How Inclusive Language Skills Impact Your Brand with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim
Episodes You Might Also Like
Featured
Description
A single word can carry a lot of weight. In an increasingly diverse world, we need experts like Dr. Suzanne Wertheim who know how to navigate inclusive language in ways that can promote connections and get past resistance.
Suzanne is a linguistic anthropologist and author of The Inclusive Language Field Guide, which outlines six principles to help you avoid painful and sometimes costly communication mistakes. She emphasizes the role of science-based approaches by applying linguistic anthropology to modern, real-world communication problems.
In this episode of the Branding Room Only podcast, you’ll hear about the significance of empathy and accountability in communication and how problematic language affects individuals, companies, and brands. Suzanne will give real examples of the consequences of using exclusive language and mitigating the impact when you communicate in an insensitive fashion.
Chapters
00:55 - The role of alignment in personal branding and why Suzanne uses the words curious, educational, and perfectionist to describe herself
4:41 - Suzanne’s favorite quote that emphasizes the contradiction and complexity of human nature, songs that hype her up, and the silver lining gift the world gained from the African diaspora
10:37 - How Suzanne grew up with a very New York City orientation (and still has a lot of it in her) despite living in California for about as long
15:23 - Why Suzanne left tech, became interested in linguistic anthropology, and decided to branch away from professorship and out into the world
19:50 - How Suzanne sneaks under other people’s resistance radar
23:08 - How Suzanne became a national expert on inclusive language and the empathy deficit that leads to resistance
30:47 - What drove Suzanne to write the Inclusive Language Field Guide
35:35 - How Kellogg’s CEO damaged his brand with insensitive comments and the two words that tanked a $4 million sale
39:55 - How a multi-million dollar sale was saved thanks to an apology and recognition of exclusive language impact
44:04 - How inclusive language is like a design challenge and intersects with communication and understanding cultural differences
54:12 - How Suzanne incorporates animals into her branding for fun, why she’ll always bring the social science, her surprising Branding Room Only attribute
Connect With Dr. Suzanne Wertheim
After getting her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Berkeley, Dr. Wertheim held faculty positions at Northwestern, University of Maryland, and UCLA. In 2011, she left the university system to apply her expertise to real-world problems.
Dr. Wertheim has done fieldwork with speakers as diverse as Tatar nationalists in the former Soviet Union, Native Americans in central California, comedians in Los Angeles, and female engineers of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. She now runs Worthwhile Research & Consulting, which specializes in analyzing and addressing bias at work.
At Worthwhile, Dr. Wertheim offers keynotes and workshops based on her original research. She also leads both short-term and long-term consulting engagements. Her clients have included tech giants such as Google and Reddit, financial companies such as Charles Schwab, and national news organizations such as News Nation.
Suzanne Wertheim, PhD | LinkedIn
Worthwhile Research & Consulting
Mentioned In How Inclusive Language Skills Impact Your Brand with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim
Inclusive Language Field Guide: 6 Simple Principles for Avoiding Painful Mistakes and Communicating Respectfully by Suzanne Wertheim, PhD
Subscribe to The Branding Room Only on YouTube
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.
PGE Consulting Group LLC is dedicated to providing a practical hybrid of professional development training and diversity solutions. From speaking to consulting to programming and more, all services and resources are carefully tailored for each partner. Paula Edgar’s distinct expertise helps engage attendees and create lasting change for her clients.
To learn more about Paula and her services, go to www.paulaedgar.com or contact her at info@paulaedgar.com, and follow Paula Edgar and the PGE Consulting Group LLC on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Paula Edgar: Welcome to The Branding Room Only Podcast where we share career stories, strategies, and lessons learned on how industry leaders and influencers have built their personal brands. Now, let's get started with the show.
Hi, everybody, it's Paula Edgar, your host of Branding Room Only. Very excited for today's conversation with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, who is the author of the Inclusive Language Field Guide.
She's a national expert on inclusive language, and she also applies the science of linguistic anthropology to real-world problems and specializes in the ways that problematic language costs companies, clients, talent, and money. Dr. Wertheim, welcome to the Branding Room.
Suzanne Wertheim: I am so excited to be here in conversation with you today. Thank you so much for having me here.
Paula Edgar: Of course. All right, so let's rock and roll. What does a personal brand mean to you? How do you define it?
Suzanne Wertheim: I was thinking about personal branding before this conversation, obviously, and I realized that for me, it's a lot about alignment. How do you present an image to the world that's in alignment with your, I would say, best characteristics and your best values?
I realized that one reason I'm thinking about alignment for personal brand is because I'm thinking about alignment with inclusive language all the time. In my work on inclusive language, I'm saying to people, “You have good intentions. Is your language reflecting those good intentions out into the world the way you wanted to?” I feel like the same thing can be applied for personal brand too.
Paula Edgar: Oh, fantastic. Absolutely. I love the concept of alignment because I think it really requires us to do that consistently aligning. Same thing you have to do with language, like thinking about how it iterates, et cetera. Love that. Tell me, describe yourself in three words or short phrases.
Suzanne Wertheim: It's hard to do just three. I'm sure everybody says that, right? I would say curious, educational, and perfectionist. Curious is that there's so much out there in the world, it's so easy to fall down the rabbit hole.
Now with the internet, I grew up without the internet. Now I feel like there's so much at my fingertips. I started professoring before YouTube. So if I wanted to show a clip of a movie to my class, I would have to go to like the AV room at Northwestern and get a VHS and get help from a person clipping it.
Now for me, the amount that's out there that I can learn about, I'm like, “Volcanoes have lightning? What's happening?” I feel like there's always so much in the world or another thing is just if I leave my house, here's the other thing, the internet isn't everything, so if I just leave my house, I'm so much more open to something interesting that's going to happen.
You're in a major metro region, I'm in a major metro region. I'm outside of San Francisco. So there's always something weird and interesting happening. Educational, I think is because I can't stand it if I know something that I think is useful and other people don't know it, it really bothers me.
I'm like, “Why am I the only one?” I had the luxury of getting a PhD. A lot of people don't have that. I'm not saying it was a luxurious life making the $12,000 a year in Berkeley, I made no money. But I had the luxury of devoting so much time and energy into learning so much.
