**Business Book Awards 2025 Finalist**

The unspoken rules and unquestioned assumptions that make up an organization’s culture are so well hidden that, once we become insiders, we stop noticing them. They’re just ‘the way we do things around here’. But shared internal language – ‘the way we talk around here’ – both reflects and sustains the unconscious patterns of thought, behaviour and interaction that add up to culture. So examining an organization’s language is a powerful and pragmatic way to shed light on its culture.

Gill Ereaut describes how to uncover organizational and team cultures through paying close attention to the language used by insiders. Discover:

• How and why an organization’s internal language can point to the silent assumptions that underpin its culture

• How to use language patterns to identify unconscious rules and norms, often rooted in the past, so people can work out which still serve the organization well, and which don’t

• Practical tools to help everyone reshape unhelpful shared habits of thinking, and generate effective, continuous and positive change.

If you’re responsible for guiding an organizational or team culture – or if you’re trying to thrive within one – find out how listening to language can help you map, understand and even inspire change within that culture.

If you’re a leader, manager, or anyone interested in improving workplace culture and communication, The Way We Talk Around Here is a must-read. It’ll change the way you listen, the way you speak, and the way you have conversations at work. – NetGalley 5*

The book shines in its practicality, offering clear strategies for leaders to identify outdated cultural norms and use language to drive meaningful change. While it focuses deeply on linguistics, it provides fresh insights into how small shifts in communication can transform an organization’s culture.

Accessible and thought-provoking, this book is perfect for leaders, HR professionals, and anyone looking to improve their workplace dynamics. It’s a quick, actionable read that challenges you to listen more closely and use words as a tool for cultural transformation. – NetGalley 5*

As a Team Leadership Coach, I am often surprised at how little attention is given to how we frame our conversations for growth and performance. This book gets to the heart of the matter and balances academic research with experience to offer a lens on how we talk to each other. – Amazon 5*

Gill’s warm, clear, informative style had me nodding along from start to finish – and frequently pencilling notes in the margins as ‘Aha!’ and ‘Eureka!’ moments strike…Language is “the depth on the surface”. Gill’s book (which to my knowledge, is unique) will help you tune in to the language surrounding you. Perhaps for the very first time, you will begin to see how it might be holding back the entire organisation – and with some small but significant changes, could also have the power to set it free. – Amazon 5*

Drawing on a powerful combination of theory, including Edgar Schein’s model for organisational cultures, and practical application described through case studies, this book shines a unique light on how to analyse and understand the deeper reaches of organisational culture, thereby enabling, if required, a profound and sustainable shift to be put into effect. – Amazon 5*

This approach to understanding organisational culture is by far the best I’ve found. Once you’ve seen the world this way, you can’t unsee it anymore. The book is an excellent introduction to a simple yet sophisticated methodology for giving leaders agency to nurture and promote the sorts of cultures we need in the organisations we lead. – Dyfed Alsop, Prif Weithredwr / Chief Executive, Awdurdod Cyllid Cymru / Welsh Revenue Authority

I have always described culture as “what people around here do when no-one is looking”. It can therefore be difficult to read and to assess. Gill’s insights around the use of language and discourse provide incredibly useful frameworks to codify culture for those involved in leading change. Essential reading for those contemplating business transformation. – Paul Donovan, Serial CEO, Angel Investor and Venture Philanthropist

Easy to read and rich in ideas, this book will help you to understand how the way we talk shapes the way we think, act and connect with each other. The author combines her academic insights with practical experience to offer ways to understand and shift the culture of your team, department and organization and, most importantly, how to make it better for everyone. – Kathryn Bishop CBE, Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Consultant and Non-Executive Director. Author of Board Talk: 18 crucial conversations that count inside and outside the boardroom

I was genuinely enthralled. I read it in two sittings and was delighted to learn so much, even though I’ve worked with Gill. I remembered how surprised we were to learn what her language work had revealed about our culture. Macro conclusions from the analysis were not just eye opening but actionable; the shock she mentions in the book was real and was truly a catalyst for change. – Barb Agoglia, Founder of FreshEyes Business and Brand Strategy Consultants, NYC. Former VP of Global Brand and Marketing for B2B Payments, American Express

A must-read for anyone interested in organisational culture, in the ongoing challenges of how to measure it, and how to change it. Gill Ereaut provides a practical guide to understanding how a company’s everyday language can hold a mirror up to what people are really thinking and why they are behaving as they do. If you want to transform any aspect of your organisation, you should read this powerful guide first. – Caroline Fawcett, Customer Experience Consultant and Non-Executive Director, Financial Services

For our Masters students in Organizational Psychology, Human Resource Management, and Management Consultancy & Organizational Change, this would be an inspiring and informative text, showing how a method that we introduce to them in an academic context (via methodological and empirical academic papers using discourse analysis) can also be used in organizational practice. In fact, many of our mature students already work in these fields and they would all potentially be interested in this book, even without their Masters student identities.

