Thoughts Unlocked – How Labels Are Damaging Your People and Culture

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Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro: The small habit quietly wrecking your team
01:14 – Why labels feel helpful (but aren’t)
03:45 – Cognitive ease: why your brain jumps to labels
04:05 – The danger of misdiagnosing behavior
05:10 – A label isn’t an explanation. It ends curiosity
07:30 – The Pygmalion effect: how labels shape performance
08:46 – A simple reframe to replace labeling

Skot Waldron (00:05.00)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome back to Unlocked. Today, I’m going to talk about something that sounds small. And I fought with this whole idea quite a bit. And I’m even making a new keynote around this idea.

And sometimes I’m questioning, gosh God, does this really matter? Gosh, it seems like such a nitpicky little thing. But honestly, I’ve seen it quietly wreck teams, trust and performance every day, honestly. And I’ve heard this multiple times from my clients. And the big problem here is labels.

Not the kind on your shirt, not that shirt tag that’s annoyingly sticking out that my wife continuously pushes back into my shirt because I don’t notice it. But it’s the kind that we put on people, you know, labels like procrastinator, which was the biggest offender, which is what caused me to want to write a book about this and a keynote on it and actually make this podcast about that.

But also labels like disengaged or unmotivated or difficult or lazy, you know, all those words that we throw around and we use these words. Like we just diagnosed a problem, but most of the time we didn’t diagnose anything. We just named our frustration. We’re naming behaviors that we think we see. And that’s what we’re the label we’re throwing out because it’s easy and lazy. And then we wonder why nothing changes.

Well, let me explain. I’ve been working on this, this keynote idea, I’ve been diving deeper into the research, and I realized something that might make you a little uncomfortable, but most leaders aren’t solving problems. They’re reacting to labels and these thoughts and these ideas they have in their heads that are often not correct.

Someone misses a deadline; we call them a procrastinator. Someone pushes back in a meeting, we say, that person seems really difficult. Someone’s a little bit quiet; we say, they just seem so disengaged. Those labels they feel helpful because they give us closure. They give us an answer. They close the story loop. Our brains are storytelling factories. Our brain loves closure. So, we go for those things.

And there’s actually a psychological concept for this. It’s called cognitive ease. Our brain prefers quick, simple explanations over accurate ones. And labels give us that shortcut. And here’s the big trade-off though, that we make when we do that. The faster the label, the worse the diagnosis. The faster the label, the worse the diagnosis. And when the diagnosis is wrong, every solution, every treatment, every intervention after that is wrong too.

You don’t coach a procrastinator the same way you coach someone who’s overwhelmed. You don’t address disengagement the same way you address the idea of confusion, and you don’t fix a lack of motivation the same way you fix fear. But if you label it wrong, you treat it wrong. Now you’ve got performance issues that don’t go away and the team feels misunderstood in the process. Holy moly. We have just lost a whole bunch of trust.

People carrying around this guilt and shame label, the idea of who they are and what they are and then losing hope and were frustrated. This is everywhere, y’all. Here’s the line I want you to think about. A label is not an explanation. It’s the end of curiosity because once we have the label, we don’t need to search for the truth anymore. That’s not good. We need to ask better questions.

Curiosity is where leadership begins. Let’s say you’ve got someone on your team who keeps delaying work. You say, “gosh, they’re such a procrastinator. You know, cool. That’s super decisive. Like you’ve decided they’re procrastinators.

Or you could dig a little deeper. You could be the leader that people want to follow and that they get to follow. You could ask questions like, or you could be a teammate. This is for teammates too, y’all. You could ask, are they clear in their expectations? Hmm. “Hey, Janice, are you clear about what’s expected of you right now? What do you understand? What do you think the expectation is?” Or “are you overwhelmed? Is there something here that’s just a bigger step that you just keep getting bogged down with?” Or maybe, “are you, are you afraid of getting this wrong? I know that there’s a lot of pressure on this right now. And I wonder if there’s just some perfectionist tendency in there, or you’re afraid of a misstep. Are you may be flooded with priorities?” “Priorities” which if there are multiple priorities, then there aren’t, you know, there isn’t one priority, which priorities are, you know, there’s one priority. If there’s 15 priorities, that’s priority. Are they prioritizing something else that they think matters more or are they putting out fires? Somebody else’s fires because somebody keeps coming to them, delivering all these fires to them and putting them on their lap.

These are all very different problems, and they required very different leadership tactics and strategies. And this is where a lot of leaders get stuck because diagnosing takes more effort than labeling, it does, it takes effort, takes intentionality. It’s really easy just to throw out the label. Diagnosing takes a lot of work. But if you want influence, real influence, you don’t get to skip the hard work. And there is another piece to this whole thing.

Labels just don’t affect how you see people. They affect how they see themselves. This is straight out of social psychology, and this is called the Pygmalion effect. Y’all have maybe heard of this before. People tend to rise or to fall to the expectations placed on them. And we call someone unmotivated long enough and you know what? They will completely start acting like it. Not because it’s true, but because it’s continuously reinforced.

So, what do we do instead? We slow down. We ask questions, we move from labeling to diagnosing. We start getting more curious. And in my work, something I’ve developed as a process called D three, you diagnose, you design, you deliver. You diagnose, you design, and then you deliver. And diagnosing site sounds kind of like this. You know, what’s actually going on here? What am I assuming that might not be true and what’s driving this behavior? Because behavior is not the end all y’all. It’s not the end. It’s just a signal. It’s not the verdict. It’s not the thing.

So, I’m to give you a reframe and you can use this immediately. So instead of saying, “gosh, they’re such a procrastinator” or “I’m such a procrastinator.” You say, “something is causing a delay.” That’s interesting. Something is causing a delay. So instead of, you know, they’re such procrastinators. It’s like, something is causing some friction. I call it friction, right? There’s something causing this delay, something calling the friction that I don’t understand what’s going on.

And the one shift, this one shift, like it opens the door. It keeps you curious. It keeps the conversation productive. It keeps the person from feeling like they’ve already been written off, and you know, leaders want better performance. I’m assuming, right? Do you want better performance? I’m assuming you do. But the fastest way to kill that performance is to mislabel people responsible for it. What? You mean I shouldn’t insult or shame and guilt the people that are meant to perform for me. Mind blowing, I know.

When people feel misunderstood, they stop engaging not because they’re disengaged, but because they’ve been labeled as someone who’s disengaged and they start protecting themselves a little bit more.

Here’s your challenge this week. Catch one label. When you throw it out there, just one, this could be for yourself or for somebody else. One moment where you’re about to say, “I’m just,” or “they’re just,” instead I want you to pause. I want you to replace the label with a question. Because leadership doesn’t start with answers, y’all. It starts with a better diagnosis. And a better diagnosis starts with curiosity. Let’s move towards curiosity. Let’s move towards asking better questions because labels are lazy.

Thanks for being here on Unlocked. And at this episode, may you rethink how you see your team and how you see labels and how you see how we interpret behavior. Share it with someone who might need that same shift in their thinking.

Remember, labels are easy, but they’re also super expensive. I’ll see you next time.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.