One reason I left academia is I felt like I couldn't educate enough people, a lot of the stuff that was so useful, that my students were emailing me years later, “Well, I'm in Italy, and I've been thinking about Bakhtinian heteroglossia,” I'm like, “You're thinking about what? You remember that from four years ago?”
So I knew stuff was still sticking with people. So I decided I needed to reach even more people. Then perfectionist, I don't think needs an explanation. My self-care, a lot of my current self-care is how do I let go? What do I let go of? How can I say we're over the threshold and it's good enough? And not push, push, push, push.
Paula Edgar: Welcome to my therapy session.
Suzanne Wertheim: Mine too, my friend, mine too.
Paula Edgar: As you were mentioning before, child of immigrants, that'll do it for you.
Suzanne Wertheim: I mean, I'm grandchild of immigrants, but that through line is, I mean, we came here, you do better. You also have higher degrees and it's like, get the degree, get that certification, get that thing, show the world you know your stuff, because we're used to people not treating us so great, which is why we left and came here.
Paula Edgar: Exactly, exactly that. All right, tell me, do you have a favorite quote or mantra?
Suzanne Wertheim: Not a mantra, in fact, this is going to sound so snarky. You know, it's funny. Snarky is not my brand that makes it out to the world, but my personal brand for people who really know me, I'm such a sarcastic snarky comedy person.
I wrote my honors thesis a thousand years ago on Oscar Wilde and a lot of his stuff still sticks with me and the one that comes to mind right away is “Only the shallow know themselves.”
It's a pretty harsh critique of people. Basically, I think there are a lot of people out there who are super confident and they say so much stuff and they don't recognize or they don't want to recognize all the contradictions that live in themselves and all the human complexity that's really there.
So there's this way of saying, he's like, “Maybe let's not trust people who are super confident in telling you, I know everything about myself, I know everything about the world.” Because just by the fact of saying that, they're telling you that they don't have space to embrace all that's interesting, nuanced, and complex that's really out there in the world.
Paula Edgar: Wow, I love the breakdown of it because I think also thinking about just the words on their face, you can take it a lot of different ways too.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, hell yeah, that's why his stuff is so sneaky. A lot of his stuff looks like it's just funny. Then when you look and you're like, “Oh, this is hardcore social critique of pretentious and uptight people.”
Paula Edgar: Like you're talking about us. Hmm.
Suzanne Wertheim: Exactly, yeah, this whole play that I wrote my honor thesis on, the people are like, “Oh, a frothy delight. It has no reflection of the world.” I'm like, “This is 100% a skewering of Victorian morality, homophobia, uptight, it's like pretension, hypocrisy.” It was in their faces and they didn't get it. Honestly, I love that for him.
Paula Edgar: It sounds Shakespearean almost. I remember when I first started understand Shakespeare, I was like, "Wait, that's what that means? Oh, is that what he's saying?" So yes, I would agree.
All right, so what is your hype song? The hype song, in my mind, is one of two things or both. It's when they're going to get full Dr. Wertheim, what song is playing in your head, or if you're having a bad day, what song do you need to pick you up and it could be the same or different songs?
Suzanne Wertheim: I think that less in my head, although it's in my head right now because I played it before this podcast is, and this is one I think might surprise some people, it doesn't seem perfectly on brand, but there's this song from the early 90s that's a collab from Anthrax, the thrash metal band, and Public Enemy called Bring the Noise.
Very masculine. It's a very masculine song. But when I feel like I need to go and bring it, especially if I'm a little low, that song always hypes me up. When I think about it, I think it's a lot about two groups who were very pigeonholed and didn't feel amplified by the people who should amplify them. So they reached a bigger audience.
I don't know. I love that song. But honestly, because Chuck D is so good, the flow is so good, the guitars are so good. I really love that song. I mean, the other one is more obvious. It's just Prince Let's Go Crazy. It could be almost anything from the Purple Rain.
Paula Edgar: Are we best friends?
Suzanne Wertheim: I mean, like anything. A lot of people get asked, I don't think you're going to ask me this, but like, “What's your first concert?” It's always so embarrassing. I wasn't really allowed to go out and do that much, but my first concert is Purple Rain because you could suddenly be under 18 and go see Prince.
That's my first concert. I'm always like, “No embarrassment. One of the best shows of my whole life happened to be the first show I ever saw.” So almost anything from that.
Paula Edgar: You don't know this about me, but I'm a huge Prince fan.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, my God.
Paula Edgar: I saw him perform, I danced on stage with him.
Suzanne Wertheim: You what?
Paula Edgar: I danced on the stage with him and I got to see when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I'm like a huge Prince fan. As soon as you said Prince, I was like, “Ah!” So yes, we are aligned in that. I'm a big fan of Purple Rain and I'm a big fan of Sign o' the Times. I'm a big fan of Prince period. But, yes, you hit my love language when you talk about Prince.
Suzanne Wertheim: That man is like the Mozart of modern music. It's just everything. Sheila E is somewhere in Oakland. I know she's in my neighborhood or she's around. So I'm always just like, “Where's Sheila E at?” She thinks people won't recognize her and they totally do.
Paula Edgar: Waiting for the drums, just listen for the drums.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, man, man. I have to say, I feel very bad about the African diaspora in almost every way. It's so bad for so many people of African descent. But the gift of music to the world, I'm not saying it makes up for the many centuries of horrific treatment and extraction, whatever, but there's nothing that compares to what people of African descent have brought to the world stage of music. Nothing compares.
Paula Edgar: Agreed. One of the things that I love about music is that there are so many things in the world that separate us but a good drum beat can bring you together in so many ways and having been to lots of different countries and understood that dance and sound brings us together.
I think to your point, because of the spread of Africans in the diaspora, it's a lot of that, but music for me, it's why I asked this question, because one, I think music brings us all together, if somebody is going to be like, “Oh, my gosh, of course, I love that collab between Public Enemy…” it takes away some of the barriers that we have. Love that.
Well, tell me this, where did you grow up and how did it shape your brand?
Suzanne Wertheim: So I'm loving hearing your accent. When I grew up, I actually grew up talking like this on Long Island. I know you're in Brooklyn and my dad was from Brooklyn. I grew up with it.
I grew up in New York. Long Island can be pretty behind the times. I grew up like, I want to say 40 miles out from Manhattan in a county called Suffolk County, I grew up with people who had never been in New York City by the time of our high school graduation.
