The unspoken rule: is English really the key to success in Europe’s boardrooms?
Around the boardroom table, Carmen-Maja Rex’s colleagues slip easily between French and English. When the Airbus CHRO takes her seat, the discussion naturally settles into English without anyone flagging the switch. For a company founded in France, built partly in Germany, assembling aircraft across Europe and flying them globally, English has quietly become the default working language. The same takes place just a few hundred kilometers away at Sodexo’s headquarters just outside of Paris. CHRO Heather Jacobs is American, and most of her conversations in the boardroom are in English, despite the company having roots in the French city of Marseille.
English is now the most widely spoken language in history, with around 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, and fluency in it has quietly become an unwritten yet essential requirement for many senior roles at multinationals. This expectation can disadvantage those who are not native English speakers, and now sits against a wider political backdrop in which leaders such as Donald Trump have designated English as the U.S.’s official language, promoting warnings from scholars about how easily the ‘speak English’ rhetoric can slide into exclusion.
The OECD examined 11 million online job postings in 2021, across the EU and the U.K., and found that 22% explicitly required English proficiency. German was the next most frequently requested language, appearing in 1.7% of listings, often in tourism-related roles. French was required in only 1.1% of postings, while Italian was required in only 0.4%.
In Europe’s boardrooms, the growing dominance of English isn’t just a matter of habit; it’s also driven by global business demands, with effects that reach into areas such as rules and safety. It also shapes who fits in, who advances, and how companies operate. The question now is whether AI is reinforcing English as a ‘superior’ language of leadership, or simply making it easier for organizations to maintain a common corporate language—and whether businesses could realistically return to a more localised way of functioning.
A language born of power, not policy
Although English is mandated as the common corporate language in many Fortune 500 Europe headquarters across the region, its dominance is, in many ways, a historical “accident”. Nina Bellak, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the University of Vienna, links the power of English in boardrooms to postwar history. “There’s this power dynamic at a national level between the colonizer and colonized, and it’s a very similar dynamic at a corporate level,” she says. Explaining that English became far more prominent post World War as U.S. economic and political power expanded across the continent.
Over the following decades, English gradually displaced local languages such as French and German as the dominant working language. Many Fortune 500 European companies have mandated English for simple operational reasons, ranging from safety standards to international financial reporting. Airbus’s decision to mandate English as its working language goes back to the company’s birth in the 1970s, says Rex. “This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language,” she adds. The reasoning was largely practical: aviation safety, where English is the global standard.
Similarly, in the early 2000s, Siemens began using English more consistently after listing on the NYSE, particularly for financial communications, says Nanda Burke, global head of talent and organization at Siemens. In other cases, companies adopted English more organically. For example, at the Swiss electrification and automation company ABB, English became the common corporate language following the merger of Swedish firm ASEA and Swiss company Brown Boveri in 1988. With neither Swedish nor German able to claim precedence, English emerged as neutral ground—less a deliberate strategy than a diplomatic necessity, according to Carolina Granat, ABB’s chief human resources officer.
“This was very surprising, especially in those days in France—there were not many French companies [that agreed] on English [becoming] the common language.”
Carmen-Maja Rex, chief human resources officer, Airbus
Beyond industry factors, the prevalence of English within Fortune 500 companies in Europe also reflects its widespread use across countries. In the Netherlands and countries in Scandinavia for example, English classes are compulsory at schools and so individuals pick up the language at a much younger age, hence often functioning as a natural second language. Kaija Bridger, EVP people & communications at elevator engineering company, KONE, says that, in Finland, where the company is headquartered, the country’s small domestic market has caused people to look outward and so most senior leaders operate comfortably in English. “Finnish wouldn’t be the most dominant language to begin with,” she says, adding that one newly employed executive member recently asked for support in learning Finnish.
Lost in translation
Research suggests this English-first narrative hides a more complex reality. Bellak finds that many multinationals claim to have an official corporate language policy, but day-to-day language choice is messy, hard to regulate and often up to the individual.
Whilst many companies have officialized English as the common corporate language, local languages remain critical on the ground. At Siemens, day-to-day meetings are conducted in English, although local languages are highly present, and “that is a strength,” says Burke, who is not fluent in German but has been learning “not because it was required but because I now live part-time in Munich and genuinely want to understand and speak the local language.”
At KONE, which operates in 70 countries, Bridger describes the company as a “global company with very local operations”. While English is essential for regional and global roles, local languages dominate among technicians in the field. “Let’s say, all of a sudden, the escalator stops working. Someone needs to be pretty close by and [a technician] needs to be able to fix the lift. That’s where we come to the language and proximity of the business…and that’s where local language plays a huge role,” she adds. Similarly, Sodexo’s Jacobs explains that despite English being the corporate language, “local languages naturally dominate in the markets where we operate”, such as India and mainland China. At the company’s headquarters, more than 25 nationalities are present and so “you hear a little bit of everything,” she notes. While many of these firms have formally mandated English, in practice, they rely on a multilingual ecosystem to function.
