So What’s The Problem With Softening?

The problem with softening is exactly the same side effect that gives it its strategic value: it reduces other people’s sense of your power!

There are times when de-emphasizing your power can be helpful, but if you constantly soften, people might perceive you as lacking authority.

Since softening is so effective at minimizing our demands, requirements, and opinions, it places you firmly in the accommodative position and prioritizes the other party’s interests. That means that, even when you do have formal authority or power, it saps you of it.

And because softening is so often used by folks in lower-power positions, when you overuse it, it can create confusion about whether you are in charge – or worse, make people think that your leadership skills aren’t up to par for your organizational level.

There is a time to back off and a time to lead. So even though softening is a valuable skill, if you use it when you should be communicating assertively, it compromises your ability to lead your team effectively – and reduces your perceived power and influence.

Women’s Relationship with Softening Language

So if too much softening is a bad thing, why do women use it so often? The answer starts with childhood socialization.

Women get taught to soften their communication from an early age. Differences in the way boys and girls communicate are evident by school age, with research showing boys use more dominant command-based communication styles, while girls use more affiliative, suggestion-based styles.

Boys’ more dominant communication styles – confident assertions, interruptions of lower-status individuals, and talking more than their equal share – are ways of asserting and performing power. Conversely, girls’ communication strategies – softening, waiting their turn, and taking up less conversational space – are their direct opposite and work to project and maintain lower power positions. These gendered mirror-opposite positions help to create and uphold patriarchal norms at home, in friend groups, and eventually in the workplace.

Unfortunately, these gendered communication norms we learn as children put women and girls at a distinct disadvantage. While girls’ collaborative style fosters more team cohesion and belonging, it gets subsumed by boys’ louder, more insistent style in mixed-gender groups. Girls’ voices get lost amidst the boys’ dominant style, reducing their influence and power.

Fast forward to adulthood, and the picture is largely the same, with men and women continuing to rely on the communication styles they perfected as children as they move into the workplace. Once in the workforce, two major factors strengthen and reinforce women’s use of softening language:

#1 - Softening Works in Low-Power Positions

Women are overwhelmingly overrepresented in lower-level, lower-power positions at work, which is exactly where softening is a smart strategy. When women soften their language, they get all kinds of positive reinforcement – both from the concrete results it helps them generate, but also from managers that praise their EQ and ability to manage tough relationships.

This positive feedback loop causes women to double down on softening, which unfortunately only decreases others’ perception of their power and makes it less likely that they move up into positions of authority.

#2 - Leadership Training & Feedback Promotes Softening

Research shows that women receive a disproportionate amount of feedback on their communication, despite consistently being rated at a higher skill level than their male colleagues. So as women work to move up the ladder, they are often directed towards polishing their communication and interpersonal skills.

From here, ambitious women turn towards leadership books and training, which were designed to serve the needs of their primary market: male leaders. Leadership is still overwhelmingly male, with over 75% of senior level roles occupied by men. So it’s no surprise that most leadership training is focused around teaching the skills they need to perfect: soft, EQ-focused, affiliative communication. Leadership training designed around these skills help balance out male leaders, who already come to the table with an entire childhood of training in more dominant communication styles.

So what happens when women attend these trainings and read these books that portray these soft communication styles as one of the most important leadership skills to learn? They over-index on the communication skills they learned in childhood – and have a total gap around the dominant, assertive style that comes easily to “most leaders” (read: men).

As a result, you have women leaders with unbalanced skills who get constant messaging around the need to develop their (already overdeveloped) softer communication skills to be able to move up the ladder.

And then those same soft communication skills they’re working so hard to develop make other folks doubt their authority and leadership capability.

Fun. Cool. Yep, love this. *internally screaming*

The Problem With The Podcast’s Advice to Soften

All of this, my friends, is why I got so mad listening to that podcast host share her cushiony, cashmere-coated communication hack! There are very serious career costs to women over-using softening as a communication strategy. And here she was, uncritically advising women to soften their language to an absurd degree, reinforcing this toxic pattern that keeps women stuck in lower-level roles and out of power positions.