There were definitely people who had never been to Manhattan at all. If I was willing to walk far, which I wasn't, I could walk to the train station and just take the train in. I grew up more than a lot of people with a very New York City orientation.
I was gestated in Spanish Harlem. My mom was a teacher in Spanish Harlem. I think the smell of Arroz Con Pollo just went through the uterine membrane.
Paula Edgar: Lunch time.
Suzanne Wertheim: Exactly. I mean, it made her throw up every day. But for me, I'm like, “Damn, Arroz Con Pollo.” I feel like even though I've lived in California no longer than I lived in New York, so I was here for grad school, and then I came back and I taught at UCLA. I was in LA for eight years. Now I've been back in Oakland for nine years. But those are some formative years. There are ways that you just will never take a lot of that New York out of me.
Paula Edgar: It's so true. I think the essence of being a New Yorker has so many things in it, resilience, diversity, and adversity, all of these things that go into your understanding of the world, no matter where you are, it's ingrained in your spirit and your blood really. Yes.
Suzanne Wertheim: I would add to that, I think that makes a lot of people at California think I'm a weirdo, is talking to strangers. I used to have two bus stops, after my car was stolen in Oakland, that's an Oakland story, my car was stolen when I was dissertating and so when I would go to campus, I would take two buses.
The first bus was in a mixed neighborhood which had a lot of Black folk at it, the second bus was in a white neighborhood. There's a lot of overlap between New Yorker ways like, “Oh, here's a stranger, I'm going to talk to them,” and African-American ways.
You greet somebody, you look them in the eye, you say have a good day now, there's a lot in common. When I carried over bus stop one to bus stop two, the white folk would look at me, [inaudible] like East Asian folk would look at me like I was cray-cray. They're like, “Why is this weirdo talking to me?”
What was normal literally at one bus stop wasn't normal, but there are a lot of ways that there's that. If you're just waiting in a long supermarket line, you just start chatting with people.
I think that helps in my work because I'm always learning things about people because I'm normal to talk to someone you don't know.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, as I'm thinking about, because I lived in California for a little while in Southern California in Orange County, which is not very diverse.
Suzanne Wertheim: It is, my friend, that is not diverse.
Paula Edgar: I know. I'm being kind, but it's not very diverse, but other than the failed relationship that I was in, it was a fantastic time for me to learn about people who are different than me.
I didn't bring that New York lens and talking to everybody, but it's transient because everybody's in a car. I didn't take a bus, but if I would have taken the bus, it would have been a whole different experience. I was there and I went to college at Cal State, studying anthropology.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, cool.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. We have that. We have that in common, although not linguistics. That was not my jam.
Suzanne Wertheim: Anthropology is big. Anthropology is big. But it's all about, your work and my work and the law and anthropology are all about, how do you find the patterns? Once you find the pattern, how do you use it to push people in the direction that they should be pushed in, whether it's through legal recourse or whether it's through making suggestions, like, “Hey, I don't think you see this pattern that I see because of my training. How can I help you see this pattern?” So you're like, “This pattern is not serving me.”
Paula Edgar: Yes, no, I studied in specific museum anthropology, which was fascinating. It was fascinating because I've always loved museums. My parents were big museum folks, but it really was about how people experience museums, not just the exhibits, but how they interact with them and really to help people to build it. It was really fascinating to, to your point, folks do do things and it is culture and how we are trained to ingest information, etc.
It definitely helped me in my role as a DEI consultant and doing personal development because I see people and what makes them resonate and connect. Awesome. Okay, we know where you grew up. Tell me about your career journey.
Suzanne Wertheim: I graduated with student debt, like me, people. It was not the student debt of millennials. I'm Gen X, but it was student debt. I went to school with a lot of rich people, and then you could tell who was rich and who wasn't as you were getting close to graduation.
People were like, "Oh, I'm going to go to Marseille and I'm going to help my aunt out in her antique store." I'm like, "Oh, I have to pay off student debt." I ended up in fintech, that's who was hiring. I graduated in a recession, but fintech was hiring, so I started out as a sales and marketing assistant, and then I became a tech writer.
The longer I was in tech, and it's not fintech specific, the more I felt like there was no place for me there. No one was cultivating me, and there was so much condescension, so for people just listening, I am ambiguously ethnic looking.
No one can tell even if you're seeing me. I'm very, very short. I've got a tan skin and dark hair and dark eyes and people are always guessing what I am. I'm not even going to tell you what I am, but I look like a Latina or like some kind of lady of color, short and a baby face and people just were so rude.
They were so condescending to me. After a while, I was like, “What is technical writing doing for me?” It feels like I'm hyping up other people, but my brain is too good for this. So I left. I just couldn't handle all the bias.
I left and I went to grad school here in Berkeley. That was the East Coast, Boston. I moved to Berkeley, went to grad school. Then I did that very common academic thing where you move from place to place.
By the way, I started grad school thinking I was going to look at language acquisition, how does the brain acquire language. But then the questions I was interested in, let me back up into linguistic anthropology. I was trying to solve these grammar questions.
Why when you have a minority language and a dominant language—and that dominant language is the language of oppressors, like really this is in Russia, like genuinely oppressive—why does the minority language change its grammatical structure and the majority language doesn't?
The only answer to the grammar was social context. What's the big political context? What's happening in institutions? What's happening with people when they talk one-on-one? So I backed into my field. Then I went and I taught at Northwestern. Then I was at University of Maryland doing research for government clients.
Then I was at UCLA. I left for a few reasons. I had started consulting because I wanted to buy a house and professor money wasn't enough. So I was doing some consulting work on the side for local tech in LA.
I kept on hearing things from women in tech. I'm like, “It's worse than when I left it's worse.” I've been away. It's worse. So I was like, “Uh-oh. I better do something. It's my job to do something.”
Then the other thing was I've been at all these elite institutions, and it felt upsetting that I had this knowledge that was so useful, and it was only being allowed to be given—just because of how the world is—to students at elite institutions and only if they happen to take my class.
But I knew that it was lasting with people because people would take my one intro class of 300 people and email me three years later, they're like, “There's this guy on my team and he's so annoying. I realized I can use your hierarchies and boundaries analysis. He's pretending like he's above me and he's at the center and I'm in the margins,” and I'm like, “Oh, I better take this out to the world.”
