Chapter 8. Pace and Clarify
In global business, what counts is getting the job done clearly — not sounding native. Two small skills make the five moves land: a pace listeners can follow, and the habit of asking when you don't understand.
English as a business lingua franca
A research team at Aalto University in Finland spent the 2000s studying how professionals actually use English across borders. Drawing on a survey of 987 people and 27 follow-up interviews, they described English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF): English used as a shared working language among people who mostly aren't native speakers. B (Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta 2011)
What mattered to these professionals was getting the business done. They described the success factors as clarity, brevity, directness and politeness, supported by strategic skills: building rapport, asking for and giving clarification, and asking questions. In this view, BELF users aren't "learners" falling short of a native target; they're full members of a global business community.
What this does and doesn't prove. The research shows what experienced practitioners value, based on surveys and interviews. It does not prove experimentally that clarity beats pronunciation. The honest phrasing: "Asked what matters, about a thousand global professionals pointed to clarity and brevity, not native-like English."
Pace: fast is not the same as fluent
One theme repeats in posts by professionals who moved to U.S. teams: in some places, speaking fast is taken as a sign of English command. One engineer wrote that after moving to the U.S. he deliberately slowed down and noticed far fewer requests to repeat himself. On the listener side, colleagues describe difficulty following unfamiliar accents on phone and video calls without visual cues — and many replies point out that the simple fix is to ask people to slow down. Ccommunity reports
The controllable levers are pace, pauses and structure:
- Slow down noticeably, especially on numbers, names and technical terms.
- Pause for a full beat after your headline. Silence is where listeners process.
- Lead with the frame (Chapter 3) so listeners know what to listen for.
- On video calls, say the key point twice in different words, and put it in the chat.
The accent-credibility study, and why we don't lean on it
In 2010, Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar reported that trivia statements read in a foreign accent were judged less likely to be true, and explained this by processing difficulty: harder to hear, harder to believe. The study became famous. Bmixed replication
Replications disagree. Some reproduced the effect, including a 2021 study with Lev-Ari as co-author. Others found no difference, including Souza and Markman (2013), Stocker (2017) and Wetzel and colleagues (2021). One study even found that people with stronger regional accents were rated as more trustworthy. (Lorenzoni et al. 2024)
This book does not tell you that your accent makes you less credible. The science is unsettled, and the message is harmful. What we can say: if a listener is working hard to process your speech, the structural tools in this book — headline first, three points, short sentences, pauses — reduce that effort more reliably than accent training. Cfrom Chapter 3
Clarify: asking is a skill, not a weakness
In the BELF research, asking for and giving clarification is one of the core strategic skills of global English. Many fluent second-language speakers report that they follow 90% of a fast native-speaker discussion — and that the missing 10% is exactly where decisions get made. Asking closes that gap. B
- Confirm: "Just to make sure I got that — you mean…?"
- Request: "Could you say more about the second option?"
- Slow the room: "Can we pause on that for a second? I want to be sure we agree on the numbers."
Confidence, not proficiency
In 1986, Elaine Horwitz and colleagues defined foreign language anxiety and built a 33-item scale to measure it; the original showed high internal reliability (.93). The construct includes communication apprehension, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, and speaking is consistently the most anxiety-provoking skill. A
This matches what we hear from engineers: one H-1B engineer who spoke English well until promoted to a senior level became preoccupied with choosing perfect words in every meeting. Native-speaking colleagues replied that they had never judged a non-native speaker for imperfect English — and that they, too, had received feedback about how they speak.
Practice
Number read-back. Record a 30-second status update that contains three numbers. Play it back at normal speed. Could a listener write all three numbers down on the first listen? If not, slow down on the numbers and pause after each.
Chapter 7. Next
A good point that ends in silence is half a contribution. Say what you want, specifically, and turn agreement into a step with an owner and a time.
Chapter 9. Your Starting Point
Your home culture's communication style isn't wrong. It follows different rules. The skill is translation: knowing how your habits land in a U.S. meeting and having a second version ready.