Steerania

Steerania https://steerania.com/authors/max-roi/ Recent content on Steerania Hugo en-us Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000 Painshare https://steerania.com/jargon/painshare/ Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/painshare/ <p>“Painshare” is what we call the equitable distribution of consequences that were not equitably caused. The project ran over budget. The quarter missed. The client left. These things have authors, but authorship is a complicated conversation with HR implications and a tendency to produce documentation, so instead we painshare. The pain goes into a common pool. The pool is divided. The division is described as solidarity, which it is, in the same way that a mandatory fun day is camaraderie.</p> Advocate https://steerania.com/jargon/advocate/ Sun, 31 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/advocate/ <p>An advocate is what a senior leader becomes in the thirty seconds between saying “I will fight for you” and their next calendar invite. The word has a noble history. In corporate culture it has a different one, which is the history of people who discovered that announcing support is considerably less demanding than providing it, and that the two are, in most organizational contexts, indistinguishable until they aren’t.</p> <p>The mechanics are straightforward. A leader identifies a junior whose idea, project, or existence they wish to champion. They say so, publicly, in a way that reflects well on everyone. They mean it, more or less, at the time. Then the quarter closes, the priorities shift, the room changes, and the advocacy relocates to a place where it is preserved but not active, like a gym membership. The junior’s project is still supported in principle. Principle, here, is a technical term meaning the calendar is full.</p> Benefits https://steerania.com/jargon/benefits/ Sun, 31 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/benefits/ <p>Benefits are compensation that we do not call compensation, which is useful because it makes the total package harder to compare. The health insurance has a premium, a deductible, a copay, an out-of-pocket maximum, and a network, and the interaction between these five numbers is specific enough to each person’s circumstances that no two offers are directly comparable. We present this during the offer call as a feature of the plan’s flexibility. The candidate nods. They will understand what they have agreed to when they need it.</p> Concern https://steerania.com/jargon/concern/ Sun, 31 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/concern/ <p>“Concern” is the word we reach for when the situation requires documentation but not yet action. It is softer than “problem,” which implies ownership, and considerably softer than “issue,” which implies a meeting. A concern can be raised, noted, and parked. It asks nothing of the person raising it. This is why we raise so many of them.</p> <p>The word does two distinct jobs depending on its object. A concern about your work is a warning, delivered at a register that preserves deniability. The manager has not said the work is bad. The manager has said they are concerned, which is a feeling, and feelings are harder to rebut than assessments. Nothing has been put on record, formally. The concern floats in the space between feedback and consequence, available for escalation if required, easy to walk back if not.</p> Mushroom Management https://steerania.com/jargon/mushroom-management/ Sun, 31 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/mushroom-management/ <p>Mushroom management is what we practice when the information required to do a job is also the information we have decided not to share. The term is self-describing, which is rare in this field: keep them in the dark, feed them manure, watch them grow. We do not use the term internally. Internally, we call it “managing communication” or “protecting the team from noise,” which are cleaner and mean the same thing.</p> Team https://steerania.com/jargon/team/ Sun, 31 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/team/ <p>“Team” is what we call a department once we need something from it that a salary alone cannot buy. Nothing else changes. The reporting lines stay. The cubicles stay. The people who have been openly hostile to each other since the Q3 offsite stay. We change the word, and with it arrives a useful fiction: that the people in this room chose each other, share a purpose, and are in this together. They are not. But the word costs nothing, and the alternative is an honest conversation about incentives, which costs considerably more.</p> Leadership https://steerania.com/jargon/leadership/ Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/leadership/ <p>Leadership is how an organisation describes the quality it most wants from its managers and least receives. The literature on it is extensive. The practice of it is, depending on the organisation, somewhere between rare and theoretical.</p> <p>The ideal is specific: decisive, visionary, capable of communicating clearly under pressure. What fills that space in most structures is someone who has learned that long answers to direct questions function as answers, and that the appearance of momentum is indistinguishable from momentum until the deadline. Transformative leadership initiatives exist to close this gap. They do not close the gap. They restate it in a workshop format.