One Million words in English. That is, One Million words avaialble to those who speak English. The most of any language.
This week as I spoke at the Nebraska State SHRM conference, this was hammered home. I was there to help explain the gap between CFOs and HR. The overflow crowd came to hear some strategies for getting things done. I started by defining the world of the CFO, and we outlined the reasons that CFOs don’t trust us.
They don’t like HR’s metrics.
They don’t understand our terms of engagement
They don’t value our contribution. More exactly, they don’t feel that we can add value in any particular 90 day period.
We worked on a few key terms. Accountability. EBITDA.
You see? Another language.
Using the new ideas, we then worked on developing a more robust turnover cost calculator. We also agreed that we needed better language.
Question – anyone care to share te language they use to get on the same page as their CFOs?
Karl Ahlrichs' Uncommon Experience 
CFO’s also want to understand ROI, sometimes to even a ridiculous level. If you are not prepared to discribe what the company will get from the investment of resources, and why that is better than the present alternative, don’t schedule the meeting until you can.
The also hate intangibles (if they can’t account for it, and don’t know where to put it, it must not be real). Unfortunately HR deals in a lot of intangibles.
I used the story of the USC Band on one. They are huge and have a big sound; always have. They are the only college band that issues sunglasses as standard equipment. They are loud, proud, and intimidating (they go to all road games and often play over the home team;s band). Pete Carrill, coach of the Trojans, meets with the band a minimum of 4 times during the season to implore them to be part of the team and influence the outcome of the game in favor of USC. Not a one of them plays on the field, makes a tackle, or scores, yet they factor in the outcome. You won’t find a college coach who opposes USC tell you anything different.
Just because you can’t account for it does not mean it is not real and does not have impact.
I got to thinking the other day about how much time could be saved if we just got out of the way of each other. It seems as we get older the more we value our own opinions due to life experiences/memory and draw less and less from new experiences. The same is true for organizations. Most well run companies like to employ a diverse set of people with different backgrounds to get differnt perspectives on ideas. What gets lost in this is the stereotypical attitude we hold toward one another within our personal lives, not the position we hold within the company. There is a big displacement between your role in life and your role with the company. Most people (including me) like to feel like their opinions/ideas are valuable, the only problem with this is that if the audience/department I’m speaking to does not, my “good idea” goes to the wayside. The biggest caveat with this is that if I were someone else presenting the same ideas only in a “more effective” way conveying the same message my ideas could be looked at as valuable. I think we should condense down the vocabulary within an organization to about 20-30 words so that our communication efforts could be streamlined and more effective… haha… wishful thinking.