Canton of Fribourg — Managing through influence: how can expertise be distinguished from language fluency?

In the bilingual canton of Fribourg, the agri-food sector, industry and the university community often work across the Sarine, switching between French and German in everyday management. For SHR's « Manager par influence » programme, this raises a precise question: how can managers assess someone's contribution without confusing expertise with fluency in the language being used?

What the literature establishes

Helene Tenzer, Markus Pudelko and Anne-Wil Harzing (2014, Journal of International Business Studies) show, in a qualitative study of multinational teams, that language barriers play a part in trust formation. They can affect how team members interpret their colleagues' competence and intentions. Language is therefore not merely a channel for transmitting information: it contributes to the judgements that make someone influential.

When language becomes a signal of status

Tsedal B. Neeley (2013, Organization Science) examines how using a common language in a global organisation can be accompanied by perceived status loss and distinctions based on language proficiency. This mechanism helps explain why professional expertise and standing in a discussion may diverge. A manager seeking support therefore cannot treat ease of speaking as a transparent measure of a contribution's value.

The hasty conclusion

One might conclude that simply allowing everyone to speak their own language would restore a balance of influence. These studies do not warrant that assurance: understanding a contribution, recognising expertise and placing trust remain distinct processes. The point is not to devalue language fluency, which helps cooperation, but to prevent it from serving as the sole evidence of competence. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What these data do not tell us about Fribourg

These studies concern international organisations, not a comparison of management practices among French and German speakers in the canton of Fribourg. Their findings neither quantify a local bias nor establish that one language group systematically exercises greater influence. In practice, a proposal that receives little support may also lack relevance, evidence or compatibility with project constraints.

A practical check in Fribourg

In a hypothetical project bringing together an agri-food business, an industrial partner and a university team in Fribourg, the cross-functional project manager could test a two-stage review of proposals. Before the bilingual oral discussion, each proposal would be presented without its author's name on a standardised French-German brief, with the author having validated its meaning, and assessed against shared criteria of relevance, evidence and feasibility. After the discussion, the manager would record changes in assessment and ask what new information justified each one; the measure would be the proportion of changes supported by something verifiable rather than an impression of the speaker. This exercise, suitable for SHR's « Manager par influence » programme, would not prove the existence of language bias, but would make the reasons why a proposal gains or loses weight open to examination. 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.

In pictures: Influence Management in Fribourg

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