</p> Low-Hanging Fruit https://steerania.com/jargon/low-hanging-fruit/ Wed, 27 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/low-hanging-fruit/ <p>“Low-hanging fruit” is how a sales team describes a prospect who was already going to buy. The metaphor does useful work here: it implies someone had to identify the tree, assess the canopy, and make a considered decision to start from the bottom. None of that happened. The call was short. The deal closed. The metric moved.</p> <p>In quarterly planning, low-hanging fruit functions as a category that justifies its own prioritisation. The logic holds on its surface: start with what is achievable, build momentum, work upward. In practice, the fruit at the bottom is picked in the first session and the team spends the remainder of the quarter discussing what to do about the rest of the tree. This discussion is also called strategy.</p> Push Back https://steerania.com/jargon/push-back/ Tue, 26 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/push-back/ <p>“Push back” is how disagreement is submitted for approval. The word does something “no” cannot: it frames objection as a contribution to the process rather than a challenge to it. Pushing back is collaborative. It has a spirit of engagement. The idea being pushed back on is still alive; it is merely under review.</p> <p>In a meeting, push back arrives as a question. “Have we fully thought through the implications?” is a well-formed push back. So is “I want to make sure we’re aligned on the risks.” Neither is a rejection. Both are. The distinction matters to the room because the room contains people who approved the idea, and push back is designed to give everyone somewhere to stand while the idea quietly fails to move forward.</p> Rightsizing (Involuntary Career Event) https://steerania.com/jargon/rightsizing/ Sat, 23 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/rightsizing/ <p>An involuntary career event is a termination viewed from sufficient altitude that the human at the centre of it becomes a data point in a workforce model. The word “involuntary” is doing the most honest work in the phrase. The rest is architecture. “Career” reframes the employment relationship as a journey, continuous and self-directed, of which this moment is merely a turn. “Event” makes it an occurrence rather than a decision, something that happened in the vicinity of the person rather than to them, and certainly not because of anyone in the room.</p> Birthday https://steerania.com/jargon/birthday/ Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/birthday/ <p>The workplace birthday is an annual audit of how much your colleagues are willing to pretend.</p> <p>The card is its primary instrument. It circulates desk to desk under conditions of low urgency and lower sincerity, accumulating signatures from people who learned the birthday existed from an HR email sent that morning. The messages inside read as proof of circulation rather than sentiment. “Hope it’s a great one.” “Best wishes.” The card documents participation.</p> Self-Starter https://steerania.com/jargon/self-starter/ Sun, 17 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/self-starter/ <p>A self-starter is what the job description says when the company has not decided what the job is.</p> <p>The term signals opportunity. What it describes is an absence: no onboarding structure, no defined objectives, no one who will explain what success looks like or when it has been achieved. The role exists because something needs doing. The company has outsourced the definition of that something to whoever accepts the position. This is presented as autonomy. The people who wrote the posting understand the distinction perfectly well.</p> Take This Offline https://steerania.com/jargon/take-this-offline/ Sun, 17 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/take-this-offline/ <p>“Take this offline” is how we remove a conversation from witnesses without technically ending it. The meeting continues. The agenda advances. The item in question is not abandoned; it is relocated to a context where there is no record, no quorum, and no one present who would repeat what gets said. We use this when the room is too big for what we actually need to discuss, and also when the room is exactly the right size and the problem is the agenda item.</p> Bandwidth https://steerania.com/jargon/bandwidth/ Sat, 16 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/bandwidth/ <p>“Bandwidth” is the word you use when you want to decline something without the unpleasantness of declining it.</p> <p>It carries a technical flavour: a network term, something measurable. This lends the refusal an air of objective constraint rather than personal preference. Not “I don’t want to,” but “the system cannot accommodate this at present.” The distinction matters. One is a character judgment. The other is a resource problem, and resource problems have no author.</p> Add-Value https://steerania.com/jargon/add-value/ Wed, 06 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/add-value/ <p>“Add value” is what you call an improvement the client did not request and will not notice.</p> <p>It’s a “feature” not a flaw. The work of adding value is not oriented toward the client. It is oriented toward the internal presentation that follows. A new feature nobody asked for photographs well on a slide. A revised framework with an additional tier demonstrates strategic thinking. A complimentary service bundled into the proposal shows generosity. None of these required the client to express a need. They required someone to fill a deck before Thursday.