Even worse, this was advice around asking for feedback on a presentation, a topic that shouldn’t require much softening at all. It’s not like she was proposing a 60% cut to executive pay packages or something wildly controversial. If we have to make 43% of our sentences softeners just to ask for feedback, what the heck are we supposed to do when we need to influence opinion on something more difficult?

How can we do the complex influencing work required at higher levels if we’re only allowed to occupy a tiny, hyper-palatable position linguistically? If we practice softening to an extreme degree for everyday requests, we won’t have earned the respect or credibility – or heck, even the practice! – to be firm when it matters most. Our ability to advocate for new and innovative approaches, succeed in complex budget negotiations, and bring teams onboard to bold visions for the future all hinge on our ability to be firm in our asks and not soften our opinions and requests into oblivion.

We need tools other than softening in our toolkit that will help us influence and achieve the results we want without the costs that come with softening.

Ok, So What Are We Supposed To Do?

So now that we understand the problem with over-softening, let’s talk about some alternative approaches that’ll help you build your credibility instead of tearing it down.

Tip #1 - Soften Only When You Need To

Avoid adding softeners to your proposals and requests most of the time and save the delicate approach for when it’s most needed – like when you’re navigating a significant power divide or introducing a bold idea that might initially meet resistance. The rest of the time, flex into a slightly bolder approach by pulling those woulds, ifs, justs, and is it possibles out of rotation.

There might be an adjustment period for you as you make your communication more direct. If you’ve used a lot of softening language in the past, it might feel like an abrupt change, and you might be worried that folks won’t receive this new version of you well. That’s totally normal, and I’d encourage you to experiment as much as you can in low-stakes situations, even if you feel a little bit unsure. You might be surprised how quickly folks agree with you even when you don’t use the softening language that previously felt like a non-negotiable!

Tip #2 - Soften Judiciously

Softening is absolutely the right strategy sometimes – but even in those moments you do choose to soften, it’s important to be strategic about how much softening language you employ.

There is a spectrum of softening – from kitten soft (like in the podcast) to juuust barely taking the edge off. Choose the least soft position on that spectrum you think will work for the situation at hand. That way you’ll get the benefits of softening while making sure you don’t pay too high a price by overdoing it.

If you’re new to practicing reducing your softening language, a great place to practice is in your emails. Before you press send, do a quick scan through your writing and tally up the softeners. Are there any you could remove entirely? Or any you could substitute for something a little more direct?

Tip #3 - Add Pre-Messaging Instead of Softening Controversial Messages

If you have a controversial idea or bold statement you need to communicate, there are other tools you can use beyond just linguistic softeners.

We often soften our language to offset a potential negative perception in the other party, for example that our proposal is too aggressive, that we’re not flexible, or that we’re asking too much. Counterintuitively, it’s often helpful to call that perception out directly instead of avoiding it.

Research shows that how you introduce your message has a big effect on how it’s received. Up-front acknowledgement of the negatives you’re trying to counter can be an effective tool to reduce backlash.

There are two key steps to doing this effectively:

First, start your sentence by pre-acknowledging the negative perception. You might say something like, “It might seem like I’m only looking out for my department’s interests…”

Then, follow this up by sharing your intention. For example “...but my intention is to make sure we spend this money on safety training now, so we don’t have huge costs down the line that hurt both our departments”

This approach will let you be seen as self-aware and empathetic to the other party’s position, both of which work to make them more amenable to your request or proposal. And you don’t even need to soften your ask to make it work! Woo hoo!

Don’t Fall Victim to the Over-Softening Trap

Softening is a powerful tool, but it can come with some serious career side effects that will undercut your long term trajectory at work.

The keys to success when it comes to softening language are discernment and choice. I want you to be able to notice the places where you tend to soften instinctively and decide whether softening is needed, helpful, or strategic in that moment. And then I want you to move from softening automatically to being able to choose when to use your softening skills.

I hope you’ve been able to find some actionable strategies in this article so you can make sure you don’t fall victim to the over-softening trap – and if you still need some help with how you show up at work, I’d love to help. Whether it’s through leadership coaching or negotiation coaching, we can work together to help you learn when to be bold and when to hold back so you can increase your influence at work. Grab some time in my calendar and let’s get started!