Behind every official language policy, the question arises: whose voices carry furthest when English becomes the default? Whilst most Fortune 500 Europe companies have not officially stated that English is a necessity, it’s almost assumed that at the C-Suite or senior level, individuals can converse in English. “If I think about the C-suite, senior leadership and even middle management roles…If there’s an English language requirement, the idea really is that the person is proficient enough,” says KONE’s Bridger.
Fluency, status and who gets ahead
Nevertheless, companies remain careful not to treat polished English as a proxy for leadership potential. “Talent is about capability, impact, and values-driven leadership, not accent or fluency,” says ABB’s Granat. Where certain language requirements do matter, most companies take responsibility for removing barriers: localizing job postings, adapting assessment processes and providing learning opportunities so that employees can build language confidence, not only in English but also in the local language of the host country when it is required or encouraged. “Within my first month of being with Sodexo, I had a full week outside of the office [in Southwest France], not just [to learn the] language, but it was about cultural adaptation as well,” Jacobs adds.
Although many companies invest in language training for employees—including English courses for staff outside English-speaking countries—employees can still experience a sense of status loss. Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Guro Refsum Sanden, uses this term to describe how non-native speakers of the common corporate language sometimes feel a subjective drop in their professional esteem, as if their competence is being judged through their language skills rather than their actual expertise. This can leave even highly skilled non-native English speakers feeling inadequate when required to operate in a foreign language. By contrast, native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”, Refsum Sanden calls it.
Language isn’t just a communication tool—whether English or the local language of the host country—it is a tool that enables people to integrate and signal whether they ‘belong’ in boardrooms as well as society. Native English speaker Brady Dougan spent eight years as CEO of Credit Suisse and left without ever speaking German; he later called it one of his regrets, and his inability to speak German was criticized in the Swiss media. In 2015, Anshu Jain, the Indian-born British co-CEO of Deutsche Bank opened the bank’s annual meeting in German before switching to English. However, less than three weeks later, Jain resigned as co-CEO after losing investor confidence.
Not speaking the native language didn’t directly cost Dougan and Jain their jobs; however, it drew criticism and made it harder for them to connect with local investors, clients and customers. English can evidently get senior leaders into the boardroom; whether they can retain the role without speaking the local language is less certain.
The translator in the room
That’s also the limit of what AI can currently change. Translation tools, meeting summaries and captions have the ability to smooth over gaps in fluency and assist non-native speakers in writing emails, translating, and functioning more confidently in English-first settings. Airbus’ Rex notes that “AI is supportive in order to build bridges,” and adds that the company has rolled out Gemini globally, resulting in improved translation efficiency. Similarly, Jacobs notes how AI has improved translation processes at Sodexo, making communication faster and more accurate for mandatory learning and employee engagement surveys.
Yet CHROs broadly agree that even the best AI tools require careful handling to preserve the essence of communication and that AI is nowhere near ready to replace human leadership and interaction. Refsum Sanden warns that the more organisations lean on AI to translate and generate text, the greater the risk that it will “converge” the way people communicate, eroding differences and nuances in local languages. If multilingual companies come to depend on those systems, technology will start to dictate what is considered ‘appropriate’ language in the boardroom and even language included in emails and chat—potentially narrowing, rather than enriching, the range of voices and communication styles that make it into the corporate conversation.
Native English speakers may gain status simply because they remain fluent in the corporate language, even when they are no more professionally capable than their peers—a form of “unearned status”
Guro Refsum Sanden, Professor at BI Norwegian Business School
Executives from KONE, Sodexo and ABB all describe English as the practical “common denominator” that enables cross-border collaboration. Global companies will always have to balance the ‘local’ with the ‘global’ and KONE’s Bridger doesn’t see that basic tension changing anytime soon. The local side is driven by the markets companies operate in and the customers served, whereas the global side brings scale, shared platforms and processes so that local teams do not need to reinvent the wheel. This is also dependent on population, country and market size. Bridger notes that Finland is a “small nation and [the language] is one of the hardest languages to learn.” Hence, native Finnish speakers at times are empathetic and remain open-minded towards language as a whole.
It’s hard to imagine multinationals operating without at least one shared language to connect their multicultural and multilingual operations. Whether local languages can retain space in multinational boardrooms? “We’re not really there right now,” says Sodexo’s Jacobs, noting that English has effectively become the universal language at the senior level—and that won’t change unless something else emerges to replace it.
Whilst English has slipped into Europe’s boardrooms as a common bridge over the last few decades, it now carries political and technological weight. President Trump signed the historic executive order designating English as the official language of the United States on March 1st 2025, marking the first time the country has ever had a national language. A symbolic move highlighting how closely language, power and identity are intertwined.
English may remain the boardroom default for the foreseeable future, but it is up to companies to define how tightly they choose to hold onto it—and who that choice leaves out.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com