Ninety minutes later, two people have shaped the outcome. Both are native speakers. A third, whose analysis was the sharpest in the room, spoke twice, briefly, and both times after being asked directly.

She did not lack an opinion. She lacked the half-second in which an opinion has to be inserted into a conversation moving at native speed.

Nobody in that room believes language played a role. Everybody in that room would tell you the meeting went fine.

Fluency is not competence. Organisations read it as competence anyway.

This is the central error, and it is almost never made deliberately. We infer capability from articulacy because in our own language the two usually travel together. Move the conversation into someone’s second language and the link breaks — but the inference keeps running.

The research on this is unusually clear and unusually ignored. Fluency differences quietly redraw status and career trajectories inside organisations, independent of actual performance.

Now the part that reverses the argument

The obvious conclusion from all this would be that people are worse in a second language. The evidence says something considerably more interesting.

Research suggests that certain cognitive biases can become weaker when decisions are made in a foreign language. Emotional distance can, under some conditions, lead to more systematic processing.

And the limit of that finding, since it has one

The same emotional distance that reduces bias also reduces something you often need.

In matters with a strong moral or normative charge — ethical judgements, transgressions, questions of what is acceptable — foreign-language use can degrade decision quality rather than improve it.

Emotional distance is an instrument, not a virtue. It is useful precisely where feeling misleads, and harmful precisely where feeling informs.

What actually gets lost: humour, hedging, and the shape of authority

Humour is the last thing to arrive in a language and the first thing to leave. A leader who is dry and quick in her first language often reads as flat in her second — and warmth that fails to translate is not heard as untranslated. It is heard as absent.

Authority distorts in the other direction. Second-language speakers hedge more, because hedging is what you do when you are unsure of the phrasing rather than unsure of the content.

And idiom does more damage than vocabulary ever does. The sporting metaphors that English-language business speech is saturated with are opaque to a large share of any European management team.

What “everyone speaks English” actually means

It means nobody has measured anything. Language proficiency is a distribution, not a binary, and treating it as a binary has predictable effects: meetings over-weight the fluent, the best ideas arrive in writing rather than in the room, and valuable contributions never become visible.

And the direct-versus-indirect trap

German-speaking cultures tend to be both explicit and direct with criticism, which Anglo-American colleagues can experience as harshness even when it is meant as respect for their time.

Meanwhile a second-language speaker hedging out of grammatical uncertainty gets read as indirect — as softening a message — when nothing is being softened at all.

What it costs, for the person who needs a number

I am not going to give you a euro figure, because I have not seen a credible one and I am not going to manufacture one for an article.

The honest way to size this is to price the decisions it distorts. One senior appointment where fluency was read as capability. One promotion that went to the more articulate of two candidates. One capable executive who gradually stops volunteering — and eventually leaves.

Why I am the wrong person to be relaxed about this

I work in five languages across five continents, and the reason I write about this with some heat is that I have been on both sides of it.

I have been the person whose point landed at seventy per cent in one language and at full strength in another. I have also been the fluent person in the room who moved too fast and only realised afterwards what had gone unsaid.

The uncomfortable part

Nobody in your organisation is going to raise this. The people who are paying the cost cannot name it without appearing to plead for an exemption, and no senior professional will trade competence for sympathy.

So the topic sits below the waterline, and shows up instead in the shape of your promotion decisions, and in who quietly stops contributing.