In the July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, the WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, communications coach Peter Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and former professor at the University of San Francisco, challenges the assumption that workplace communication success hinges on big words or perfect English. Instead, Novak contends that clarity, confidence, and trust across borders are the true drivers of effective global business communication—an increasingly urgent skill as teams become more distributed.
Novak, who holds an MFA in acting and a doctorate in dramaturgy, draws on his extensive coaching practice with executives at major corporations to offer 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 notes that phrasal verbs—such as "take off," "take up," "take over," and "take down"—quietly derail non-native English speakers, and suggests using AI prompts to swap them for stronger, clearer verbs.
A McGill University study on foreign accents reveals insights into trust, credibility, and confident delivery. Novak also points out that investor relations teams now run CEO earnings calls through AI to score language choice and tone of voice. He repeatedly frames 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 tells host William.
Novak 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 pivotal leadership challenges shaping the modern workplace. The episode featuring Peter Novak is available now wherever podcasts are heard.