In 2011, I left UCLA and I founded Worthwhile Research & Consulting. Mission statement in the name, I don't want to do janky consulting for people doing bad stuff. I'm interested only in things that shift the world to a better place.
I was doing research for a while. I was subcontracted to USC and I was doing research. I was getting my money through government-funded research projects, which is cool. Then that got canceled prematurely because of politics and the funding agency. Then I was like, “I'm just going to full-time DEI it because I can take the stuff that I've been applying for the research and let me bring really science-based things.
Especially to tech where people can be so resistant. I mean, people are resistant in a lot of places, but the PhD and the science help me sneak into places where they didn't know enough to listen to lived experience voices, and they would dismiss them.
Paula Edgar: Oh, I had a huge tech client who shall not be named.
Suzanne Wertheim: We're not going to name them.
Paula Edgar: Nope, however, the first time I went in for my meeting with them, they said, “We want you to do some training, folks are having some challenges interacting, but we don't want you to use the word privilege. Also, don't use the word microaggressions and only say things that mean that everybody has best intentions, and we should always assume good intent.”
I was like, “I don't think I'm the right person for you.” Paulie Ann is my nickname, but I don't assume good intent, I want it, but I don't assume because there are too many times when good intent is not actually there. We have to talk about privilege in order to navigate when folks don't have it. There's all these things. So I was like, “I don't think I'm the right person.” Then they hired me. It was like, “This is going to be uncomfortable for all of us. Let's go for it, come on.”
Suzanne Wertheim: I have so many things I want to say to that, but what I'm going to say is that people are surprised. I say this in my workshops a lot because I'm talking about intent versus impact. I'm like, “I would rather have a malicious person who knows better and behaves well than a well-intentioned person who never tries to make a change and keeps on messing up.”
I'm like, “Because who's actually transmitting harm? That malicious person who's behaving well and towing the line is not harming the people that they work with.” But what's funny is in all of my workshops, I don't use the words microaggressions or privilege because I'll tell you, I started thinking years ago, like I use the term inclusive language now because that's what people are looking for, but the stuff I'm talking about, I've been teaching since I was 26, a TA, teaching assistant.
I noticed that when I was talking about peer-reviewed scientific research, when I was teaching with teaching assistant, I would see resistance body language or I would hear resistance language. I'm like, “But them's the facts. These are just the facts of the world. Why are you showing me resistance?”
So since I was 26, I've been like, “How can I give people the facts in a way that they don't recognize that I'm flying under the radar?” An example I give is I've got a cat with a metabolic disorder. I give him a fancy pill every day.
At first, we're trying to shove the pill and you rub the neck and he's big because of his metabolic disorder and it was a failure. But then I found a pill pocket he thinks is delicious and now he's psyched, it's his treat. I'm like, “How can my pill pocket, the real facts of DEI?” That's what I'm always trying to do.
If you can't handle the word privilege, I'm not attached to the word privilege, I'll teach you about privilege used in different words so it goes in. But I mean, I've dealt with so many companies like that where it's like, “We want to learn, but don't make me uncomfortable, don’t make me feel bad, and don't make me change.”
Paula Edgar: Yes, oh, that last part. Like, “I don't think I'm so good to make you change, but I want you to think about changing at least when I'm gone.”
Suzanne Wertheim: I know, I know, my word, yeah.
Paula Edgar: Yes, all right, well, okay, so how did this professionness and the consultantness become you being a national expert on inclusive language?
Suzanne Wertheim: I approach inclusive language in a way that's different from almost everybody else out there because I am directly applying my knowledge from linguistic anthropology to inclusive language.
I realized that there was this big gap, and that a lot of the ways that people were talking about inclusive language weren't landing well. Here I have all of these decades of me looking, being like, “Where's the resistance? How can I sneak it by? Where's the resistance? How can I reverse engineer something?”
I realized that that was a thing that I was really incredibly well equipped to do, that there was a place for me to step into. There are two things that my clients or other people, where's the resistance coming from?
One is that a lot of people have a very American English focus and they start with identity. They're like, "Here's this identity, here's their sad history, here are bad words, here are words to use instead.”
But I'm looking around and I'm like, well, especially during the pandemic, I'm like, “All I see is empathy deficit. If people literally don't care if Black folks are being murdered in the street or in their own homes, if people literally don't care, if they're taking to the streets to say all lives matter or whatever, how is it going to work educationally to be like, ‘Here's the sad history of people of African descent. Here, don't say articulate. Don't say hair is unprofessional.’ If they don't care about people dying, how am I going to make them care about stuff?"
The other thing is that a lot of people had a very American-centric focus, and for global clients, it didn't work. You can't pretend that the US is the whole world. That itself is not inclusive behavior.
I was able to come in and do a focus on behavior and behavioral principles and take my years of research in multiple languages and multiple locations, and then so much research by my colleagues on so many languages and so many locations.
I could run analyses and say, “What seems to be universal for an interaction that goes well, or a communication event that goes well? What are the granular principles when something goes well? What are the granular principles when something goes badly?” So I developed my six principles of inclusive language that are a set of behaviors and not a long list of words.
I mean, I illustrate them with words, but they're behaviors. That really allowed me to reach a higher level in terms of what people thought of me and how well it suited their needs.
So I'm possibly going to start working with a global financial institution waiting to see, have a quote out, I'm nervous, it's expensive so I'm like, “Are they going to take it? Are they not going to take it?”
But this person reached out and they said to me, “I loved your book. I started integrating it immediately into manager training because I had managers from 12 countries in that training.” So the principles worked for them. We kept on adding dimensions of identity and it was too much to make it so it matches the whole world.
Paula Edgar: Right, yeah, no, we are in this global space even if we are local because we have to interact. The pandemic showed us that we can talk to everyone where we are and being fluent in that or at least trying to be conversant and not conflict, conflict is I think challenging when you were talking about working in Europe.
I did a session in Greece for an organization that has people from all different countries and they were like, “Well, we're going to need to hire a translator.” I was like, “I'm from Brooklyn. First of all, I talk fast. Second of all, I don't know what I'm going to say.” They were like, “Was there a script that we can follow?” I was like, “There's no script. I'm unscripted. It's followed.”
