Let us start with a compliment, because it is deserved. Your team’s English test scores are excellent. They can chat about their weekend, write a grammatically tidy email, and binge-watch British series without subtitles. And yet deals still stall, emails get misread, and meetings end with everyone nodding at slightly different things.
Here’s the news we deliver in training sessions all over Europe: grammar is almost never the problem. Business communication is a different skill from language knowledge. It is knowing that “Maybe we could consider another approach” in a British meeting often means “no”, that a German colleague’s “This doesn’t work” is not an attack, and that the ask belongs at the top of the email, not buried in paragraph four.
Test scores measure the engine. Business communication is the driving. Register, timing, implication, the softener that saves a relationship, the cultural cue that tells you whether “yes” means yes. None of it appears in a proficiency exam, and all of it decides whether your team’s excellent English actually lands.
So how do you bridge the gap? Stop teaching language and start teaching tasks. Take the real emails your team sent last week. Rehearse the real meeting that’s coming up, negotiation included. Give feedback on what landed and what didn’t, in the moment, kindly. A few weeks of that beats a year of grammar drills, every single time.
That is precisely what our bespoke training does: real work, real feedback, real progress. If your team’s English tests look great but the business results don’t, let’s have a chat about the gap.
– fin. Questions? Just ask.
We teach this stuff for a living.
Our training sessions turn posts like this into practical skills, clearer emails, smoother meetings, fewer cultural awkward moments.