Influence Management training in FribourgManaging through influence in the canton of Fribourg: how can we distinguish a proposal’s merits from linguistic ease?
In Fribourg, the agri-food sector, bilingual industry and the university community often work across the Sarine, switching between French and German in everyday management. When managing through influence, how can we prevent ease in the language of discussion from becoming an implicit criterion for selecting ideas?
What the literature establishes
Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar (2010, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) studied the credibility of factual statements read aloud in English with different accents. In their experiments, statements delivered with a non-native accent were judged less truthful than those delivered with a native accent. This finding concerns truth judgements in an experimental setting, not the speakers’ actual competence.
The mechanism: mistaking ease for validity
Adam L. Alter and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2009, Personality and Social Psychology Review) review research on processing fluency, the subjective ease of processing information. This ease can serve as a cue in various judgements, including judgements of truth, without providing evidence of the content’s quality. In a bilingual discussion, this mechanism suggests a risk: attributing a difficulty in listening to a weakness in the reasoning.
The premature conclusion: eliminate every linguistic difference
It would be excessive to conclude that every preference for a well-presented proposal reflects bias. Clarity can also reflect genuine work on structuring an argument, and a proposal must be open to discussion before it can become actionable. The aim is to make its arguments available for examination without treating the author’s oral fluency as evidence of their strength. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits: an experimental accent is not bilingual cooperation
Experiments involving short statements in English cannot directly predict decisions made by French- and German-speaking teams in Fribourg. Known expertise, previous relationships and each person’s language proficiency may affect how a proposal is received. Translating a document does not guarantee a fair assessment either: technical vocabulary and translation quality still need checking.
A practical check in Fribourg
Consider a hypothetical example: an agri-food company in Fribourg, a bilingual industrial partner and a university team assess a proposal to put a production by-product to use. For SHR’s « Manager par influence » programme, a relevant exercise would be to prepare a French–German briefing with equivalent content — objective, supporting evidence and uncertainties — and collect individual assessments before and after the oral presentation. The record would retain each change of opinion and its justification, distinguishing new information from a mere impression of the presentation. The verifiable measure would be the proportion of changes supported by an explicit argument about the content: an indicator of traceable judgement, not proof that bias has disappeared. To go further: explore the Influence Management training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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