8 phrases that make you sound condescending
Posted by Josh Taylor / March 27, 2014
Sometimes, it’s hard to choose your words carefully, especially as a leader. Leaders get busy, stressed out, emotional, and as a natural result leaders sometimes get a bit short with people. While we can’t slough of our bodies and ignore stress, exhaustion, or frustration, we can train ourselves not to say phrases that are especially annoying to our employees or peers. Many of these phrases are simple, like, “I know you’re stressed about this, but you shouldn’t be because…” Why is this so annoying? Because the person is stressed! Telling them they’re wrong to be stressed only makes it worse. Acknowledge how they feel and move forward from there. Here’s another annoying one:
“Don’t worry about it”, or “It’s no big deal”.It may not be a big deal to you, but it must be a big deal to your employee, or they would not have brought it up. You need to take the time to listen, and find out why the employee is concerned, and then take the opportunity to coach the employee to help them find a solution.
Full story at Great Leadership.
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Would the phrase “Sure I am!” Be considered condescending or patronizing?