Glossary
Management vocabulary, minus the jargon
Management and coaching vocabulary is full of words that sound precise and are used loosely. These are the definitions we work from.
- Code-switchinglanguage switching
Moving between languages inside a single exchange — in Mauritius, between Kreol, French and English — according to who is present, the subject, or the degree of formality intended.
It is the most ordinary linguistic fact of Mauritian working life, and the least often treated as a management subject. Switching is neither a failure of fluency nor a lapse: it carries meaning. Moving into Kreol can defuse tension or close distance; moving into English can formalise, create distance, or simply signal that you are entering the register of the official document.
What a manager gains from seeing it: the same switches that ease an exchange can also shut someone out of the table, and can hide the competence of a person who follows perfectly well but will only contradict in one of the three languages. Management vocabulary written elsewhere has no word for this — hence this entry.
- Delegationlevels of delegation
Handing over a task with the level of autonomy decided in advance — from "do it and report back" to "decide alone" — rather than handing it over without saying which you expect.
Delegation rarely fails because the person was incapable. It fails because the level of autonomy was never stated: the manager believed they had handed over a decision, the other person believed they had been handed an execution, and each holds the other responsible for the misunderstanding.
The symptom to watch for is taking the work back. A manager who reliably reclaims the file on the third day does not have a delegation problem but a level problem: they delegated higher than they could bear, and it is better to delegate one level lower and hold it than to delegate high and take it back.
- DISCDISC profile · the colours method
DISC is a behavioural model describing four preferences — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness — used to understand how someone tends to communicate and decide at work.
DISC describes behaviour rather than personality, and describes it in a working context specifically. It is deliberately simple: four preferences, observable in a meeting, usable within minutes of meeting someone.
Its value is practical rather than diagnostic. Knowing that a counterpart wants the conclusion before the detail changes how you open a conversation. It says nothing about what they are like as a person, and treating a profile as a verdict is the most common way DISC gets misused.
- Enneagramthe nine bases
The Enneagram is a model of self-understanding describing nine bases, each defined by a core motivation and by what it seeks to avoid, rather than by visible behaviour.
Where DISC describes what a person does, the Enneagram looks for what makes them act: the core motivation of a base, and the avoidance that is its other side. That is what explains reactions a behavioural model does not predict, particularly under pressure, where each base shifts in a fairly regular way.
Two limits are stated upfront. The Enneagram is not a scientific instrument and predicts no performance: it therefore has no place in recruitment or appraisal. And a base is not assigned from the outside — it is recognised by the person themselves, which is precisely what separates the model from a test.
- Professional co-developmentco-development · peer group
A structured six-step method in which a group of peers helps one of their own with a stuck situation, forbidding advice until they have questioned and understood it.
The discipline of the format does all the work. In an ordinary meeting, advice arrives before the situation is understood, and the person presenting defends themselves instead of thinking. Co-development forbids advice during the first two steps and imposes a period of questions: most often it is the person themselves who reframes their problem at that point, and it is the reframing that unblocks things.
Three roles rotate from one session to the next: the client, who presents; the consultants, who question and then propose; the facilitator, who holds the sequence. An experienced group does without an outside facilitator after three or four sessions.
- Situational leadershipsituational management
The principle that the right management style depends on how autonomous the person is on the task at hand, rather than on the manager's temperament or on a style they have adopted.
The idea is simple and rarely applied: the same person does not call for the same style on every task. Experienced in their own trade, they want to be left to it; on a file they have never handled, that same “I’ll leave it with you” is abandonment.
It is what makes the question “what is your management style?” less useful than it sounds. The relevant answer is not a style but an ability to change style, and the main obstacle is not knowing the model but habit: most managers apply the style that is comfortable for them and call it a conviction.
- Team coachinggroup coaching
Work with a collective that is not functioning, beginning with a diagnosis — individual interviews and observation of a real meeting — before any working session.
Team coaching differs from a cohesion seminar in its starting point: it treats a collective that has stopped working, where a seminar strengthens one that works. Confusing the two is the most expensive mistake in this field — a seminar placed on top of untreated conflict enforces a warmth nobody feels and leaves the team worse off than before.
The entry condition is rarely negotiable: the sponsor must accept that the diagnosis may call their own way of operating into question. Without that agreement, given before anything starts, the engagement stops at the diagnosis.