But one person came backwards and said that you can feel compassion across language. I mean, it was a high compliment because I was like, “Some things won't resonate. Some examples don't. But having an understanding of where the harm is when things happen is important.” To your point about empathy deficit, oh, sigh, sigh, sigh.
Suzanne Wertheim: I mean I think that's been a meme that's been out since 2020 between the pandemic and people's threatening behaviors to people who were COVID cautious or had COVID and people's threatening behaviors for people who are like, “I would like to not be afraid for my life as I walk around my neighborhood.”
This meme went around a lot, which is like, “I can't teach you that you should care about other people.” But I just feel like it's still so true and you've got all this polarization and we're in an election year, an American presidential election year, and what you've got is a lot of bots, a lot of propaganda, a lot of people who benefit from polarization.
When in fact, human beings have way more in common with each other than they have difference. They're just way more in common. It makes me sad, the empathy deficit. Also, another issue that I have that I can't figure out how to educate people around is the very human problem of short-sightedness where people don't recognize that it's happening to somebody else and that it might happen to them.
There's an internet thing where they call it "leopards ate my face." The joke is like a woman who votes for the leopards-eating faces party cries when leopards eat her face.
I think it's from some comedy thing or something, but so that people, the shortcut is leopards ate my face and people are like right now I think in Alabama, people who were “pro-life,” I'm going to call them forced birth, suddenly the government's interfering with IVF.
Now they care and people are like, “Leopards are eating your face.” We told you to care when it was women dealing with other stuff, we told you to care. Now you care and now it's pretty late because you didn't do the things that were necessary to stop this from happening. Because you thought, “I got mine, I'm good.” And guess what? You don't have yours, and you're not good.”
Paula Edgar: Yeah, if us going through a global pandemic collectively, and not realizing that our literal connection with each other is our salvation or our detriment, it truly is when people would be like, “Oh, why are they wearing a mask still?” it's like, you have no idea what that person's experience is, why they might need to or not.
I do think that a lot of how we try to protect ourselves is to be like, “That's them and this is us. That's that thing. This is my thing.” But it's real, always our thing, because we all impact each other.
I remember when my son was little, and I happened to explain to him, we saw someone who was in a house and he was like, “Why is that person on the street?” It was so hard for me to say to him like a New Yorker, we see things and we're like, “Okay, I gotta go.”
Say to him, “This person has a different experience than us. There are a lot of reasons why that may be the case. Yes, we could help in this instance, but we're not sure we'll be able to help in his full experience.”
I remember him being like, “That can't be.” He was so like, “This doesn't make any sense because if something's wrong, we should fix it.” Children would grow up with that, “Hey, let's fix the world.” Then we dampen the spirits to say, “No, actually.” It's hard. It's really, really hard. There's that. There's that.
You wrote the Inclusive Language Field Guide for all of us who need it and was the inspiration simply just understanding that you had this stuff that people that you had on your own and you wanted to share it, did someone come to you and say, “You gotta bring this.” Tell me the story.
Suzanne Wertheim: Yeah. The perfectionism comes with imposter syndrome, not in the sense that I feel like a fraud. But I often feel like, “Can I step into that space? Is that for me to do? Shouldn't I wait for somebody who really knows their stuff to do it?” By the time it was like the fifth client was like, “Can you write a book already? I need your book,” I was like, “Oh, I guess I should.”
That's my people pleasing, like, “Oh, there's a problem,” and people are like, “I think you can help me solve it,” “Oh, I can do that,” as opposed to saying something like, “Suzanne Wertheim has things to say and the world needs to hear them” is not where I was coming from.
But even though the way that I've been approaching inclusive language, I find lands really, really well with people. It lands so well. People said to me, a head of HR would be like, “It makes sense when you're here during the workshop and then you're gone and then people come to me and I'm like, ‘I can't explain it the way she can.’”
Or “I can only be in so many places, I need you here when I'm not here.” She was like, “I need this book for all of my people managers. I need you to write a book and then I'm and give it to all my people managers and we'll do in-house stuff.”
Or like a head of recruiting talent acquisition was like, “My recruiters are driving away candidates. So I need this, and then we'll make a list. We'll use this and be like, ‘What can we avoid?’”
Or customer experience people. Even people designing intake forms. I just saw a thing where the Florida Treasury has one of those, I talk about names all the time. People are like, "Names are so basic. You're a linguist." I'm like, "But people throw so much disrespect on names. People are so exclusionary about names in so many ways."
I'm like, "Make it so the person can put an accent in. Make it so that you can have a white space for Chinese names, which have two parts." So the Florida Treasury has that treasure hunt thing where you put in your name and then you see if people owe you money, is the state holding money for you? Somebody put in their name and their family name, and they were like, “Eh, you got to have three letters.” It was like, “Wu,” or maybe “Li.”
The programmers didn't think about people with Asian last names that are two letters long. There are so many ways and I see that as a customer experience. It's the government. All these customer experience things, where does it permeate through?
That's how I did it. I honestly made a list as I was making piles of index cards. I rented an Airbnb in Gold Country and I held myself up and I had these piles of index cards. One thing I made was a list of who's asking me to write this book and who is it for? What are the reading journeys of these different people who are going to go through? That's how I wrote it.
Paula Edgar: Oh, I love that because I also love that as advice to somebody who's writing a book. I'm like, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense to think about the user experience and who wants it and who’s it you're writing for and how they're going to experience that.” So thanks for that. Got my one-on-one coaching check.
Suzanne Wertheim: There you go. Happy to share. Happy to share more tips. We're at a time where everyone who's a sister wrote a book during the pandemic, and it can be hard to sell, the more that you think through who your top three buyers are going to be and it doesn't have to be a reader because think about the people who are talking to me, they're like, “I'm going to buy 300 copies of your book.”
I'm going to talk to somebody tomorrow. They did a DEI on site including executives, gave my book as a takeaway and everybody vowed to read one chapter together and do one exercise and then it went over so well that they're like, “Can we bring you in for a keynote? Can we talk about bulk buying for a lot of the company?”
Ironically, they're finTech, which I think is funny. I'm like, "Oh, back to my early 20s roots." But to me, I love that the proof is in the consumption of it, that a lot of people are like, "Oh, I don't want to read a book." They tell me, "I was not happy that I got assigned to read this book. Then I read it and I was pleasantly surprised because you didn't scold me, you didn't tell me I was a bad person." It was very low in BS and very high on science.
