In a recent episode of the WRKdefined podcast "You Should Know," communications coach Peter Novak challenged the notion that perfect grammar and big words are essential for effective workplace communication. Instead, Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and a former professor at the University of San Francisco, emphasized that clarity, confidence, and trust are the true drivers of success in global business environments.
Drawing from his coaching experience with executives at major corporations, Novak highlighted how unconscious biases, including the well-documented like-me bias, shape who gets promoted and believed. He also pointed out that phrasal verbs such as "take off," "take up," "take over," and "take down" can quietly derail non-native English speakers, and recommended using AI prompts to swap these for stronger, clearer verbs.
Novak referenced a McGill University study on foreign accents to discuss how trust and credibility are influenced by confident delivery. He noted that investor relations teams now use AI to score CEO language choice and tone of voice during earnings calls, underscoring the importance of communication precision.
Repeatedly, Novak reframed inclusive communication as a bottom-line issue rather than a political one. "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 said. He also pushed back on the idea that non-native speakers should be the ones to 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 moved into concrete tactics. Novak described building executive voiceprints by feeding hundreds of hours of transcripts into AI so leaders can deliver scripts that sound authentically like them. He shared a 20-question intake he uses to help executives communicate their preferences to their teams, 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.
