On the July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, a WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, communications coach Peter Novak of Strictly Speaking Group challenged the notion that flawless English is the key to effective global business communication. Instead, Novak emphasized clarity, confidence, and trust across borders as the real drivers of success in increasingly distributed teams.
Novak, a former 25-year professor at the University of San Francisco with a doctorate in dramaturgy, walked listeners through practical strategies for leading multilingual teams. He highlighted how unconscious bias, particularly the like-me bias, shapes who gets promoted and believed at work. This bias often disadvantages non-native speakers, even when their ideas are strong.
A major focus was on phrasal verbs—those combinations of verbs and prepositions like "take off," "take up," "take over," and "take down"—that can quietly derail non-native English speakers. Novak recommended using AI prompts to swap these for stronger, clearer verbs, making communication more accessible. He also cited a McGill University study on foreign accents, which revealed how trust and credibility are often tied to confident delivery rather than accent-free speech.
Novak reframed inclusive communication as a bottom-line issue: "The best way to position it is that this is a business issue, that you need your communication to be as clear as possible to everyone, not just to a select few." He pushed back on the idea that non-native speakers must adapt, using a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers analogy: "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels." Non-native colleagues, he argued, are translating, interpreting, and vocabulary-hunting in real time while native speakers barrel ahead.
The conversation also covered concrete tactics. Novak described building executive voiceprints by feeding hundreds of hours of transcripts into AI so leaders can deliver scripts that sound like them. He shared a 20-question intake he uses to help executives tell their teams exactly how they want to be communicated with, from pre-reads to agenda formats. He referenced Yakov Smirnoff on the absurdity of English, contrasted Ernest Hemingway's accessibility with Oscar Wilde writing "for about 6 people," and noted that Latin American teams often operate trilingually in Spanish, Portuguese, and English until a monolingual American enters the room and collapses the exchange back to English. He also flagged cultural intelligence lessons from his own preparation for business in Tokyo and Dubai.
The episode underscores that strong workplace communication is not about bigger words or flawless English. It is about clarity, confidence, and trust—an increasingly urgent skill as global teams grow more distributed. Novak's insights offer a working playbook for leaders aiming to foster inclusive, effective communication across borders.
