We should kill “We Should”
You can tell a lot about a team by how it talks. You don’t need access to strategy docs or Jira. Just sit through a few meetings and listen. What’s said, how it’s said, what happens next. Or doesn’t.
There’s one phrase that shows up in almost every mediocre meeting: “We should…”
It sounds useful. Responsible. Strategic. It’s not.
It’s a linguistic placeholder — a way to describe a desirable future while avoiding the friction of making it happen. It’s usually followed by an ideal state, not a plan. No steps, no owners, no deadlines. Just a vague sense of what “better” might look like.
And that’s the trap: “We should” is how smart people sound like they’re contributing when they’re actually avoiding clarity. It’s the mask worn when someone wants to be seen as thoughtful, but doesn’t want to be wrong, or accountable.
I’ve seen this play out even in simple situations. A team wants to communicate a decision internally. Somehow, that turns into a 30-minute discussion about all the tooling we don’t have, what worked at their last job, and how “we should” standardize communication processes. In the end: no message sent, no plan made. The gap between ideal and real just got bigger.
That’s what this pattern does. It creates fake alignment. Everyone agrees in theory. No one moves in practice.
When this kind of talk goes unchallenged, the team gets performative. People speak in perfect vision statements and untestable goals. It sounds great. Nothing changes. And if you’re new or junior, it’s even worse — you think this is how you’re supposed to talk. Like you’re earning credibility by pointing to the summit, even if you’ve never taken the first step.
So I started cutting it.
Not with harsh corrections — that just makes people defensive. But with questions. “Who’s we?” “Is that me, you, or this room?” Then I offer the alternative: don’t say ‘we should,’ ask ‘how could we?’ Followed by a first step. Assignable. Concrete.
I’ve seen people shift quickly. Some resist — especially if they’ve built careers on management-speak. They’re used to declaring what should happen without touching the how. For them, it’s a dethroning. But others grow fast. They bring the same rule into their own teams. They start building momentum instead of narratives.
Over time, you see something else. The people who talk about ideal states the most are rarely the ones who move the team toward them. The ones who do real work — the ones who build paths, unblock others, take steps — almost never speak in grand abstractions. They ask better questions. They stay low to the ground. They focus on the next right move.
That’s the real tell.