307. Accent-uate, Don't Compensate: Why Clarity Matters More Than Perfection

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: When we communicate, we not only communicate our ideas, we communicate our identity. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I look forward to speaking with Peter Novak. Peter is a former vice provost at the University of San Francisco and former dean at Yale University. He is the founder of the Strictly Speaking group. Peter leverages his doctorate and background in linguistics and acting to help non-native speakers master clear communication. He has an award-winning LinkedIn learning course on public speaking for non-native English speakers. Welcome, Peter. I am really excited to bring you to the show and to share what you've shared with my students here with everybody. Thanks for joining. 

[00:00:48] Peter Novak: Thanks so much. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. 

[00:00:51] Matt Abrahams: Shall we get started? 

[00:00:51] Peter Novak: Absolutely. 

[00:00:52] Matt Abrahams: Great. On the show, we've often spoken about how word choice affects the strength of our messages and the impressions people form of us. Your work highlights the impact accents can have on people's perceptions. Can you share a bit about this? And please make sure you define what you mean by accent bias, because I think this is really important for what we'll talk about today. 

[00:01:12] Peter Novak: Absolutely. Let me start with the definition of accent bias. So accent bias is essentially that reflex that we have to trust people who sound like us, and this happens a lot with people who are the in-group and people who are part of the out-group. And the idea of accent bias, of who's in and who's out, and what that means, it really affects the workplace. It can affect hiring decisions, it can affect promotion decisions. It often affects how people feel about leadership qualities. And so all of these aspects of accent bias creep into our workplace without us really understanding or knowing the full impact of it.

[00:01:53] Matt Abrahams: And we could have our career and our trajectories be affected by something we don't even know. Have you found that there are advantages to having an accent, or that non-native speakers bring to their communication maybe through the focus of the specific words or the way they speak versus those who don't have an accent in a given environment?

[00:02:13] Peter Novak: Or who don't have the accent of the majority in the specific group? Absolutely, and I love the framing of this question around the advantages that non-native speakers have, because so often they come to the table thinking it's a disadvantage to have an accent when they're speaking. And so I think what's fun about that is that when you think about multilingual speakers, seventy-five percent of people in the US and Canada and Australia and Great Britain don't speak another language. And so when you've got multilingual speakers, their skills in being able to code switch between language and cultures, in being able to be more intentional, which is part of your question, I think, about that focus that they have about the language choice that they're having, is really profound. And I think it's up to native speakers to recognize that non-native speakers are doing a hell of a lot more work in the workplace than native speakers are.

[00:03:04] We tend to take our proficiency in English for granted. We don't think about how we use it. We don't think about ways to use it more clearly for non-native speakers. And I like to say, remember Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the dancers from the 1940s and '50s. Everyone said that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. And in many ways, that's what non-native speakers are doing, too. They are in the moment involved sometimes in translating what was said into their first language, oftentimes, translating what they want to say from their first language or another language, thinking about tone, thinking about word choice, thinking about all these other things that native speakers don't have to. And I think we need to give them credit for that and then create the structures around that that enable a greater linguistic flexibility in the workplace. 

[00:03:55] Matt Abrahams: And just recognizing that the difference even exists and that you should take the time to reflect and accommodate. I have found that the folks I know who speak multiple languages, some of whom who have accents and some who don't, their ability to listen and discern subtlety is far superior to mine. Really interesting. I have heard you say in my class and in things you've written, "It's not an accent, it's an identity." What do you mean by this, and how can it help someone who is concerned about their accent to reframe it in this way? 

[00:04:26] Peter Novak: Sure. You know, language carries with it culture, it carries identity, it carries individual stories. And so why would we want to try and fix that? There's no reason to really fix that. The goal, actually, is clarity. And I think sometimes, there was a great episode of Modern Family with Eva Longoria, was that, who, who said, "Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?" And this is what happens. If you ask a multilingual speaker, do they feel like different personality traits emerge with the different languages that they speak, they will say, "Absolutely. I am so much funnier in my first language, and I don't have access to the same type of comedy in English or in a second language that I do in my first." And so really, there's this interesting part of identity that shifts because of the different languages that we speak, and I think that needs to be celebrated. It needs to be brought into the workspace a lot more than it normally is. 

[00:05:25] Matt Abrahams: You just reminded me, I was coaching a very senior leader who was a native French speaker. In English, he was a little more stilted, a little more buttoned up, but when I actually had him say the same thing in French, he became much more lively, much more connected, and we were able to use that as a tool, as a guide to allow him to feel more free speaking in English. It really is interesting how we have these different compartmentalizations based on language.

