Master Global Communication: Clarity Over Big Words

The July 6, 2026 episode of You Should Know, the WRKdefined podcast on workplace leadership, features communications coach Peter Novak, founder of Strictly Speaking Group and a former 25-year professor at the University of San Francisco. Novak, who trained as a Jesuit, earned an MFA in acting and holds a doctorate in dramaturgy, joins host William to argue that strong workplace communication is not about bigger words or flawless English. It is about clarity, confidence, and trust across borders, an increasingly urgent skill as global teams grow more distributed.

Listeners get a working playbook for leading multilingual teams. Novak walks through several threads pulled from his coaching practice with executives at major corporations: how unconscious bias, including the well-documented like-me bias, shapes who gets promoted and believed at work; why phrasal verbs (take off, take up, take over, take down) quietly derail non-native English speakers, and how AI prompts can swap them for stronger, clearer verbs; what a McGill University study on foreign accents reveals about trust, credibility, and confident delivery; and how investor relations teams now run CEO earnings calls through AI to score language choice and tone of voice.

Novak repeatedly reframes 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 the host. He also 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 actually 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.