Imagine you could sit invisibly in the back of your leadership team meeting this week.
Not to assess the agenda, or evaluate the strategy, or check whether people came prepared. Just to listen. Listen to the actual words your leaders use when they talk about the future, about challenges, about the people they’re trying to reach.
What would you hear?
Would you hear “we’ve tried that before” — or “what if we approached it differently?” Would you hear “I don’t think we have the capacity for that” — or “let’s work out how we make this possible”? Would the dominant pronoun in the room be I or we?
Here’s the thing I’ve come to believe as a leader and a coach: the language of your team is the most honest diagnostic tool available to you. More honest than your strategy documents. More honest than your stated values. More honest than the culture you say you’re building.
What people say — in the corridor, in the meeting, under pressure — is what they actually believe. And what they actually believe is what they’re actually building.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” — Proverbs 18:21
That’s not just a spiritual observation. It’s a leadership one.
Language Is Not Neutral
Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright spent years researching workplace culture and came to a striking conclusion: you can identify the health of any team simply by listening to the language. Not what people claim to believe — what they actually say. They documented their findings in Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (HarperBusiness, 2008), and the diagnostic is as relevant to church teams as it is to any corporate organisation.
Language doesn’t just describe the culture of a team. It creates it.
Every phrase a leader uses sets an invisible permission level in the room. Every unchallenged statement becomes a precedent. Every disempowered sentence — spoken casually, unreflectively — slowly lowers the collective ceiling.
And the reverse is equally true. Leaders who use language that is owned, future-focused, and possibility-oriented gradually shift what their teams believe is achievable.
Jesus understood this. “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks,” He said (Matthew 12:34). Which means: if you want to know what’s happening in the heart of your team’s culture, don’t look at the vision statement on the wall. Listen to what comes out of people’s mouths when things get hard.
The Five Stages — Where Is Your Team Right Now?
Logan and his colleagues identified five stages of team culture, each characterised by a dominant language pattern. I’ve paraphrased the stage descriptions here to reflect what they actually sound like in a ministry context — but the research behind each one is robust.
As you read, ask yourself: which stage most accurately describes your team’s default language — not your best moments, but your ordinary Tuesday?
Stage 1 — “Nothing will ever change.” Despair and alienation. Language is cynical or resigned. People have effectively given up — on the organisation, on the possibility that anything can be different. You rarely find a whole team here, but you’ll encounter individuals at this stage. They need pastoral care before they need coaching.
Stage 2 — “I’m stuck and I can’t see a way forward.” Apathy and passivity. People talk as though circumstances are simply happening to them — as though they have no agency over their situation. Language is flat and disengaged. They’re not hostile; they’ve just stopped believing their voice or effort makes a difference. This is where empowered language reframes begin to do real work.
Stage 3 — “I’m doing well — better than most around me.” This is the most important stage to understand, because it looks like health. Stage 3 produces results. But the dominant pronoun is I, not we. Leaders at Stage 3 compete rather than collaborate, manage in one-to-one conversations, and keep everyone dependent on them. Logan’s research found that approximately 49% of workplace culture sits here. It looks like high performance. But it has a ceiling — and it doesn’t multiply.
Stage 4 — “We’re achieving something together.” The pronoun shifts. Information flows freely. Leaders stop being the hub of every conversation and start connecting people to each other. Culture becomes something people own and actively protect. This is where teams begin to outperform their resources — because they’re genuinely pulling together. For a church team, Stage 4 is where shared mission starts to feel real.
Stage 5 — “We’re part of something far bigger than us.” Rare, and rarely sustained. A team gripped by a possibility larger than any internal agenda. Language becomes expansive and generous. Most teams visit Stage 5 briefly — in moments of breakthrough, revival, or extraordinary unity. The task is to recognise it when it arrives, understand what created it, and cultivate those conditions deliberately.
Now — honestly — where does the language in your team mostly live?
The move from Stage 3 to Stage 4 is the most significant shift a leader can make. And it almost always starts with the leader’s own language.
The Phrases That Are Quietly Lowering Your Ceiling
Most disempowered language isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It lives in throwaway phrases — and it accumulates.
Here’s a simple diagnostic. In your meetings, are you hearing language from the left or the right? Disempowered / Empowered
- “have to…””I choose to… “
- “I get to…””I can’t…” “Up until now I haven’t…”
- “That’s just how I am” “That’s who I’ve been, not who I’m becoming”
- “We’ve always done it this way” “What if there’s a better way?”
- “I’ll try…” “I will… I commit to…”
- “They won’t let me…” “I haven’t yet found a way to…”
- “It’s impossible” “I don’t yet see how”
- “Yeah, but…” “Yes, and…”
The reframe that I’ve found most powerful in coaching conversations is “up until now.” When a leader says “I can’t lead that kind of conversation” — the coaching response is “Up until now, you haven’t.” It honours the past without letting it define the future. It creates the possibility of change without dismissing where someone actually is.
This is also deeply scriptural. Think about Numbers 13 and 14. The twelve spies came back from Canaan with the same facts. Same land. Same cities. Same inhabitants. But ten of them said: “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes.” Caleb said: “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it” (Numbers 13:30).
Same data. Different language. Different futures.
The ten spies weren’t stupid. They were disempowered – probably by their language on reconnaissance – and their language shaped the direction of an entire nation for forty years.
Three Things Every Leader Needs to Know About This
1. You are always modelling, whether you intend to or not.
Within minutes of a leader speaking, the room calibrates to their language patterns, their emotional register, their level of agency or passivity. You are the linguistic thermostat. If your language hedges, the team hedges. If your language owns and commits, the team begins to own and commit.
2. What you tolerate becomes the culture.
What goes unchallenged in a meeting becomes permission. A leader who lets “we can’t do this” pass without a gentle reframe has, in effect, endorsed the limitation. You don’t have to be heavy-handed about it — but you do need to notice, and name it.
3. You have the authority to speak identity ahead of reality.
This might be the most powerful thing a leader can do with language. It is the pattern of God Himself: He called Abraham “father of many nations” before a single child was born. He named Simon “Peter — the Rock” while he was at his most impulsive. He declared Gideon a “mighty warrior” while he was hiding in a winepress (Judges 6:12).
Speaking identity ahead of reality is not flattery. It is a specific, observed, grounded statement about growth in motion. Leaders who do this consistently build people who can eventually see their own potential — because someone named it before they could.
A Few Questions to Take Into Your Next Meeting
You don’t need to announce a language initiative. Just start paying attention.
- What is the dominant pronoun in your meetings — I or we?
- What phrase does your team use most often that quietly limits what’s possible?
- Is there someone you lead who needs you to speak identity over them this week — not encouragement, but a specific, observed statement about who you see them becoming?
- If a stranger sat in on your team meeting, what stage would they hear?
Language shapes culture the way water shapes stone — slowly, continuously, and more powerfully than anything more dramatic. The leaders who take this seriously don’t make announcements about it. They quietly, consistently model what they want to see, gently challenge what they want to eliminate, and speak into people what those people cannot yet see in themselves.
Over time, the room changes.
Because the language changed first.
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Paul Benger 