against “just”
I’ve written here before to caution you, dear leaders, against the use of adverbs (and ellipses, too). My target this week is one mean culprit within that gang. You and your team will be better off if you delete “just” from your vocabulary.
Almost any sentence I can think of that includes “just” gets better without it.
I was just … sharing my opinion, stating facts, waiting for you to do it.
It’s just … an interview, a small mistake, a random occurrence, a few (hundred/thousand/million) dollars.
When I look back at the ways I’ve deployed this word, I don’t like what I see. “Just” shows up when I indulge the belief that they shouldn’t feel that way. “Just” shows up when I’m pretending to observe facts but I’m actually making an argument. “Just” stumbles along the line between kind, generous communication and reductive, aggressive communication.
That line is an especially dangerous one for a leader to tread – your people are aware of your power and they – rationally – draw rich inferences from your small choices of diction and facial expression. When you use “just”, you teach a mini-lesson about how we make a case around here. How we take or shirk responsibility. How we reckon with the emotional impact of our choices.
As you might expect, the word shows up in instances of self-justification. It’s four letters worth of defensive crouching. If you find yourself wanting to use it, slow down and erase it.
-eric
ps: If you are Just, The Adjective please don’t take this as an indictment of you, too. We need just laws, just hiring policy, just compensation plans, a keen sense of what is just and unjust.
