Why Your Multilingual Team Resists Change: Bridging the Language-Culture Gap in Growth Operations
In the world of a growth operations consultancy, the only constant is change. Scaling a tech company or managing a rapidly expanding nonprofit means implementing new technology, streamlining workflows, and rolling out new Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). When these changes don’t go smoothly, leaders often default to thinking their teams are simply resistant or unwilling to change, however, in organizations with a significant multilingual workforce, the real problem is rarely defiance, it’s a systematic failure of uniform communication.
Working alongside certified interpretation experts like Alexandra Kaplan, CEO of Kaplan Interpreting Services, I’ve observed how organizations that treat professional interpretation as a core operational asset consistently outperform those that don't.
Advising leaders across tech and nonprofit organizations has given me a front row seat to the silent killer of organizational change: the language-culture gap. When communication breaks down, an investment in new technology or training instantly becomes a sunk cost. Professional interpreters are not a luxury item if your workforce is multilingual; they are an essential operational asset that ensures leadership alignment and prevents the systemic degradation of your operational integrity.
The most common operational misstep is relying on the assumption that a bilingual employee can act as an adequate on the fly translator for high-stakes meetings or training. This is flawed for two key operational reasons:
Loss of SOP Integrity: SOPs, technical documents and compliance training are built on precise, industry-specific vocabulary which may not be commonplace. Asking an employee to interpret concepts like “agile transformation”, “quarterly OKRs” or “fiduciary oversight” while simultaneously absorbing the content introduces interpretation variance. This variance as well as any personal spin leads to multiple, differing versions of the one single message across your organization. Once the organization starts to operate with slightly different versions of the new process, you’ve lost the benefit before it even launches. A certified business interpreter from Kaplan Interpreting Services, specialized in the business context, ensures the message is properly delivered.
Erosion of Leadership Alignment: Executive alignment requires the consistent communication of the “Why.” When a CEO introduces a major strategic shift, they convey conviction, urgency, and a vision for the future. This tone, and strategic nuance are critical to garnering buy-in. An uncertified interpreter, focused simply on word-for-word translation, often fails to bridge cultural gaps in communication styles, inadvertently muting the leader’s conviction. When the “Why” is lost in translation, the change is perceived as arbitrary, leading directly to resistance.
Change resistance is often rooted in a lack of psychological safety and a disconnect between the team and leadership, language barriers exacerbate this disconnect.
A professional interpreter serves as a vital bridge, not just by translating words, but by facilitating context and cultural understanding:
Translating Emotion and Tone: The interpreter is skilled at capturing the feeling of the message, the sincerity behind a tough layoff decision or the excitement over a funding announcement. They help ensure the message is not just understood, but felt by the team, fostering trust needed for successful change adoption. This is an investment in your relationship with those who may not speak your language.
Empowering Feedback Loops: A successful operational rollout demands honest, uncensored feedback from the people on the ground. A professional interpreter from Kaplan Interpreting Services in a coss-functional meeting or Q&A session empowers the multilingual team members to ask tough, necessary questions without fear of miscommunication or embarrassment. This honest feedback is crucial to allowing leaders to identify and address operational friction points early.
Ensuring Equitable Knowledge Transfer: Whether you’re training a therapy team on new compliance protocols or working with an offshore development team, the goal is total knowledge transfer. When this training is delivered with certified translation, you are ensuring that all employees, regardless of their first language, receive the same high quality, actionable and detailed information. This is an important investment in your people that drives tangible results.
For any multilingual organization navigating an operational shift, whether a new partnership, the implementation of a new system or a post acquisition integration, professional interpreting must be budgeted and planned as a core operational expenditure.
Practical ways to integrate interpreters for maximum operational efficiency:
The High-Stakes Meeting: Utilize professional interpreters for all-hands meetings, leadership presentations of new strategy, and executive Q&A sessions. This ensures the foundational vision is clearly and uniformly understood by everyone at the same time.
The Critical Training Rollout: For any new technology or SOP rollout, use certified interpreters for both live training sessions and creation of translated training material. AI or translation apps will not create solid training material and you can not risk the integrity of your core processes.
The Cross-Functional Alignment Session: In planning meetings where different departments are aligning on a new process, the interpreter ensures that all operational requirements and constraints are clearly articulated and understood by all stakeholders.
At Katrina Purcell LLC, we specialize in providing strategic guidance and tailored solutions to unlock our clients full potential. For multilingual organizations, this means ensuring your communication strategy is as robust as your operational plan. By treating professional interpreting as the strategic operational asset it is, you can stop asking why your team resists change, and start achieving ambitious growth.
This article was created in collaboration with Kaplan Interpreting Services. Kaplan Interpreting Services provides certified and professional interpreting and translation services, specializing in ensuring high-stakes, nuanced business communication is accurate across languages and cultures.