Paula Edgar: Oh, I love that. That's the tagline.
Suzanne Wertheim: Oh, I know. I wish I could. I had so many things. Also, my preferred subtitle would have been like, “Don't be an A-hole.” In fact, I made a long subtitle for SEO so people are searching on “avoid mistakes,” “speak respectfully,” whatever, so to catch people doing SEO. But honestly, I'm like, “My tagline should just be like don't be a jerk. I'll help you.”
Paula Edgar: I love that. Okay. Can you show an example of how problematic language significantly impacted a company's reputation or their bottom line?
Suzanne Wertheim: I'll give you an example that I found out through my own research. But before that, let me tell you Google the CEO of Kellogg's who went on CNBC and got compared to Marie Antoinette because people are like, "What are you doing for marketing?" and he's like, "Well, there are a lot of people with food insecurity now." He didn't say that.
He's like, "So we're marketing cereal for dinner for them and it's going over really well." Meanwhile, they've had so much inflation and so much shrinkflation and everything. This $5 million a year upper-class white dude is on TV saying, “Hey, poor people, eat cereal.”
So there's all these headlines, “Let them eat flakes.” What he said, there was not one bad word. So you can just Google his brand reputation, his personal brand has taken the biggest hit. If you Google his name, oh, I can't remember, because it's similar to the name of a state senator who did something terrible.
Paula Edgar: We'll find it.
Suzanne Wertheim: But it's like, if you find like Gary Pilnick, maybe, but if you Google his name, it's like regular finding, regular finding, and then three pages of mean headlines saying what a jerk he is.
I'm like, “Well, his comms people really needed my inclusion checklist.” You got to go through if they had gone through, they would have hit socioeconomic class and been like, “Oh, is this going to land well?” That's one that anybody can see for themselves.
I found it because the internet was like, “This is terrible.” I'm like, “Oh, yeah, that is pretty bad.” Here's a private one that I like to use. Sales teams don't want to hire me yet and I'm like, “Oh, you're losing so much money because your people say bad things.”
Here's an example I'm happy to get out there. I was interviewing somebody who had left a company and she was a very expert person at a high level in particular technologies that this company integrated into their offerings.
I was asking these questions, “Has there ever been a time that you felt like you were not heard, not respected, not valued?” I would elicit these stories. She told the story of, I call it like the two words that tanked a $4 million sale. There's a person who I think you can characterize him as a sales bro dude. I think I know which one this was, because I did other work with the company.
There's a long sales cycle for the complicated things. This tech expert and this guy go in, and I think they're the two people at a big table of a meeting room to the potential client for like the final things, “Let's hash things out, let's get it clear. What's really the best recommendation?”
Somebody asks a question in the meeting that's general, “Well, this thing seems like it would be a problem.” So she opens her mouth to respond and he jumps in and talks before she gets to respond. That's strike one.
Show respect, drop people in, incorporate other perspectives. Those are three principles he violates right there. He says, “Oh, that's not a big deal. Talk to your top IT guy. He'll tell you that this is very easily taken care of.”
So it's IT guy and he, two words, guy and he. She's in the room, she's in the room and she's a decision-maker. This tech expert who got talked over says to me, she watches her close her notebook, lean back in her chair, fold her arms, and listen with a sour expression on her face for the rest of the meeting.
That deal is done. It is dead in the water. The person who left, she didn't bother explaining to them why. She's like, “I'm sure they have no idea that it was this person,” we weren't talking about problematic language, but that's how I would call it, “that this person's problematic language, it was three sentences and that deal was done after six months.”
That's a juicy story. I think problematic language is expensive. If you put your foot in it and you don't fix it, you can cost your company so much money. Then who knows, they don't even know how to fix it. Not only do they cost the money, but they don't even know how to fix the problem for the next time. Who knows how many other times something like that happened?
Paula Edgar: You probably get this question a lot, I would imagine. What is the top advice for how to fix it when you put your foot in your mouth or put your foot on the compass, whatever the analogy is.
Suzanne Wertheim: I have another sales story that involves guys. Let me just share that one because this one has a happy ending because a knowledgeable man was there. I was talking to a salesperson whose wife does DEI. He's much more informed than he might have been with a different partner because his professional life hadn't led him to things.
He was going on a trip to sell a complicated set of services to a consortium, a large consortium in a location. A lot of the people who would be taking advantage of the services were women and transgender people.
It was the largest room. A lot of those people who were decision-makers were in the room. Senior VP decides last minute, “I'm going to come in on the trip.” So this salesperson was like, "Oh, I don't really,"
Anyway, so that VP comes in and he takes up the space and he takes up the air and he keeps on saying guys as he addresses the room. “Hey guys, you guys, you guys, hey guys.”
It's much easier to see how language is landing on people when you're not the one producing it. If you're just sitting there, you have that space freed up in your brain. You can be looking around and seeing.
The salesperson who's been working very hard on the sale is like, “Oh, the sale is tanking.” During maybe a coffee break, he's out with the VP and he pulls him aside and he said, “I need you to do something. I need you to go back in that room and say and apologize for saying guys and saying, ‘I'm sorry, that was disrespectful. That was exclusionary. I didn't realize what I was doing. I'd like to apologize. I'm going to try to save folks and everyone, but please tell me if there's something else that you would prefer.’”
Resistance, resistance, resistance. He's like, “I'm begging you.” VP's like, “I don't want to do it, this is ridiculous.” He's like, “I am begging you.” It looks like he's not going to do it, then they go back in the room and the VP maybe can sense suddenly looking around that it is chill, the environment.
I don't mean chill, like cool. I mean chill, like cold, like cold. He looks around so he does the apology and visible thawing, and people are like, “We accept your apology,” like a spokesperson is like, “We accept your apology. Yes, folks is fine. Yes, everyone is fine. Thank you for noticing that.”
This guy had to be kicking and screaming, dragged into that apology. Then that sale was saved. That was a few million bucks too. It's the same story with two different outcomes because a sincere apology that followed the rules of the principles of apologies that land well, people are like, “Oh, okay, came in not great. I see that he can learn and make a difference.” It's as simple as a correct apology.
