Why Confidence Beats Perfect Grammar in Global Business English, Says Communications Coach Peter Novak

In the July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, a WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, communications coach Peter Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and a former 25-year professor at the University of San Francisco, argued that strong workplace communication is not about bigger words or flawless English. Instead, it is about clarity, confidence, and trust across borders, an increasingly urgent skill as global teams grow more distributed.

Novak, who trained as a Jesuit, earned an MFA in acting and holds a doctorate in dramaturgy, joined host William to discuss how unconscious bias, including the well-documented like-me bias, shapes who gets promoted and believed at work. He also explained why phrasal verbs—such as take off, take up, take over, and take down—quietly derail non-native English speakers, and how AI prompts can swap them for stronger, clearer verbs.

Novak referenced a McGill University study on foreign accents that reveals insights about trust, credibility, and confident delivery. He noted that investor relations teams now run CEO earnings calls through AI to score language choice and tone of voice, highlighting the bottom-line impact of inclusive communication.

"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 told the host. He pushed 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 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 actually sound like them. He shared 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 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.

Novak repeatedly reframed inclusive communication as a bottom-line issue rather than a political one. The episode is available now wherever podcasts are heard.