Accent vs Comprehensibility: What Markets Reward in Leaders

What the Market Really Rewards

Anyone who has ever wondered whether a non-native accent places a ceiling on a career can find reassurance with a quick look at senior management in the Fortune 50. Consider just a few of the leaders at the top:

• Satya Nadella, who grew up in Hyderabad, runs Microsoft.
• Sundar Pichai, raised in Chennai, leads Alphabet.
• Albert Bourla, a veterinarian from Thessaloniki, leads Pfizer.
• Ramon Laguarta, from Barcelona, has run PepsiCo since 2018.

Their speech still carries recognizable features of their native languages, and none of them appears to feel pressured to sound conventionally American. Even more encouraging, controlled experiments point in the same direction. Leonardo Barcellos and Kathryn Kadous, accounting academics, asked participants with investing experience to listen to simulated earnings calls. Actors played the CEOs using either standard American English or a non-native accent. When the news was bad, the accented CEOs stood out positively. Investors inferred that someone who had risen to the top while working in a second language must be unusually hardworking and determined. Their impressions of both the leader and the company became more favorable. When the news was good, the accent made no meaningful difference.

The reality, however, is more complicated. Audiences often penalize accented speakers, usually without realizing it. An analysis of 5,367 TED Talks found that speakers with non-native accents received fewer views and likes, even after researchers accounted for topic, speaker fame, and other factors. Harvard Business Review calls this the “accent penalty.” Across 139 experiments, candidates with standard accents were rated more worthy of hiring than candidates with non-standard accents. Psychologists trace this to processing fluency: unfamiliar speech requires more cognitive effort to decode, and listeners can misinterpret their own extra effort as a flaw in the speaker. In one experiment, Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar found that people rated the same statements as less truthful when spoken with a foreign accent. The extra work listeners had to do felt like doubt, and they attributed that doubt to the speaker.

What Proficiency Demands From Us

So is an accent an advantage or a penalty? The most useful answer comes from research that ignored accents altogether and asked a simpler question: Can the average listener follow what this executive is saying? In work published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics, researchers scored thousands of recorded earnings calls on that precise measure. Investor behavior told the story. When executives spoke clearly, markets absorbed the news quickly. When executives were less fluent and harder to understand, trading activity fell by about 9%, and prices were slower to catch up with information that was already public. Individual investors, who cannot rely on analyst teams or immediate transcripts, were affected more than large institutions.

This standard applies to everyone. An executive can speak with a discernible Indian, Greek, or Spanish accent and still walk an audience through complex information or disappointing results with clarity and precision. Another executive may sound like a local TV anchor, yet mumble, rush through caveats, and bury the conclusion in jargon. The first one has an accent. The second has a communication problem. Comprehensibility, not nativeness, is the standard that really matters, and many native speakers fail on this front every day.

Comprehensibility is one standard; proficiency is the other. The word “accent” can do real damage here, because people often use it as a label for problems that have nothing to do with the way someone sounds. Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham learned this in 2013, when he remarked that a CEO with a “strong foreign accent” was a bad sign. Critics immediately named Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk. Graham needed an entire clarification essay to dig himself out of the hole.

If you lead, or aspire to lead, in a language other than your native tongue, how close you sound to your adopted language matters far less than what you can do with it. Linguists Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing showed long ago that even heavily accented speech can be perfectly intelligible. But for leadership purposes, proficiency is more than grammar and vocabulary. It extends to pronunciation clear enough to follow, fluency steady enough that your delivery does not obscure your structure, vocabulary precise enough to say exactly what you intend, and syntax that preserves the relationships between your ideas. You need to develop sufficient command of idiomatic expressions to catch what is being said to you, and you need the cultural competence to understand how disagreement, humor, and deference land with the audience in the room.

The good news is that proficiency can be developed. The bad news—if you regard learning agility and making sustained effort to achieve your goals as bad news—is that it takes time. The process can be frustrating and at times embarrassing, and it demands your focus away from what you might consider the “real work.”

When language is part of the job

Sometimes proficiency carries even more weight because language is built directly into a role. In March, a regional jet collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport, killing two pilots. Air Canada chief executive Michael Rousseau recorded a four-minute condolence message that contained two French words: bonjour and merci. Rousseau led a Montreal-based national institution. He was mourning a captain who was a francophone Quebecer. Yet he delivered the rest of his message in English. Nobody misheard him, and nobody questioned his pronunciation. The failure was that after living in Quebec’s largest city for nearly two decades, he could not address francophone Canadians directly during a moment of collective grief. “I am still unable to express myself adequately in French,” he admitted. Quebec’s National Assembly called for his resignation, 92 to 0, and within a week the Air Canada board announced his retirement.

Rousseau could not have been blindsided by this. Almost five years earlier, nine months after he became Air Canada’s president and CEO, he was caught in another major language controversy. He delivered a 26-minute speech to Montreal’s business community that included only about 20 seconds of French. When asked how he had lived in Quebec for 14 years without learning the language, Rousseau blamed his demanding schedule. He called Montreal’s tolerance “a testament to the city.” The answer came across as complacent rather than contrite. It sparked a wave of criticism and thousands of official complaints. Rousseau apologized the day after his speech, promised to improve his French, and joked that he hoped to do so “with the proper accent.” But that was never the essential standard. What people cared about was whether he commanded a language that mattered to his role and to the people he served. In short, language was part of his job. The feedback was unambiguous, and he plainly ignored it.

The feedback nobody gives

I often see a dynamic in organizations where managers lead global teams in their second or even third language, and it is one that accent-bias research rarely touches. When colleagues genuinely have to work hard to process someone’s speech, that person is frequently the last to know. Peers stay silent, and so do managers. The usual fear is that raising the issue will make them seem biased against non-native speakers.

Psychologists have documented the mechanism. While accent-specific evidence on this silence is limited, adjacent research reveals the risk. Academics Alyssa Croft and Toni Schmader found that evaluators who were worried about appearing prejudiced gave minority writers sufficient praise but withheld critical feedback. Kent Harber, another social psychologist, found a similar pattern of grade inflation from teachers assessing identical work. The silence feels inclusive. In practice, it harms one group by withholding the developmental information everyone else receives freely. It forces that group to discover the problem through a stalled promotion instead of a constructive conversation.

So, you should run the diagnosis both ways. If you speak a language you acquired later in life, do not wait for vague comments about “executive presence.” Ask a trusted colleague which words, constructions, or moments require the most effort to follow, and make it genuinely safe for them to answer. And if you evaluate accented speakers, audit your own listening before you reach conclusions. Did you understand the central point? Could you follow the reasoning? Could the speaker express nuance and qualify ambiguous information? Was meaning actually obstructed, or did you simply have to try harder to discern? That last point is worth highlighting because experimental research shows that listeners can adapt to unfamiliar accented speech after surprisingly brief exposure. Often the most inclusive thing you can do is give someone another minute.

The bottom line

Accents are here to stay. We operate in a global economy, so leadership talent will increasingly need to speak second or third languages. If you are an accented speaker, work to be understood and precise. Build the proficiency your role demands. Those are the standards you can control, even when listeners do not always apply them fairly.

If you evaluate accented speakers, remember that the effort of listening is not evidence of the quality of the thinking. Your judgment carries a greater obligation, because you may control the promotion or the funding. Maintain both standards with compassion and integrity, and most accent problems turn out to be a proficiency gap that can be closed, a feedback barrier that can be broken, or a bias that can be fixed. The goal for any accented leader is not to sound native. It is to become difficult to misunderstand and impossible to underestimate.