language can point to the silent assumptions that underpin its culture

• How to use language patterns to identify unconscious rules and norms, often rooted in the past, so people can work out which still serve the organization well, and which don't

• Practical tools to help everyone reshape unhelpful shared habits of thinking, and generate effective, continuous and positive change.

If you're responsible for guiding an organizational or team culture - or if you're trying to thrive within one - find out how listening to language can help you map, understand and even inspire change within that culture.

Gill Ereaut is the founder of the consultancy Linguistic Landscapes, pioneering the commercial application of language analysis to organizational challenges. She lives in Oxford, UK.

Résumé
A powerful and practical way to uncover an organization's culture through the language it uses.