We is an incredibly economical and efficient little word with massive implications.
In just two letters, it can express “You and I are the same,” or “You and I are in the same group,” or “You and I are in this together.”
At the same time, it (that is, we) can do the opposite. In just two letters, it can express “My group is different from yours,” or “You’re not welcome here,” or “You and I aren’t in this together, because I’m with them.”
In other words, when we say we, we’re saying a lot more than we realize. We is a politically charged word. It identifies how you and I are yoked together or at odds. It reveals who is in the in-group and who is in the out-group. It persuades and even coerces by toying with our human need for belonging.
We should be used with care—especially when so many don’t quite know where they fit in.
This is literally semantics. No “just” about it. And semantics has practical implications throughout our lives and work. In what follows, I look at those practical implications in three areas of work-life: marketing and sales, management, and leadership.
Marketing & Sales
Copywriting, the practice of producing persuasive text typically to influence reader behavior, relies on you instead of we. The copywriter wants to create distance between, say, the company pitching their product and the potential customer. That distance represents the skill, knowledge, power, creativity, etc., that make it possible for the company to have a solution to the potential customer’s problem. Designating difference between the company and the customer is critical to making a convincing case for a product.
As one accomplished copywriter put it (albeit with a flair for the dramatic):
…it’s important that you start thinking of the word “we” as the root of all evil.
Really hate on it.
Growl when you see it.
Slap your fingers when they consider typing it.
Advice culture (specifically, self-promotional advice culture) in online spaces uses you similarly. The advice giver must establish a difference between them and the audience to make a credible claim of unique or secret knowledge. Scroll through Substack, Threads, Bluesky, and even Instagram, and you’ll find copious use of the second-person to position the communicator as different from their intended audience.
If using the second-person pronoun works, in effect, to other the person receiving the communication, then switching to the first-person plural, we, makes sense in scenarios where the communicator doesn’t want to other the receiver. Instead of creating distance, the communicator may want to create a sense of closeness or even intimacy.
While you might work best in overtly persuasive communication, like copywriting, we is often employed in covertly or indirectly persuasive communication. A manager might use we with their team to get buy-in on a company initiative. A political commentator might use we when speaking to their audience to signal and strengthen group identity. A content creator might use we to tighten parasocial bonds and set the stage for future marketing campaigns.
Effective communicators seem to have a good intuition for using we in these ways—even if they’re unaware of the mechanics.
Seth Godin, a bona fide marketing guru, writes:
“People like us do things like this”
There is no more powerful tribal marketing connection than this.
Us and we are two sides of the same first-person plural pronoun coin. Godin is exactly right that this is an incredibly powerful (and persuasive) formulation. And his (continued) cringeworthy use of the term tribe points to why. People in the same group want to uphold the norms and expectations of that group. To do otherwise is to risk losing membership to the group—a point I’ll return to later.
So, the team member buys into their manager’s plan. The audience member shifts their views to align with the political commentator. The follower smashes the like button or shares content with a friend when the creator asks them to. This isn’t necessarily problematic behavior, but it can be (and often is) abused. In fact, it’s part of the playbook that cult leaders, authoritarians, and all sorts of other abusers use.
We can be just as effective as you for creating distance. It just acts on a different relationship than you does. We can separate an in-group from an out-group while reinforcing in-group norms and expectations. You can separate the communicator from the receiver while using that distance to establish social order.
On the surface, we might seem more inclusive than you. But dig a little deeper, and its complexity becomes apparent.
Management
Management is, in one dictionary sense, “the process of dealing with or controlling things or people.” And while today’s managers have the kind of software and data that Frederick Taylor could have only dreamed of, the main technology of management is language. How a manager talks about projects, responsibilities, and goals impacts how their team responds. Learning the best scripts and encoding the right motivational triggers helps managers “deal with or control” the people they manage.
As mentioned above, a manager might use we to get buy-in for a company initiative among their team. We acts to identify the team members as stakeholders in the company rather than people following instructions or fulfilling a job description. We can also spark the competitive spirit, as when a manager rallies their team to beat another team to a goal. We is also critical to the adoption of standard operating procedures and company norms: “This is how we do things around here.”
While these are all legitimate uses of we, they can easily be abused. For example, a company might deploy we to combat unionizing efforts (e.g., “We’re a family—we don’t need a union to solve our problems.”). Or a manager might try to create a norm around working evenings or weekends by asserting, “We know how important this work is.”
In both of these scenarios, the use of we functions to separate individuals with less power from those who might undermine people with more power (e.g., the worker is separated from the union or the employee is separated from friends and family who might question their overworking). This us-versus-them dynamic is key to the playbook those with power (or who want power) use or, as linguist Amanda Montell puts it, “totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power without using language to till a psychological schism between their followers and everyone else.”
Luckily, as managers, we don’t have to be totalitarian leaders. We can use language that encourages cooperation and collaboration rather than obedience.
Cultivating awareness around plural pronouns and their use illuminates the idiosyncrasies of pluralistic culture and reminds us to think outside our limited concepts of ‘normal.’ This issue is especially salient during social and political unrest. The stakes are higher, the risks are greater, and our anxiety about whether or not we belong is palpable.
Psychologist Laura McHale explains that our sense of status and how we relate to others in our group are “stress/reward triggers:”
The exclusive “we” may reward Status for the ingroup members, but it threatens Status for the outgroup – especially those that want to belong. For outgroup members, the exclusive “we” meddles with the sense of Relatedness and creates insecure Attachment. Those not included in the “we” (an experience common for generations of non-White Americans, for example), have a sense of not belonging or feeling welcome. This activates all the pain centers of the brain. It is a pernicious influence in our organizations and can frustrate everything from our strategies to create more creative and collaborative cultures to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
While we can view management as something a bit more transactional or goal-oriented, leadership is much more complex. How we lead (or how we are led) impacts us at work, at home, and everywhere in between.
Leadership
The day after the 2016 election, I dialed in to a small group call with my business coach at the time. Knowing they couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room, our coach acknowledged that we might be feeling shocked or upset. Then, they said something like, ‘But we’re entrepreneurs. We carry on and go back to business. That’s who we are.’
That was not who I was. Eight years ago, I couldn’t explain why I immediately felt estranged from the group. I was hurt and angry and very, very confused.
Shortly after, I realized that my coach’s we didn’t include me. They didn’t mean to exclude me, of course. They were trying to be encouraging and comforting to everyone. But by lumping the group together based on entrepreneurial identity rather than creating space for the countless other identities we hold, their words felt dismissive and alienating.
I didn’t want to put my identity as an entrepreneur ahead of my other (much more “me”) identities. Besides, my entrepreneurial identity was rooted in my other identities. Not only did I not want to separate them, I couldn’t.
Over the last eight years, I’ve endeavored to lead not as an entrepreneur or business owner or (god help me) thought leader but as someone whose complex identities remind me of the complex identities of others. True leadership, I’ve come to believe, challenges us to reject a homogenous, simple we and embrace a truly plural we.
Because, beyond word choice, the much, much bigger issue is who one thinks of when one thinks of we. The solution to the problem of we isn’t to stop using the word or didactically double-check whether it’s appropriate in a given scenario. Nor is the solution trying to come up with the broadest, most inclusive, and wishy-washy we. Groups can and often should have boundaries.
Instead, the choice to use we should spark the imagination. It should cause us to examine our assumptions, biases, and limitations. It should encourage us to imagine different experiences, beliefs, abilities, and emotions. We can be a door into a world where recognizing our differences inspires us to work in solidarity.
