Industry Research: Fluency Isn't Binary

We all have our own insular vocabularies. A sprint means a different thing to your lead engineer than it does to Carl Lewis. Trousers are what we'd call pants in the U.S. while pants are what they'd call underwear in the U.K. PDA meant public display of affection before it meant personal digital assistant. Unless you're a member of the Progressive Democrats of America, of course. Then it means something else entirely.

 

The point is, there's no such thing as complete and total fluency. Start a new job and you're sure to uncover acronyms you've never heard of before–even some of the ones you know might be defined differently. Even the most avid reader can find them challenged by adventurous authors with exacting vocabularies. New words and phrases appear constantly, slang or jargon attend new innovations, and just crossing a bridge can mean you'll hear a whole slew of new words you've not yet encountered.
 
And that's just for native English speakers. For multilingual professionals, it's not just about vernacular but a whole host of other factors native speakers never really have to consider. We can interject in fast-paced, chaotic conversations at a meeting or at a bar. We can intuit quickly if someone really knows what they're talking about. We get jokes. We're not translating in our heads.
 
So it follows that when you're assessing fluency, you shouldn't be basing it just on a certification or a test or any conventional rubric. Those do well to give you a general idea of fluency, of course, but not situational fluency. And that's the kind of fluency that's most important for growing businesses.
 
What do we mean when we say situational fluency? It goes beyond vocabulary and looks at the ability to speak and understand language in a particular context. For multilingual talent in business, situational fluency touches on the ability to participate in fast-paced meetings where people are interjecting and brainstorming and ideas are evolving in real-time. It means an engineer being able to articulate and passionately advocate for a project. Situational fluency allows employees to contribute their full potential and bring their authentic selves to work.
 
Teaching English, even conversational English, with a one-size-fits-all rubric misses this nuance. Learning a handful of terms every week from an app isn't particularly helpful if a gifted employee is struggling making her opinion known or feels an idea she was super excited about got dismissed due to her inability to share it concisely. The best–and most effective–learning methods for business focus on fixing those exact problems. They hone in on problems a particular employee might be feeling–say, speaking up in a meeting–and they solve them. Useful learning focuses on impact and outcome, not certificates and vocabulary.
 
This approach has some challenges, of course, but the challenges are solvable and the rewards are both tangible and career-altering. One of those challenges is truly understanding what each individual needs and coaching them towards that outcome. I believe that this is best accomplished with a self-directed learning approach. After all, most of us know what areas we can improve in. But it's important to be specific. It can't be "I'd like my English to be better," because, again, that's just aiming at some vague level of fluency. It needs to be something like "I'd like to write emails more clearly" or "I have a big presentation coming up and I need to improve that specific skill." This gives the learner a tangible goal they can aim for.
 
Which is to say learning like this requires a personal approach. And no app or generic course can actually provide that. They can provide an approximation, certainly, but at some point during the curriculum, the learner may lose momentum because the coursework isn't actually solving their in-the-moment needs. A truly personal approach, especially for nuanced language and communication needs, can only be provided by another human being..
 
There are enormous benefits to one-on-one, personal coaching. If anyone's ever had a dedicated tutor, they know this intuitively. Each session builds upon the last. Goals are set and they're actually reached. More than anything, there's a bond that develops between a coach and a learner that carries immense weight. They know each other. The coach can start intuiting the learners needs and feel truly invested in their success. It’s why I started Lingo Live and the unique, personal relationships our coaches and learners form are the biggest reason for our success.
 
And I know this not only professionally, but personally. For me, I was struggling to manage someone on my team who had his own communication issues. My coach Michelle knew me–including my strengths and weaknesses–and she knew that as a logic-based thinker I have a tendency to focus on the cold hard facts instead of empathizing with the other person. She gave me a framework for framing my critical feedback in a way that not only shares the implications of his communication challenges across the business, but more importantly opened up the conversation for an understanding for how he felt about it. We role-played the situation in our lesson and she pointed out how my body language didn't convey openness as well as how quick I was to jump to the facts instead of just listening to her and feeling her pain. While the realization of what I was doing was instant, the situational fluency of being able to actually do it was a whole other story.
 
It took several lessons, and implementation in the real world, to go from hearing to understanding to doing what I needed to be a better, more empathetic communicator. I still have a ways to go but the feedback from my peers has been a testament to the change I've been able to make so far. And I never could have done that by simply learning the framework for how to do this.

And that’s just a personal story with two native English speakers. Things can be trickier with non-native speakers and diverse workforces. But diverse, multilingual workforces pay real dividends. They drive innovation and they perform better. The data is clear. Fostering a culture where that talent can truly thrive requires a smart approach to learning and development, one where you look at individual needs and individual outcomes and increase the fluency that matters for your organization. Does it takes a little more time and effort than providing everyone with a generic course or an app? Sure it does. But if you choose to look at your employees as unique individuals and invest in their development at a deeply personal level, that time and effort gets repaid exponentially.