The HBR Channel: Why Everyone at Your Company Should Speak (A Little) English

 
Podcast Transcript
SG:Hi I’m Sarah Green. I’m here today with Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely. Thanks so much for coming in.
TN: Thanks for having me.
SG: You’ve made the case that companies should have a common language. What’s the benefit for companies of having a common language?
TN: Well, companies need a language strategy, especially if they have any type of global aspirations. When you have an employee base that’s spread across the world, across geographies, across national boundaries, you need to find a way to get them to communicate and how do you do that if you don’t have some form of a language strategy or a common language? And what’s happening too today is that companies are very quickly starting to adopt English as a common language or a lingua franca is the term as well and they’re doing that in order to serve customers, in order to have better partner relationships and their competitors are doing it as well.
SG: You made the case that English should be that lingua franca. Why English and not say, a language like Mandarin?
TN: It’s a great question. I’m not the one who is selecting the choice for a common language. English is actually a common language of business today and so when I talk about language strategies oftentimes interchangeable with the English language. And the question of Mandarin comes out often. People think, you know, China is rising and will it one day take over in the language choice? And I argue that for now it won’t, because English has some advantages that for example Mandarin doesn’t. The English language has had a massive head start and be imbedded around the world through the colonial history of the British and the American spread of its culture. Mandarin, on the other hand, you have less people around the world who are not from that region who speak it, and the second thing is that it’s much more difficult, it’s easier for people to speak broken English than it is broken Mandarin.
SG: That’s a really good point. So when companies are deciding whether they need a language strategy like that? Do they need to, do all companies need one or just multinationals? What if a company is only based in the US?
TN: The companies with a global strategy need a language strategy, anytime you’re extending beyond your domestic place and you’re interacting with people with different language backgrounds then you need a language strategy. If a company is focused domestically only, it becomes less important but what I’m finding is, customers are getting spread around the world.
SG: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the implementation challenges with the language strategy. It seems like the kind of thing that could rub people the wrong way, if they have a strong sense of cultural identity and you’re asking them to learn another language for their job that seems like a sensitive issue.
TN: That’s exactly right. One of the reasons I argue in this article is that companies need to be very thoughtful in not only determining their language strategy but also implementing it, is because this is one of the toughest most radical things a company can ask their employees: to change a language but I’ve developed an adoption framework that caters to the needs of employees so that they don’t feel that their identities are being water down but instead they’re gaining a new skill that enhances their personal as well as their professional advancement. When you select an English language strategy, you’re feeling to work hard to make sure that your native speakers, American, your speakers from the UK, your speakers from Australia begin to communicate in ways that accommodate others so language strategies are also about insuring that everyone is involved in building up the linguistic capacity of a company. Native speakers have a big role to play.
SG: Could you just tell us a little bit about what you mean by how native speakers can help in that way?
TN: For one, native speakers can’t show up in a mixed language environment or mixed language skilled environment and speak as they do among themselves. They need to slow down, they need to use different vocabulary to accommodate others, they need to help their coworkers to communicate better, they literally have to change their communication behaviors in order to accommodate non-native speakers but what you find oftentimes is that native speakers continue on business as usual and that doesn’t work so they need to dial down while non-native speakers dial up and managers actually have to fully manage the processes of communication when you have people of all levels of fluency interacting in a common language.
SG: Well Tsedal, thanks so much for talking with us today about this.
TN: Thank you.