There are many successful people in leadership roles (where the working language is English) whose spoken English is hardly at a B1 level. Even understanding them presents serious challenges – especially those from France and Italy (to stick to European countries) – and not only because of the accents. I’ve observed many among them whose written English was A2-ish: their emails hardly made any sense. Their grammar was so rudimentary that it couldn’t convey anything reminiscent of logic, let alone rhetoric.

English is a special case: being the lingua franca of our times, many people who have never lived for a longer period in an English-speaking country speak it fluently (even on an A2 level), and native speakers – especially in business – have a pragmatic attitude toward them: if their skills and experience are strong enough to counterbalance the lack of language mastery, they’re ready to make the compromise.

Also, there is a general decline in mastery even among native speakers. The general decline in the level of everyday language is typical of all languages. And since the borders between the professional and the everyday are blurring, standards are dropping in most domains. Thus, it’s quite possible that in certain areas of academia, for example, foreign speakers’ mastery of English (coming from countries where the decline is not so strong) is higher than that of native speakers; and this is even more so when we compare these foreigners to the average native speakers whose jobs don’t demand more than everyday English. In this case, the language categories in job application forms don’t make much sense at all.

Since A2–B1 “works just fine,” a false sense of mastery emerges from being “fluent” – and this means (on this level) nothing more than speaking routinely. This further reinforces the general tendency of decline, leading to misunderstandings and miscommunications to such a degree that meaningful conversations between people are increasingly becoming a real challenge – meaningful outside of transactions, that is. From this point of view, AI is already more efficient than people – and that this would be the case in all mechanical functions was clear to everyone from the start.

Now, the point is this: keeping communication standards high is a leadership function. While a certain degree of pragmatism is absolutely necessary, purely pragmatic leadership is an oxymoron – not to mention “leadership” that specifically aims at lowering standards.