[00:05:55] Before I ask you to share some specific techniques that those with accents can take to feel more confident in their communication, I'd love to ask you to define some foundational principles that I know you refer back to. And in fact, these principles apply not just to people who are speaking in a language other than their native language. They, they apply to all of us. So can you help us understand what you mean by processing fluency, intelligibility, and comprehensibility? 

[00:06:19] Peter Novak: Absolutely. So in a nutshell, processing fluency is the ease with which we understand something. And I think the goal of every speaker is to try and make what they say as easy as possible to understand for the listener, for your audience, whoever that audience is. And it really means getting to know your audience as well as possible. And processing fluency is essentially that. Processing disfluency is anything that gets in the way of that message being understood. That could be content, right? You ramble or you don't have a good structure. Or it could be delivery, right? Things that make it difficult for people to hear and understand. And that brings us to the linguistic ideas around intelligibility and comprehensibility. Intelligibility is how much I understand of what you say.

[00:07:07] Comprehensibility is how hard I have to work to understand you. It's the effort that I put in to understanding you. Let me put this into an example. Let's say you're on a Zoom call and it's a little glitchy on the other end. But maybe you understand what the person said, but still there was, "I'm losing you a little bit," and so you have to work harder to do it. That's the difference between intelligibility and comprehensibility. And the best part about this is that there were major studies done 20 years ago and more that say that people who speak English as a second, third, or fourth language can improve both their intelligibility and their comprehensibility with no noticeable shift in accent. And so there are some really interesting things to focus on to help you do that without worrying about what your accent really is. 

[00:07:56] Matt Abrahams: So processing fluency is the ease with which we take in the information. And there's a whole bunch of things we can do, making sure we know our audience so it's easier for them. We're using relevant concepts and ideas that they can connect to. Structuring the information, making it more concise. And then intelligibility is the understanding, and the comprehensibility is how hard we work to understand. And anything we can do to reduce comprehensibility, I would assume, helps with processing fluency. Excellent.

[00:08:25] So let's get very tactical and practical. What are some techniques and approaches you recommend to help people who want to work on their accents or increase their intelligibility while not increasing the comprehensibility of what they're saying? 

[00:08:37] Peter Novak: Well, they want to do both. They want to have both high intelligibility and high comprehensibility. And so what I would say is that the goal is clarity. That's number one. First and foremost, the goal is clarity. 

[00:08:48] Matt Abrahams: So clarity of meaning. 

[00:08:50] Peter Novak: Clarity of meaning, right, and then clarity also of delivery. 

[00:08:53] Matt Abrahams: Got it. So I clearly understood you, but I also clearly heard you. 

[00:08:57] Peter Novak: That's right. 

[00:08:58] Matt Abrahams: Okay. Very good.

[00:08:59] Peter Novak: And so there was an interesting study from McGill University in Canada, and basically it said this: Your car breaks down in a city that you don't know very well, and your phone is out of juice, and so you're trying to find a garage that you can go to. And so you ask the first person, they tell you to go one direction. You ask a second person. The first person is a native speaker, sounds like you. You ask a second person, they tell you to go in the opposite direction, and they have an out-group speech or accent. That's right. Foreign or something you don't recognize. Who are you going to trust more? And in essence, the study found that you trust people who sound like you more. That's what accent bias is.

[00:09:34] However, if the person who speaks with a different accent than your own speaks with confidence, then it reduces that gap. And so the question becomes, what does speaking in English with confidence actually mean? What are people who speak English as their first language listening for that tells us that person is confident? And so we know this. We know what some of those elements are, and some of them are all related to prosody. So prosody is an element of speech that thinks about the musicality of the language, which thinks about volume and pacing and the power that you lend to certain words and inflection. It's all of the things outside of the words and the sentences that carry meaning that we often don't think about.

[00:10:26] Matt Abrahams: When we had Lerone Martin on talking about Martin Luther King Jr., we talked a lot about prosody and, and how he was able to leverage that as part of the, one of the many things that made his orations really powerful and meaningful. 

[00:10:38] Peter Novak: And every language has its own musicality. So the biggest return on investment is understanding and really working on prosody of the language. Not individual words, not individual phrases, and if you've got the pronunciation just right, you don't need to worry about any of that. It's really more about the paralinguistic features outside the language itself that carry more meaning, that make us relate better when we're communicating. 

[00:11:03] Matt Abrahams: Can you give me an example or two of maybe an activity or a thing you would coach people to do to really touch on that?

