Mexico's Time to Lead is Now

I am not selling native fluency. I am pitching cross-cultural communications and negotiations training, including insider decoding of how Anglophone counterparties actually behave in negotiation — which requires someone from inside that culture. I make my living selling this training, and I am an estadounidense writing to Mexican firms about trading with estadounidenses and others. You should weigh that interest as you read.

The Business Landscape Has Changed. It is Mexico's Time to Lead.

As an estadounidense English instructor, I have seen many curricula employed to teach English to speakers of other languages. What this field has spent decades teaching professionals to be is competent employees. What I am here to do is prepare them to be leaders of companies on the global stage.

The Best Kept Secret: Native-English Speakers No Longer Have the Advantage.

American English may be the language of big tech, with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. English may even be the language of the international business world. But, that does not mean estadounidenses have the advantage.

This is what no one is talking about: A bilingual, Mexican small- to medium-sized business owner, with a B2–C1 English speaking ability, and a similarly sized American business with no business communications support are on the same level. Who has the edge is going to be in who chooses to train in the communication abilities to meet our new, global reality.

In fact, native-English-speaking business owners have been found to frequently fail to filter their business communications to the non-native ear. Instead, they speak with idioms, jargon, and speed. They, mostly, have never been coached in negotiation, cross-cultural communication, or to speak with clarity in high-stakes situations. In multilingual rooms, the effective use of their native tongue breaks down.

Technology has brought three incredible disruptions:

1. The internet has brought cross-border sales to your doorstep. Right now, more than 20% of Mexican e-commerce is international. And, 75% of Mexican firms intend to explore new export markets.
2. With robotics, suppliers have ramped up production with each sales cycle. The companies that are out-performing the rest are those which have automated their systems.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown us that we have been thinking in black-and-white, and that our dreams can be brought to life in multidimensional technicolor.

These Traits are Needed to Thrive in This New International Corporate Setting:

There are certain qualities that business founders have always needed to possess, such as: business ethics, outside-the-box thinking, and the ability to lead others to do their best work. Now, we know we must also have technological and digital fluency. However, given this new landscape there are certain attributes proving to be essential to lead the way into tomorrow.

What the WEF groups as resilience, flexibility and agility, I call adaptability. And, what my own years of observation has shown me is that leaders from Latin American countries demonstrate that they possess these same four:

• Adaptability
• Collaboration
• Connectivity
• Communication

The Skills Needed Everywhere Today are Those You Have Already Built.

Through rapid political and economic change, you have adapted, and re-adapted, and adapted again, to survive conditions most foreign competitors have never faced. That is not resilience as a personality trait. It is a trained capability, and a trained capability can be pointed at a target.

With colectivismo and familismo, you have learned to collaborate to lift up the community. Even as part of the elementary school curriculum, community values were already being taught to you. Here, you have multi-generational family firms, supplier and compadrazgo networks. Relationship-first deal-making is your advantage.

Global buyers often see LatAm as one market — that is their simplification, not yours — and it creates leverage. If firms across the region choose to coordinate to meet world markets, they can compete on more than just price alone.

Communicating with respect is already an advantage of yours.

Communicating with respect in high-context communication cultures is an attribute people from the LAC region are known for — individuals vary widely within any culture; this is a starting point (not a description of any one person). It is something Erin Meyer wrote about in 2014 in her now widely popular The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, building on the work of many, including Edward T. Hall's high-context/low-context distinction, first set out in The Silent Language (1959) and developed in Beyond Culture (1976). It includes being able to communicate indirectly, with courtesy, and taking into consideration who you're working with before stating individualistic goals. High-context communication is a part of many cultures and you have the advantage of being able to communicate with those customers that the internet has brought to your doorstep.

Where fluent professionals get stuck is production.

Language-learning research is clear  on the fact that where fluent speakers get stuck is in the live production of their thoughts in the second language, meaning they understand the second language perfectly well. Therefore, they (we) can score as fluent on the international fluency scale. However, to be able to speak fluidly in business situations, we need to train for those specific scenarios so that, in the moment when clear communication counts, we can retrieve the language for the appropriate setting. Thus, you create change — change in how you are perceived, change in how the negotiation unfolds, and change in the business trajectory for your company.

A word on Accent Bias. If a native-English-speaking business person has a bias against you based on accent, that will be because of documented cultural Accent Bias on their part, not due to any weakness in how you've positioned your business. And, because this problem that they may have is publicly documented, we can prepare to recognize and work around it. The Accent Bias in Britain 2020 report found that of the interventions it tested, raising awareness of accent bias had the strongest and most consistent effect on the listener — and that its panel of sixty-one lawyers and recruiters rated candidates consistently on the quality of what was said, regardless of accent. That study tested British regional accents rather than second-language accents, so treat it as evidence about how bias behaves, not as a measurement of your buyers. But, most importantly, training in indirectly calling attention to that bias, we further equip ourselves.

Yet, you have another advantage.

There is a documented effect here worth knowing about. The Foreign Language Effect is the finding that reasoning in a second language measurably shifts how risk and framing are weighed — people deliberating in a foreign language show reduced framing bias and reduced risk aversion. A meta-analysis of forty-seven experiments puts the effect in the small-to-medium range, and finds that it holds for language pairs from different branches, such as Spanish and English, while disappearing for closely related pairs. So when your team negotiates in English, the language itself is not only a cost. It is also, measurably, a slightly cooler head.

A C1 does not answer the questions you actually care about.

Training employees to the CEFR international standard is still a useful path for some people. And, it remains a valid language fluency assessment. However, I'm suggesting an alternative path to global business readiness. When an employee receives training and receives a C1 result, it tells you they can use English proficiently. However, what it does not convey is whether they can disagree with a U.S.-based counterpart without losing their positioning, or correctly interpret subtle requests in a high-stakes meeting, or hold your company's position on price across multiple rounds of negotiation without losing the deal. The CEFR language assessment was never designed to answer those questions — the Council of Europe even states this itself.

What comes next.

Who I am, and what I am trained in. I coach business skills, in English, through writing. I am TEFL-trained and completed adult-learning and academic-coaching training through a CRLA-informed tutor training program, and I have spent three years coaching adult learners in English and writing.

My method uses your team's realistic, daily situations, not textbook scenarios. It goes beyond business English, by evaluating the email that has to go out, the price that has to be defended, and the push-back that has to be answered. With personalized coaching, your team members compose their response, then we edit it together. There are no practiced, spoken drills. Writing is the only condition under which an adult gets unlimited time to formulate their responses into precise communications. Once the language has been through iterations, it is committed to memory and theirs to retrieve when someone is waiting for an answer. Research comparing written and spoken rehearsal before a speaking task is consistent with this: learners who wrote first spoke more fluently than those who practiced aloud.

My work is informed by the belief that language education should expand people's ability to participate, influence, and lead — not ask them to assimilate or remain in support roles. I do not claim to speak for Latin American or Indigenous communities. I commit to listening, using specific and respectful language, and making my own business practices accountable to the values I describe.

The internet has brought you qualified buyers. Reaching them is no longer the next step. The next step is in the conversation that you can steer and manage.

This article was edited, but not written, with the assistance of AI.