Record of Team Achievement Pronouns
The announcement said we built something. The announcement did not specify which members of we were involved in building it, which members were informed after building, and which members are included in we as a courtesy.
Record of Team Achievement Pronouns Correspondence, November 1, 2021
Dear Achievement We,
This letter constitutes a formal record of your deployment during the Q3 launch period. You were used in eleven communications, three all-hands updates, and one post-mortem summary between July and October 2021.
Deployment Record
You appeared in the announcement that the new feature had shipped. You appeared in the retrospective that celebrated its adoption. You appeared in the message to the broader organization explaining what the team had accomplished and what it meant for the roadmap.
In all eleven instances you referred to a group whose exact composition was not defined.
Assessment of Scope
The team that built the feature consisted of four engineers and one product manager. The announcement was sent to forty-seven people. The we in the announcement encompassed all forty-seven, including three people who joined after the feature shipped and two who work in a different time zone and had not yet been briefed on what shipped or why.
This is standard practice.
The Structural Function
The pronoun we performs inclusion at the moment of announcement without requiring inclusion at any earlier moment. A person receiving an announcement that begins with we built something experiences a brief affiliation with the accomplishment that does not require them to have contributed to it.
This is not dishonest. It is a feature of the pronoun.
Areas of Note
In four of the eleven instances, we was used in a context where the decision had been made by one person. That person did not use I in the announcement. This is consistent with organizational communication norms in which individual decisions are attributed to collective agreement as a courtesy to the decision-maker, who benefits from appearing to have broad support, and to the audience, who benefits from believing they were represented in a decision they were not consulted on.
Both parties find this arrangement acceptable enough to continue.
Finding
No revision to pronoun usage is recommended. We will continue to serve its function, which is to communicate shared ownership of outcomes while leaving the distribution of shared labor unspecified.
The record will be updated after Q4 closes.
Respectfully, The Announcement Archive