In the July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, a WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, communications coach Peter Novak argues that strong workplace communication hinges on clarity, confidence, and trust—not on bigger words or flawless English. As global teams become more distributed, this skill is increasingly urgent, Novak tells host William.
Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and a former 25-year professor at the University of San Francisco, draws on his coaching practice with executives at major corporations to outline a working playbook for leading multilingual teams. He highlights how unconscious bias, including the well-documented like-me bias, shapes who gets promoted and believed at work. He also explains why phrasal verbs (such as "take off," "take up," "take over," "take down") quietly derail non-native English speakers, and suggests using AI prompts to swap them for stronger, clearer verbs.
Novak points to a McGill University study on foreign accents that reveals how trust and credibility are affected by confident delivery. He notes that investor relations teams now run CEO earnings calls through AI to score language choice and tone of voice. "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," Novak says.
He pushes back on the idea that non-native speakers are the ones who must adapt, invoking a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers analogy: "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels." Non-native colleagues, he argues, are translating, interpreting, and vocabulary-hunting in real time while native speakers barrel ahead.
The conversation moves into concrete tactics. Novak describes building executive voiceprints by feeding hundreds of hours of transcripts into AI so leaders can deliver scripts that sound like them. He shares a 20-question intake he uses to help new executives tell their teams exactly how they want to be communicated with, from pre-reads to agenda formats. He references Yakov Smirnoff on the absurdity of English, contrasts Ernest Hemingway's accessibility with Oscar Wilde writing "for about 6 people," and notes 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 flags cultural intelligence lessons from his own preparation for business in Tokyo and Dubai.
You Should Know is a WRKdefined podcast tackling the pivotal leadership challenges shaping the modern workplace. The episode featuring Peter Novak is available now wherever podcasts are heard.
