Unspoken Dictionaries

In my experience, most work conflicts don’t come from disagreement.

They come from undefined terms.

For example:

Your new manager tells you they need something “by end of day tomorrow.”

You say, “no problem,” and send it at 10 pm your time—the end of your day.

Later, you find out:

“End of day” to them meant 5 pm They’re on the East Coast So in their mind, it was due at 2 pm your time

Now your manager thinks you delivered something 8 hours late.

You’re confused because you thought you both agreed.

No one is technically wrong.

But you were never actually aligned.

You were using the same words—just not the same definitions.

That’s where most friction lives.

When you work with someone long enough, you build a shared understanding of what things mean. “End of day,” “urgent,” “ASAP”—they stop being vague because you’ve quietly defined them together over time.

But when you start working with someone new, that shared language doesn’t exist yet. And assuming it does is where things break down.

We don’t just communicate with words.

We communicate with the meaning we attach to them.

And most of the time, we forget to check if that meaning is actually shared.

If something matters, define it.

Because “end of day” isn’t a time—

it’s an assumption.