The Accent in the Room

I am usually in meetings where I am the only woman. I am usually in meetings where I am the only non-native English speaker. And I am usually in meetings where I am both. 

In a global channel business where English is the operating language, where most of the major vendors are headquartered in the United States, and where the default cultural frame for “leadership” still skews heavily in one direction — being the person with the accent is not a neutral experience. It shapes what you have to work harder at, what you have to let go of, and — if you are paying attention — what you can do that the default voice in the room sometimes cannot. 

I lead a global marketing team from Southern Europe. I work primarily in English, which is not my first language. I have been doing senior roles in the technology channel marketing for years. And I have spent a lot of that time thinking about what it costs — and what it teaches you — to lead in a language and culture that is not your own. 

What it costs 

Let me be honest about the tax. 

When you are working in a second or even your third or fourth language, everything takes slightly more processing. Writing an email that a native speaker does in ten minutes takes you fifteen — not because your English is poor, but because you are making choices that a native speaker makes automatically: is this too direct? Too formal? Does this idiom land the way I think it does? There is a constant low-level cognitive overhead that people who have never experienced it do not see. 

In meetings, particularly fast-moving ones, there is the risk of the moment passing. You formulate the point, and by the time you are confident in how to express it, someone else has made a different one and the conversation has moved on. You learn to get faster. But in the early years, you lose ground in rooms you should have won. 

And then there is the credibility question. In international business, accent is still — far too often — used as a proxy for authority. The default assumption of competence is not equally distributed. I have watched colleagues with stronger accents than mine be talked over, interrupted, or simply not heard in rooms where their ideas were the most valuable ones present. I have experienced versions of it myself. It is not always intentional. But it is real, and it compounds. 

What it teaches you 

But here is what I have come to believe: the tax is also a training ground. 

When you cannot rely on cultural fluency to carry you, you develop other things. Precision. Because you cannot afford to be vague and then clarify with idiom. You learn to say what you mean, clearly, the first time. That is a leadership skill that most people have to work to acquire. It was forced on me early. 

You develop listening as a competitive skill. When you are not operating on autopilot in a language, you pay more attention to what is actually being said — rather than pattern-matching to what you expect. I have caught things in conversations that native speakers missed, precisely because I was not filling in the gaps with assumptions. 

You develop a certain comfort with being underestimated. Early in a relationship, some people will assume — based on accent, based on geography, based on the fact that you are a woman from Spain — that you are less authoritative than you are. That assumption is exhausting. But it also means that when you demonstrate what you actually know, the recalibration is swift and permanent. You are memorable in a way that blends into the default sometimes is not. 

And perhaps most importantly: operating across cultures has made me a better global leader. When you are not the default, you learn that there is no default — only different frames. I lead teams across EMEA, AMER, and APJ. Every region has different norms around directness, hierarchy, relationship-building, and pace. I do not approach them as variations on a US-centric model. I approach them as their own valid operating systems. I think that comes, at least in part, from having spent years navigating someone else’s operating system myself. 

What I want to say to other women navigating this 

If you are reading this and recognising yourself — the person who rehearses the sentence before saying it, who has felt the meeting move on before you could find the words, who has wondered whether the room heard the idea or the accent — I want to say a few things. 

First: the overhead is real. You are not imagining it. And you are not behind because of it — you are doing more with the same number of hours. 

Second: the skills you are building to compensate are not consolation prizes. Precision, listening, cultural intelligence, comfort with ambiguity — these are genuinely among the most valuable capabilities in international business. You are developing them under conditions that most of your peers are not. 

Third: find the rooms where your perspective is valued rather than tolerated. Not every organisation, every team, every leader will see what you bring. The ones that do will not just make you more effective — they will make the work possible. 

And to the leaders reading this who do not carry this particular weight: listen for the accent in the room. Not to make a point of it — but to ask whether you are hearing the idea as clearly as it was spoken. The most valuable voice in the meeting is not always the loudest or the most fluent. Sometimes it is the one that had to work hardest to get there. 

I am proud to lead a global team. I am proud to do it from Paris, in English, across cultures that are different from mine and from each other. I am proud of the capability that built — even when I wish it had not been necessary. 

The accent in the room is not the obstacle. Most of the time, it is the edge.