</p> CEO https://steerania.com/jargon/ceo/ Fri, 01 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/ceo/ <p>The CEO is the only person in the organisation whose job description is also a performance.</p> <p>Everyone else has deliverables. The CEO has presence. They appear at the all-hands to speak about vision, at the offsite to speak about culture, and at the earnings call to speak about momentum. These are not the same speech, but they are close. What they share is an absence of operational detail, which is not an oversight. Operational detail is for the people who handle it. The CEO’s job is to make the organisation feel like it is going somewhere, preferably before anyone checks whether it is.</p> Boss https://steerania.com/jargon/boss/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/boss/ <p>A boss is the person whose name appears above yours on the organizational chart and who derives authority from that fact alone. Not from competence. Not from institutional memory. From position.</p> <p>The interview is where the relationship begins, and where it is most misleading. The boss describes the team as collaborative. They use the word “we” with confidence. By the end of the first month, “we” has clarified into a working arrangement where the work flows in one direction and the credit flows in another. This is called delegation. It is a real management skill. What it produces, in practice, is a boss who is across everything and accountable for nothing.</p> Ownership https://steerania.com/jargon/ownership/ Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/ownership/ <p>“Ownership” is what you are asked to take of something you did not design and cannot change.</p> <p>The ask is emotional, not operational. Nobody is offering equity. Nobody is offering decision rights. What is being offered is accountability, reframed as an opportunity. Take ownership of this project, this workstream, this deliverable. Feel invested in it. The investment is one-directional, which is not mentioned, because the point of the ask is motivation, not accuracy.</p> As You Know https://steerania.com/jargon/as-you-know/ Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/as-you-know/ <p>“As you know” is the linguistic equivalent of a compliment with a knife tucked behind it. The phrase walks into a conversation looking perfectly polite, a respectful nod to the listener’s knowledge. Of course they already know this. They are practically experts. What follows is merely a pleasant refresher.</p> <p>Except it is not. Peel it back and you find its real function: a smooth way to deliver information the listener clearly did not have. The kind that was either all over the news or sitting unread in a memo they abandoned after the subject line. A tidy method of educating someone without the awkwardness of saying “you missed this, didn’t you?”</p> Socialise the Learnings https://steerania.com/jargon/socialize-the-learning/ Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/socialize-the-learning/ <p>“Socialise the learnings” is how we ask someone to send an email when we need the request to sound like it was worth the meeting. The email will contain an update, or a document, or a summary of what was discussed in the session that produced the learnings in question. The recipient list will include people who could have been told this in a sentence. None of that is new. What is new is the framing: the information is not being forwarded, it is being socialised, which implies that the information has a life outside the inbox, that it moves through the organisation organically, that it is adopted rather than received.</p> Humaneering https://steerania.com/jargon/humaneering/ Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/humaneering/ <p>Humaneering is the discipline of changing what people experience while preserving what they hear. The restructuring happens. The headcount reduction happens. The role eliminations, the site closures, the benefit adjustments that require three readings of the FAQ to understand are worse than they initially appeared: all of it happens. What humaneering contributes is the vocabulary layer that sits on top, carefully selected to ensure that the people most affected feel, at minimum, that they were considered. They were. This is true. It’s that consideration who produced the term.</p> BCC https://steerania.com/jargon/bcc/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/bcc/ <p>BCC is how you CC someone without having to explain why.</p> <p>The recipient in the To field believes they are having a conversation. They are not. They are performing for an audience that has been seated without their knowledge. This is by design. The value of BCC is precisely that it cannot be seen, a visible BCC is just a CC, and a CC requires a reason. BCC requires nothing. You simply add the address and send, and the record exists somewhere the other party cannot find it.</p> Bottom Line https://steerania.com/jargon/bottom-line/ Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/bottom-line/ <p>The bottom line is what the numbers say after we have finished explaining the numbers. It is the figure on the financial statement that survives the footnotes, the adjustments, the one-time charges that recur annually, and the segment reporting that quietly relocates underperforming assets into a category called Other. What remains is the bottom line. We present it with the gravity of a verdict, which is accurate, and the confidence of people who chose the accounting method, which is also accurate.