Gill Ereaut has done an amazing job in explaining and unpacking discourse analysis. The book includes some fantastic materials in the examples and case studies that really bring the discursive approach to life. It’s a great read – I wish it had existed years ago when I started my own discourse analysis journey! – Rebecca Whiting PhD, Reader in Organization Studies at Birkbeck, University of London

A wonderful writing style – clear, unfussy, accessible, able to render complex ideas simply. It’s a very rich distillation of decades of experience. The case studies/examples really made it come alive – these, and how the author uses them to illustrate specific language points, are a really important part of the book’s uniqueness and readability. – Clare Anderson PhD, Bold Leap Consulting

In this interesting and accessible book, Gill Ereaut shows how language analysis can offer valuable insights into the self-organizing patterning of people’s ongoing interactions that we think of as organizational culture. I recommend it to anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of how culture ‘shows up’ in the language used by people in their everyday conversations, and what this might mean for their own perspective, practice and performance. – Chris Rodgers, Director, Chris Rodgers Consulting Ltd. Author of The Wiggly World of Organization and Informal Coalitions

Organisations are usually judged using numbers like turnover or profits or return on investment. But this very important book explains how words are at least as important as numbers and indeed often more important, because language expresses and shapes culture, which is the most important determinant of organisational success. – Professor Sir Muir Gray, The Oxford Value and Stewardship Programme

I’ve seen Gill’s methods in action, and I know they work. She’s now done us all a service by writing this clear and fascinating account of how she does it, and why the language people use every day makes such a difference to an organisation’s performance. – Paul Feldwick, Author and Consultant

Gill Ereaut brings linguistic analysis into the boardroom and onto the shop floor and shows its power to clear the obstacles to cultural transformation in a wide range of businesses and public organisations. We all know that language matters: now there’s a way to use this obvious insight to make a difference. – David Landsman OBE, NED, Chair and Adviser, Former Ambassador and Executive Director

Gill Ereaut’s unique approach is like structured alchemy – creating gold (a deep understanding of an organisation’s culture) from the base metal of everyday language. Having experienced the work in practice, I can confidently say that anyone interested in or charged with nurturing a different organisational culture would do well to read this original, thoughtful and practical book. – Michael Coughlin, Public Sector Consultant and Transformation Advisor to the UK Local Government Association

Gill Ereaut takes a fresh and original look at culture, not through behaviours or values, but through the everyday language that shapes them. The Way We Talk Around Here challenges leaders to notice the words and narratives that define decisions, priorities, and workplace dynamics. It’s insightful, thought-provoking, and practical, offering a tool leaders can use immediately. An excellent and highly relevant contribution

Judges’ comment from the Business Book Awards 2025

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section I: Why the way we talk around here matters
  • Chapter 1: The public and private faces of organizational culture
  • Chapter 2: How can we think about organizational culture?
  • Chapter 3: What’s so useful about organizational language?
• Section II: What organizational talk can tell us
  • Chapter 4: Turning everyday language into data
  • Chapter 5: Culture question 1: Who are ‘we’ and what matters around here?
  • Chapter 6: Culture question 2: Who are ‘they’ out there and what do we think of them?
  • Chapter 7: Culture question 3: How do we ‘do’ relationships with each other and with ‘them’ out there?
• Section III: How we change things around here
  • Chapter 8: Pulling the analysis together
  • Chapter 9: Working with what emerges
  • Chapter 10: Into the future: a cultural health plan
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index

FORMAT / ISBN / PUBLICATION DATE / RRP

Paperback / 9781788604840 / November 26, 2024 / £19.99

Hardback / 9781788605885 / November 26, 2024 / £29.99

Ebook / 9781788604963 / November 25, 2024 / £9.99

Paperback and eBook Bundle / £22.49

Gill Ereaut

Since 2002 Gill Ereaut has pioneered the commercial application of language analysis to tough organizational challenges. Leading the UK-based consultancy Linguistic Landscapes, she focused on the vexed question of how to define and diagnose corporate cultures so they can be understood, managed and helped to evolve.
Throughout her first career in market research, Gill became curious about how organizations talk and why it might matter. Each client company’s shared language seemed to sustain a powerful internal world view – one often at odds with that of their customers, but strangely resistant to new information. She wanted to make these internal organizational worlds explicit and conscious, to reduce their obstructive effects.
This led her to discourse analysis and, over 20 years, she developed commercial processes to apply these academic ideas and tools to common business problems. She works with organizations across the UK, Europe and North America including British Airways, HMRC, American Express, NHS, Roche, British Red Cross, Oxfam GB and GlaxoSmithKline.