[00:11:09] Peter Novak: Sure. And I'm gonna give some advice that is often the opposite of what a lot of speech coaches give. And that is, if you're giving a presentation or if you're talking over Zoom even, to prepare by recording yourself into a speech-to-text app. And that speech-to-text app will give you a transcript of what you're saying. So you just have to rehearse it once, and then all of a sudden you've got a script of what you're doing. You can then put it through AI if you want. You can put it through AI and say, "I need this to sound like me still, so keep my syntax, keep the way that it..." So that it sounds authentic to you. And once you have a script, you score it. And one of the best techniques that I can think of is to underline what are called content or focus words in a sentence.

[00:11:53] If I have the sentence for you, "I never said you should have hired him." If I stress a different word, it means something different. I never said you should hire him. I never said you should hire him, right? I never said you should hire him. I never said you should hire him, right? Every time you say the sentence and you put a stress on a different word, it changes the context. And if you look at your words and your sentences in your prepared speech, and you start to underline or bold just those three or four content words per second and focus on those words, the meaning of what you're going to say will come across regardless of anything else. And so if you're stressing just those words, all of a sudden you get a really clear picture of what's being said.

[00:12:37] So that's one thing that you can do to score your script for what are called operative or focus words or content words. The second thing is to put in slash marks for small pauses, because people forget to pause when they're speaking. And oftentimes non-native speakers get told to slow down when that's not always the best advice. What's more helpful is to take a sentence and divide it into thought clusters, groups of speech that have complete meanings on their own but don't often have the punctuation to make you pause. And these are simple phrases in a sentence like even when I was just saying a thought group is a group of words that has a complete set meaning on its own that we don't give meaning to.

[00:13:22] And so when you break up a sentence into those thought groups, it becomes easier to understand and follow. And so putting those slash marks into a script can help do that. And then the third way that you can really help is to provide intonation assistance in a script, in a scoring a script, using downward inflections, which words to focus on in different ways, how to use inflections and we have three basic inflections in English: the upward, where I'm asking a question; the downward, where I'm making a statement, and we do that in two different ways; and then the sustained inflection, which I really like, which is so, it's all on one note, and you're waiting for me to either go up or down. When you learn to incorporate some of those inflections, you're really tapping into, I think, the power of the language in ways that native speakers are listening to. 

[00:14:12] Matt Abrahams: Paralanguage, the things that happen around the words are so powerful in so many ways, and I love these activities. Using a script as a tool to help you plan and prepare your paralanguage, I think is beautiful. I love this idea of getting a transcript of what you're saying. Not to say that you're going to say it exactly that way, but to begin to look at what are those words of inflection, of focus of that vocal highlighting that need to stand out. And this is a tool that I think will help everybody, not just non-native speakers. Thinking about clustering of the key concepts and how to punctuate them in terms of pace and rate, really important.

[00:14:53] In fact, I believe they found some versions of the Declaration of Independence that had weird marks on them that they finally concluded were actually marks for oration. That, that when people would read it, because so much of the population at the time was not able to read. So giving yourself these little cues and clues of what to do. And then finally thinking about how you end phrases and words. Many of us will swallow what we say and get quiet. Some people have uptalk where everything sounds like a question. And just it being able to strategically think about it as a question, although I believe I know the answer. The more you do this, the more it becomes a habit where you don't need to do it. 

[00:15:32] Peter Novak: That's right. 

[00:15:33] Matt Abrahams: You have extensive training in phonetics. For our listeners who feel their voice doesn't always carry authority, whether native speaker or not, what are some vocal adjustments that we can make to come across with the gravitas and clarity that we look for?

[00:15:48] Peter Novak: There are so many different things that we can do. First and foremost, one of the things that I recommend is to really understand, that I talked about earlier, intonation, how we end sentences. In English, we do that in two ways. One is we either step down, like on the words, "I'm a professor," where you notice we go up on the penultimate sound and then come down. "I'm a professor. I teach math." And so we either step down or we glide down at the ends of sentences. And oftentimes people will swallow their last few words. They don't end with strength, and let me talk about what that means.

[00:16:25] And so if you combine the strong downward inflection in speaking with slowing down your last few words when you're done speaking, it signals that you've completed your thought. It signals a strength in the end of your communication, and you can use it almost any time you're finished speaking to make sure that people know you've finished speaking. And it works really, really well. And you can either score that on a script that you've got for text, or you can think about ending just by slowing down and using that downward inflection.

