Turns out that 80% of the time when you’re confused, everyone else is also confused. And EVERYONE is too scared to stop the meeting and ask the “stupid” question.
When we started our Chief Marketing Officer search and Jamie Tilotta Green (the best exec recruiter in the world) sat me down and said “What do you mean by Marketing?” I was confused. But as Jamie helped me realize, there are many types of marketing and thus, many types of marketers. Jamie and other amazing recruiters have taught me that it’s one of the easiest mistakes to make in recruiting: assuming everyone has the same definition of Marketing, Growth, Product Management, CTO, etc. I now feel confident that when executive hires fail, the most common reason is that the CEO didn’t take the time to specifically and clearly define what they were looking for at the start. They just assumed that one CMO is the same as another CMO.
Welcome to “Black Hole Words”.
Having this experience over and over again led me to start talking about Black Hole Words. To me, these are words that are commonplace in a given industry but everyone has a slightly different definition of them. You can have a whole meeting and if you don’t define the word, you just wasted an hour of everyone’s time. They suck all the meaning and consensus out of a room, out of a business, and out of a company.
One of the most annoying things about working for me (there are many) is that I pause conversations a lot and say “what do you mean by XX?” This phrase is exceptional, simple, and under-used in my opinion. It is my way of trying to get rid of Black Hole Words.
A candidate says, “I just want to work on strategy.” My question, “What do you mean by strategy?”
An employee says, “I feel like we’re losing our culture as we scale?” My first question, “What do you mean by culture?”
A CEO says “I’m hiring for a COO.” My question, “What do you mean by COO?”
But just in case, here’s some over-used and under-defined words that drive me nuts: