By Any Other Name

I love my name. It is my father’s and his father’s before him. I passed it on too. While they aren’t all in an unbroken line, there are at least seven of us with that name in the lineage of my family. I love my name because I wanted to be like the men who gave it to me. Having the name meant I was connected to them—I am part of them and they, me. For some, that is not the case.

Some people hate their names. For many reasons. A name tied to someone absent, or cruel, or unknown. A name that marks you as different before you open your mouth. A name that people butcher every time they try to say it. Names carry history. They carry weight. What we call a person or a thing matters more than we usually stop to think about.

Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. He was making a point about the irrelevance of names—that the substance of a thing isn’t changed by what you call it. He wasn’t wrong, exactly. But he was only half right. Because while the rose doesn’t change, the person smelling it does. The name shapes the experience before it even begins.

In the organizations I have been part of and observed, the language leaders choose tells people exactly what they are expected to be. Not in some grand philosophical sense. In a very practical, daily, felt sense.

Take the word “employee.” It is accurate. It is common. It is also a transaction. An employee is someone you pay to do something. The word carries the implicit contract: perform, receive compensation, repeat. Now say “team member” out loud. Different feeling. A team member has a role in something. They are part of something. The word signals belonging, not just exchange. Neither word changes the work being done. But one of them changes how the person doing it sees themselves in relation to everyone else.

Or consider how we talk about structure. In organizations with a command-and-control mindset, the people with more responsibility are described as “above” others. They are higher up. Others are “down the chain.” If you have spent any time in that culture, you already know what it produces. People look up for permission and look down to push responsibility. The language isn’t causing the dysfunction. But it is describing it accurately and reinforcing it daily.

I prefer to think of our structure as concentric circles. Leadership sits at the center, not the top. The further out you go, the closer you are to where the real work touches customers, product, and results. The people on the outer edge are not below anyone; they are the point of contact. Some organizations have started calling their senior leaders “servants” for this reason. Not because it sounds humble. Because it describes the actual job.

The same principle applies to one of the most persistent myths in organizational life: work-life balance. The phrase itself encodes a problem. It implies that work and life are opposing forces on a scale, that more of one means less of the other. So people spend their careers trying to balance two things that cannot be separated. Work is part of life. The relationships you build, the problems you solve, the purpose you find or don’t find in your work—they are part of your life. When we start treating them that way, the conversation shifts from “How do I keep these two things from destroying each other?” to “How do I build a life I actually want to be living?”

I am not suggesting that words alone fix broken cultures. They don’t. You can call everyone a team member and treat them like interchangeable parts. Language without behavior is just marketing. But the reverse is also true. When the words you use are misaligned with the culture you say you want, the words usually win. Because words are what people hear every day. They are the ambient signal of what is actually valued.

Pay attention to how your organization talks about itself. Notice the words used in meetings, in job postings, and in the way leaders describe decisions. Those words are not neutral. They are a window into what is actually believed about people and their place in the community. Choose them carefully because what we call things matters. That is the Bison Way.