[00:17:00] Matt Abrahams: I love that technique, and I loved how you role modeled it. Thank you. And we can all record ourselves on audio voice memo and listen to hear how we're doing it and to become more sensitive to what others are doing. We can work on these skills through reading out loud. I often encourage people reading out loud allows you to focus on how you're saying something because the words are right in front of you. So I'm not saying reading your script to give a presentation. I'm saying just read your emails out loud. Read anything and notice how you can do that to train your brain to be more comfortable doing it. Behind all of it, I believe, is also this notion of breath and breath control. You know, when we get nervous, we breathe shallow and up. So we have to remind ourselves that your voice is a wind instrument and that you have to have the breath behind it. So I often tell people we need to build vocal stamina through breathwork as well, which could be reading out loud, just becoming aware of where it is. You have provided so much rich information. Thank you.

[00:17:56] Before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions. One I make up just for you, and two I've been asking everybody for a long time. Are you up for that?

[00:18:02] Peter Novak: You bet.

[00:18:02] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. You created a national curriculum regarding alcohol abuse and sexual violence prevention that reached over a million students. When you're communicating about such sensitive, high-stakes, and emotionally charged topics, how do you balance clarity with the necessity of being empathetic and concerned? A lot of us are in situations where we have to talk about emotionally charged issues. What advice do you have that came from that experience? And by the way, thank you for creating a curriculum like that. 

[00:18:31] Peter Novak: It, it's my pleasure. I was, uh, the Stanford graduate students actually took our program, which is great, and it was throughout, I think, over now 2,000 universities have used it. And it was deeply important work for me, but you're right, it is very emotionally charged. And so what you have to create first and foremost is a psychologically safe space for people to be able to speak, and that requires a great empathy and understanding what happens with trauma. Once you've created a psychologically safe space, the goal is to not re-traumatize with your language or to re-traumatize by asking people to contribute their story when they don't feel psychologically safe to do so, and to build in a system of the way that you communicate that has its foundation in trauma-informed ways of communicating. And I think that's an incredibly helpful tool that has empathy at its core and that really helps us understand communicating on a very human-to-human level. 

[00:19:24] Matt Abrahams: So it starts with empathy, which builds to psychological safety that then requires some intentional thought about how to allow for the kind of dialogue that needs to happen in these emotionally charged situations without retriggering or causing people to become defensive. Tricky, but possible. 

[00:19:41] Peter Novak: Tricky, but possible, and you also have to build the structure of all of that into your policies, into your procedures. So it's not just the one-on-one communication, it's also the larger support structure also needs to be framed that way. 

[00:19:54] Matt Abrahams: I like to talk a lot about people, process, and infrastructure, and you need all three of those to come together when you have emotionally charged issues. Question number two, who's a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:20:05] Peter Novak: I love Trevor Noah. I think his cultural discussions, his ability to see different cultural dynamics and how they manifest, not only from his native country and the way he speaks, but to the US and to Europe and to every place that he tours and bring, he brings different stories, and he does it in a way that is enlightening, that is approachable, that is funny, and he has a lot of humility, believe it or not, in the way that he communicates, too. And so he's one of my favorite people to listen to. He's got some great stories around accents. He does take on some accents sometimes and talks about them, but he's got some really profound things to say around language and accent and accessibility and what is considered a standard sound and what isn't. There is no standard for English. There are world Englishes, and I think Trevor Noah gets to that really clearly. 

[00:20:58] Matt Abrahams: He is a very engaging speaker, great storyteller, and he does a really nice job with some of these paralanguage clues and cues that you're talking about. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:21:13] Peter Novak: The first is comfort, feeling comfortable in being able to, and that's where the psychological safety, I think, comes in as well. The second would be conversational, and this is all delivery, by the way. This isn't content. This is delivery, I would say. So the second part is really making it sound conversational, like you're actually talking to someone, not talking at someone. And the third, I would say, is conviction, or people will say confidence, but having the passion behind what it is that you're saying so that you're making a connection that is important to you. 

[00:21:45] Matt Abrahams: I love things that are easy to remember. The three C's: comfort, conversational, conviction. And those are all helped by the techniques that you have taught us and that you teach on a regular basis. Peter, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you highlighting the value that people who speak another language bring and the tools that can help all of us feel more comfortable in our communication. Thank you. 

[00:22:10] Peter Novak: Thank you so much, Matt. It was great being here. 

[00:22:13] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about communication best practices, please listen to episode 82 with Nancy Duarte. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep-dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium. You'll also find value by joining our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quest discussion boards, my AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast, Talk Smart Learning Community.