Paula Edgar: I found that so many big things started off as smaller things that could have been mitigated, fixed, or navigated with an apology, an authentic apology, and people want folks to be accountable for their actions, whether they're intentional or not, and that resistance to being accountable or to feeling as if you were wrong, I get that a lot with law, like lawyers don't want to make mistakes because that's not what they're paid for.
All of these things, but I find that the most inclusive leaders I know who are lawyers are quick to say, "I don't know everything. Please feel free to correct me and give me feedback so that I can learn." That's I think particularly poignant when it comes to language because language shifts so fast.
Then you can have one group of people who are okay with a certain language and another group of people who look similar or you think are similar but are not. So being open and flexible in those spaces is so helpful.
Suzanne Wertheim: Back to that Oscar Wilde quote, “Only the shallow know themselves.” The lawyers who are like, “I don't fully know what I need to know, and I'm not going to come here with full confidence pretending that I'm always right, I need that assistance,” that's a person who goes further and does better.
Yeah, I mean, I think of inclusive language as like a design challenge. There's a group of people, especially for mass comms, there's a group of people and you don't know the hidden differences.
It's almost like what's going to trip you up so you can't go to the place you want to go. I can picture like a video game where someone's at the beginning of a field and then they keep on like stepping on mines or tripping over things and then they have to figure out how to get up.
You have to figure out who are the different people who might get pissed off or hurt or angry at this thing and then you've got to craft your product, which is your comms, to avoid all of those obstacles because they're not always visible?
If you were raised, a lot of people in positions of power have what I call a data deficit. They belong to a lot of dominant social groups. You and I were raised understanding that there was the mainstream culture and the mainstream world and people didn't look like me, people didn't talk like me, people weren't my religion. People weren't my whatever.
I could recognize that there were multiple ways to be in the world. My grandparents spoke different languages. I knew that English wasn't the only language. White people weren't the only white people. Christianity wasn't the only religion.
But a lot of people aren't raised that way. Their brains don't have mental models that accurately reflect the world. Their language shows that limited mental model. They're coming from a further behind starting point where they don't even recognize what categories exist.
Paula Edgar: Wow. I think it's so true when I have conversations about both mindset and wanting to learn and understanding that you don't know everything. In fact, acknowledging that helps you to learn better and be more impactful.
But there are some folks who are like, “Oh, no, I'm good. I don't need to know anymore.” I did a podcast interview recently where somebody was essentially saying, “If you say that you don't want to iterate and learn, etc, then that means you're saying that you can't lead people, because they're always shifting and changing.” They're always tapping into technology and bringing new perspectives. Your being able to flex in that space helps you to be a better leader.
Suzanne Wertheim: I mean, your choices have consequences. We're talking about accountability, but even if you're not taking accountability, there are still consequences. You can choose to not use inclusive language. You can choose to stick to language that alienates people, that lowers their trust in you, that makes them feel disrespected, and there are consequences, and those consequences are they will leave.
They will leave you. They will leave your personal relationships. They will leave your company. They will leave your brand. You can hold true to your authentic self and not do any of this woke PC nonsense, whatever, which is not what inclusive language is.
Inclusive language is being respectful of the people that you're interacting with, period, and reflecting reality. But there are consequences. Then I think a lot of people who are unwilling to shift their behavior end up alone, angry, and bitter, and they don't know why.
Part of their lack of accountability and self-reflection is they don't recognize that people have left them as a direct response to their actions and their unwillingness to shift.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, I wonder how that navigates with, so like thinking about inclusive language, but then the intersection with inclusive communication because I also find that people tend not to want to be direct communicators because they feel like if you are direct, direct means mean or direct means harsh, but I think when you are being passive-aggressive as opposed to assertive, et cetera, that can cause more harm in communication and conversation often than using direct language that makes it clear how what you or what you require from the interaction.
Suzanne Wertheim: I think it works if everybody's go-to is passive-aggressive and everybody can encode and decode. If everybody can read it, I was trained to understand passive-aggressive. I have an excellent early PhD in reading passive-aggressive and understanding how to respond to it.
I don't think it's healthy, but there are indirectness cultures. There are cultures, especially more homogenous cultures, East Asian cultures where you hint at the thing and part of showing that you have a high degree of trust and understanding is a hint is perceived and reacted on.
So I don't want to say there's only one correct way to say things, but if your way of expressing your needs or interests or whatever stake is not getting across to people, then you have to make a shift.
As long as everybody's encoding and decoding well, it's great, but the world is very diverse and there's a lot of misunderstandings out there and you gotta chip away until you get to how you can work together and understand each other.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, it's why I don't work in a workplace anymore.
Suzanne Wertheim: Me too. There are so many reasons, but I'm like, “Hmm.” Just being so nice all the time.
Paula Edgar: My mother told me when I was younger, “You don't have to be nice, but you have to be kind.” I tell my children that all the time, “I don't need to smile at you all the time, but I don't need to be mean.” It's kind, and sometimes kind is being direct, as opposed to not.
Suzanne Wertheim: And giving difficult feedback. You're just reminding me of someone who got mad at me at a clothing swap. This is years ago, but it sticks with me. She couldn't zip up a dress. We were all in somebody's living room and throwing around clothes. The rest of it got donated to domestic violence shelter.
She couldn't zip up a dress. I said to her, “Oh, this fabric there's no stretch to it at all. You're a perfectly beautiful person, but I think this dress is just a size too small. I'm not going to try to zip it up because it'll ruin the dress. It'll rip the dress and it's not going to work for somebody else. This dress should just go to somebody a size down.”
She got really mad. Somebody later told me that she was talking smack about me and how I was so rude. I'm like, “How is it rude to say literally, here's your size, your body is great. Here is this dress size. The dress size does not match your size. So let's not try to squeeze you into the dress.” If the dress had been too big, I would have been like, “That dress doesn't look good on you because it's too large for you.”
But there's so much. So it got back to, it was a group of California people, I was like, “Was that really mean?” and people are like, “No, that's just that person,” and then I heard a lot of stories about that person. But people will catch that.
I think it's kind to reflect reality, I wasn't being mean, I wasn't like, “Bitch, lose some weight.” I wasn't saying that. I lived in Russia, the things people would say to me about my size which was not big. I was fit. The things people would say to me, I'm like, “Ooh, directness cultures are rough.”