</p> Synergy https://steerania.com/jargon/synergy/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/synergy/ <p>Synergy does two jobs and we use it for both without embarrassment. The first is the math that makes <code>1+1>2</code>: Two companies that have nothing in common discover, in the months before the deal closes, that together they are worth considerably more than the sum of their parts.</p> <p>The second job is smaller but more frequent. Two people from different departments share a spreadsheet. A designer attends a meeting. This also called synergy. The word elevates it into something that sounds planned, resourced, and intentional, which is a considerable improvement on the truth.</p> Circle Back https://steerania.com/jargon/circle-back/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/circle-back/ <p>“Circle back” is a scheduling commitment with no date attached, which is the only kind of scheduling commitment that carries no risk. We will circle back on this. The circling is forthcoming. When it arrives, it will arrive organically, which is a word we use to mean without being asked, which means it will not arrive at all unless someone asks, which means the question of whether it arrives has been quietly transferred to the person who raised the issue in the first place.</p> Corporate Ladder https://steerania.com/jargon/corporate-ladder/ Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/corporate-ladder/ <p>The corporate ladder is what we called the vertical distance between you and where you beleive you’re going. We presented it as a meritocracy with rungs. The rungs were real. The meritocracy was a way of explaining how the people already at the top kept finding the next ones suitable.</p> <p>Now we have replaced it with “the climbing wall”, which has been described as giving workers more agency, more flexibility, and more control over their paths. What the climbing wall actually does is distribute the uncertainty more evenly. On a ladder, at least the direction was clear. The climbing wall has holds going sideways, diagonally, and in some configurations, back down, all of which can be reframed as growth.</p> Talent Velocity • Talent Density https://steerania.com/jargon/talent-velocity/ Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/talent-velocity/ <p>Talent velocity is how fast we hire. Talent density is how good we say the people we hired are. Together they form a two-axis system for describing the same thing companies have always done, which is staff up and hope, now expressed in units borrowed from physics to suggest that the process has been engineered rather than improvised. The physics do not apply. Talent does not accelerate through a vacuum. It does not compress. The words were chosen because they sound like something that can be measured, which is the most important property a metric can have in a room where no one is measuring it.</p> Zero Tolerance https://steerania.com/jargon/zero-tolerance/ Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/zero-tolerance/ <p>“Zero tolerance” is that bold phrase that jumps into the room like a corporate cowboy. It shows up ready to shoot down every undesirable behavior in sight. Harassment? Gone. Discrimination? Banished. Whatever today’s HR buzzword happens to be? Obliterated. It’s an all-caps, neon-lit commitment that if you cross the line, you’re dead.</p> <p>Except that… If live high enough on the org chart or happen to have a golden handshake with somebody on the board… Well, in those cases, “zero” magically transforms into “come on, let’s not be hasty.”</p> Leverage https://steerania.com/jargon/leverage/ Wed, 03 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/leverage/ <p>“Leverage” is what we say when we want to use something without specifying how, or how much, or whether the thing in question can support the weight. The word is load-bearing in the sentence and weightless in practice. We are leveraging our network. We are leveraging our platform. We are leveraging the insights from last quarter’s retrospective that many people attended but few remember attending. The leverage is implied. The mechanism is not your concern.</p> Benefit Dinner https://steerania.com/jargon/benefit-dinner/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/benefit-dinner/ <p>A benefit dinner is a fundraising event structured around the premise that wealthy people will give more generously if surrounded by other wealthy people in formal attire. The cause is real. Everything else is set design.</p> <p>The cocktail hour exists to establish rank before anyone sits down. Attendance is evaluated visually, and everyone knows it. Sequins signal one thing. A strategic table sponsorship signals another. The hors d’oeuvres are too small to be food and too expensive to be dismissed. Their primary function is to give people something to do with their hands while sizing up the room.</p> Accounts Payable https://steerania.com/jargon/accounts-payable/ Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:00:00 +0000 https://steerania.com/jargon/accounts-payable/ <p>Accounts payable is the department that keeps every vendor relationship intact and receives credit for none of it. The company could not function without it. Most employees could not locate it on a floor plan.</p> <p>The work is procedural by design, not by accident. Every rule in the AP manual exists because someone, at some point, made a friendly exception that cost the company money. The memos that followed were not bureaucratic overreach. They were scar tissue. The staff enforces the process with the calm consistency of people who have already seen what happens when they don’t.</p>