The Business Value
Of Getting People’s
Names Right
Discover 4 tips for nailing name pronunciation
By Praveen Shanbhag
In 2013, Under Armour was an upstart sports
apparel company when it landed basketball
superstar Steph Curry. While the headline is history,
what’s less known is why he ended up signing
there: Because Nike botched it. One Nike official
repeatedly mispronounced Curry’s first name in the
pitch meeting.
Nike’s loss was Under Armour’s gain—an estimated
$14 billion in brand value.
Messing up people’s names has a cost. In a recent
NameCoach survey, we found that people whose
names are mispronounced often feel annoyed,
disrespected, alienated, or unimportant. And it
happens far more often than companies realize. In
the same study, 44% of participants said their name
had been mispronounced in an interview. This is
happening across workplaces, including by CEOs and
HR leaders.
It’s a problem that companies can’t afford to
keep making.
What’s in a Name?
People’s names are deeply personal. There are
family names, fathers’ names, names in honor of
relatives who have passed. There are names that
are cultural, names that are incidental. There are
names grabbed from favorite characters or created
because a parent liked the way the syllables sound.
More fundamentally, names are the first sense of self
that we have; your name is the initial identifier that
connects you to yourself.
When we mispronounce someone’s name, we’ve
telegraphed that we’ve distorted that person’s
sense of identity. It can be subtle—but it’s there. The
more it happens, the more it can feel like death by a
thousand cuts.
In the workplace, accurately pronouncing someone’s
name is vital to recruiting and retaining talented
employees. In the recruiting and interviewing
process, using a candidate’s name can build initial
rapport and help a company stand apart. Done right,
it can help a new employee feel at home during
onboarding and orientation.
Pronouncing a colleague’s name correctly also
contributes to psychological safety, that belief that
you can speak up at work without being afraid of
scorn or reprisal. A recent Harvard Business Review
article noted that psychological safety has been
“well established as a critical driver of high-quality
decision making, healthy group dynamics and
interpersonal relationships, greater innovation, and
more effective execution in organizations.” On the flip
side, people whose names are perceived to be hard to
pronounce are often marginalized in the workplace.
Colleagues, afraid of getting a name wrong, either
point to that person to speak or ignore them entirely.
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