Paula Edgar: Yeah, my family's from the Caribbean. They greet you with either you got too fat, or why aren't you eating? It's like, “No, that's so rude.”
Suzanne Wertheim: It's so mean. I knew somebody would go back to Croatia. Even in LA, she was thin and she would go back to Croatia, and exactly, “Why are you so fat? Why are you eating?” I mean, she was teeny tiny, so there's no winning sometimes.
Paula Edgar: The things we have to deal with, I mean, I'm a big fan of taking a beat, just like literally waiting. So often in our attempts to connect with people, we just talk. I think it helps us and it helps others when you put care into how you're about to communicate with someone.
Sometimes it's not easy, especially when they make me mad, but that's a whole other story. But I do think to just take a minute, but we are not very open to pause or silence. Maybe that's just the New Yorkers, but I find that in a lot of places. People don't like silence. They like to be like, “What's going on next? Let me fill the space.”
Suzanne Wertheim: It is very hard for me and still decades later. For me, the way I was raised in what we call a conversational culture, everyone's talking at once. Silence means something is wrong. Silence means a conversation is wrong.
I've been in California, I'm like a migrant to California. Here silence means I got to wait for silence so that I know it's my turn. It's so hard for me because I was raised to be like, “It's my job to notice problems. It's my job to fix problems.”
If there's a silence, it can trigger all of this, “Oh, my God, I have to jump into action.” That action might mean continuing to talk, “Oh, I need to make this person feel comfortable.”
There are all of these culture clashes that happen. Silence can be one of those things. For some people, silence is necessary, and for other people, silence means like it's an alarm sounding like, “Uh-oh, things are going wrong.” I always tell people whenever possible, be as explicit as possible about the language.
You can say, not like an intention thing. It's like situation behavior impact. Situation, we're having a conversation, and I feel like I don't get to talk as much as I would like. Behavior, because when there's a silence, you're always jumping in and there isn't enough time for me to form my thought or jump in.
Impact, I don't feel heard and it makes me feel like you don't care about what I have to say. Then the person can be like, "Oh, that's because in my culture," blah, blah, blah. Then you have a conversation about the language as opposed to some kind of, “You're so self-centered, you're so narcissistic, you're so rude,” when it can just be a simple misunderstanding and a clash in styles.
Paula Edgar: Wow. Well, I knew this conversation was going to go by so quickly. I gotta get to my last two questions that I ask everyone. But before I do that, tell me quickly, what about the fun stuff? What do you do for fun?
Suzanne Wertheim: I like animals and nature. Speaking of personal brand, I just started replacing stock photos of people talking in offices with pictures of animals that look like they're talking. I just had a thing yesterday.
I gave a plenary talk yesterday. Instead of people, I had two puffins on a hillside looking like they were talking. I'm like, “You know what? I'm just going to be that person who has freaking animals in her slide deck because that's how I'm going to roll.”
I had a bowing deer in Japan in a slide about etiquette. A person bowing to a deer. I'm like, “This is just how I'm going to roll.” I'm lucky that I live in the Bay Area. Our nature is tippy top-notch.
On any given day, I can drive half an hour and see amazing things. That's my fun is nature. Sometimes I get tired of people, no offense, humans. Sometimes I'm like, “People are too much and I just need the solace of nature.”
Paula Edgar: Okay, so I have what's called your stand by your brand question, which is what aspect of your personal brand will you never compromise on?
Suzanne Wertheim: My brand is science. I'm always bringing the social science. I think it's one thing that helps differentiate me. The PhD can work for you or against you depending on, but especially when I work with tech or other educated domain, like white collar, I don't like the phrase white collar, but they find it restful that I'm like, “Every example is real. Everything comes from solid data collection, solid data analysis, adhering to international conventions of data production.” I feel like that has really helped me in my career. So my brand is science.
Paula Edgar: Got it, okay. Branding Room Only is a play on the term standing room only, like at a concert, et cetera. What is something about you that people want to experience or witness, et cetera, that would have folks in a room with just standing room to interact with you about?
Suzanne Wertheim: I mean, it's so ironic because I grew up pathologically shy. But I'm really good at talking to a full room of people, and—now you can tell I've lived in California for a long time—energetically holding the space, which I used to think was nonsense till I lived it.
Let me tell you, I officiated my friend's wedding almost exactly two years ago. They asked me to be an officiant. I had said, “Let's do a communal support thing where they say we will, you ask for communal support and they say we will, because people will want to say that.” At weddings where I've said it, I really felt committed to supporting that relationship.
So I put it in and we were in a grove, California, we were in a grove of beautiful trees. I said something like, “Everyone gathered here today, do you promise to support blah, blah, blah, this relationship? If so, say we will.” They said, “We will.” It was so strong that I had to take a step backwards.
I had been doing all of that energy work of holding an audience and reaching out to an audience and focusing them that I do in rooms full of resistant people, but no one was resistant at that wedding. They were psyched and they were filled with love.
It reminded me that I can really bring a room together and teach them something cool that they'll take away and be like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way. I can start applying it right away.” I feel lucky to have developed that.
If you had known me at age five, you would laugh because this girl could not even tell the shoe salesperson if the shoe fit. I had to whisper it to my mom. I'm like, “Stand in front of a room of 500 people and talk about difficult things? Sure, I'll do it and I'll make them laugh.” There it is.
Paula Edgar: I love that. And thank you so much for this really in-depth and energetically sound conversation that we just had. Will you tell everybody how they can find you and connect with your work?
Suzanne Wertheim: Sure. If you can spell my name, which will be in the notes, you can find me. I am very findable. There are only three people with my name, and I am the one that dominates the internet. Find me at suzannewertheim.com, find me at worthwhileconsulting.com, and I like to recommend that people follow me on LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn because I have a newsletter, once a month it's a newsletter and once a month it's an advice column and people tell me that they find it very useful.
Paula Edgar: It's me. I'm people. I love it. I love getting it. I'm very excited for that and we will have all that information in the show notes. Everybody, go tell a friend, particularly the ones who need to communicate better, to listen to this podcast. Make sure you like, follow, download, comment, all of the above. We'll see you next time in the Branding Room. Bye, everybody.
