Your English is not what's holding you back. Order is. You deliver conclusions the way you write a design doc — context, evidence, reasoning, then the call. Executives decode in the opposite direction and stop listening long before you arrive. This course rewires the order, the hedging, and the room.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research asked senior executives what makes someone read as leadership material. The weights are lopsided, and they are not where most engineers spend their effort.
Composure under fire. Taking a public position before you have certainty. Saying the inconvenient thing to someone senior. Knowing your domain cold. This is the bulk of the score and it is almost entirely about behaviour in the moment, not vocabulary.
Conciseness, command of a room, pacing, the strategic pause, reading the audience. Note what this isn't: grammar, idiom range, or accent. Voice quality matters here; correctness barely registers.
Small, and mostly a threshold effect — it can subtract points, it rarely adds them. Clear it once and stop thinking about it. Most of the anxiety spent here is misallocated from the 67%.
The trap for a strong non-native IC is that both the anxiety and the remediation get aimed at the 5% and at the parts of the 28% that don't count. Six weeks of accent work moves nothing. Six weeks of restructuring how you open a sentence moves everything.
Everything in this course traces back to one of these. Learn to hear yourself doing them; that recognition is half the fix.
You were trained — by engineering culture and by school — to show your work before your answer. A VP with eleven minutes hears preamble and concludes you don't have a position.
In a high-context culture, softeners are politeness infrastructure — they leave the other person room to disagree without either of you losing face. In a low-context US room, the softener is parsed literally: it is read as your actual confidence level.
You defer to the most senior person in the room by default. In a hierarchical culture that reads as competence and respect. In an egalitarian one it reads as having nothing to add — and worse, it quietly transfers ownership of your call to someone with less context than you.
Answer honestly about the last month, not your best day. 1 = never / not true, 5 = consistently true. This takes four minutes and gives you the three numbers to move.
Roughly two hours of study plus five twenty-minute drills each week. Check lessons off as you go — progress is saved in this browser.
Not scripts to memorise word-for-word — patterns to internalise until the right shape arrives without translation. Read the left column aloud once, then the right. The difference you hear is the whole course.
Twelve situations you will actually hit at Staff level. Each has a setup, the trap most people fall into, a script that works, and what to grade yourself on. Run them out loud — reading them silently does nothing.
Twenty minutes, five days. The rotation stays the same for all six weeks; only the material you feed it changes. This is where the actual rewiring happens — the lessons just tell you what you're aiming at.
| Day | Drill | How | Pass condition |
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Role-play is the part of the original course you can't get from a page. Paste these into a chat with me and we run it live — I play the counterpart, stay in character, and score you afterwards against the rubric below.
Score every rep out of 20. Below 12 means run it again immediately — the second attempt is where the learning is. Track the number weekly; the shape of your weak column tells you which week to re-read.
| Dimension | 1 — miss | 3 — adequate | 5 — strong |
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