My English is not very good looking
The most important trait in a leader isn't knowing everything; it's creating the psychological safety for your team to say 'I don't know'.
I have a phrase I’ve used my whole career in America: “My English is not very good looking.”
It’s a clumsy, literal translation of a Spanish saying. Thirty years in the U.S. and I still reach for it when my mouth can’t keep up with my brain. It’s my white flag. My way of saying: I know I’m about to mispronounce something. Please pretend not to notice.
I’ve spent three decades in rooms where people were pretending to understand things. And I count myself among the guilty. I have nodded through presentations about architectures I’d never heard of, smiled knowingly at acronyms I’d Google later, and constructed plausible-sounding questions — not to learn anything, but to prove I didn’t need to.
Once, around 2003, that performance cost my team six months. Someone introduced an approach in a technical review I didn’t fully grasp. I nodded. The room nodded. We built. We discovered the flaw halfway through, when someone finally asked “wait — why did we do it this way?”
Nobody had an answer. Nobody had actually understood it in the first place.
I think about my oldest son at eight years old, standing silently behind my monitors, not asking for anything. Patient. Watching. He had learned not to interrupt the important work — but he never left either. He would stand there for hours, quiet and stubborn, until I finally turned around. I never taught him that. He just had it.
And in the way that younger brothers absorb what older ones never say out loud, he passed it on.
My youngest son is a United States Marine. He wasn’t even born yet during those long nights his older brother spent behind the monitors.
At boot camp, his drill instructors gave him a nickname: “36 seconds.” Because, they said, it felt like every thirty-six seconds he was asking something. He did not care if it earned him extra push-ups. He knew the rest of the platoon didn’t know either — they were just too afraid to say so. His “not very good looking English” did not stop him. He asked anyway.
He finished boot camp as Platoon Leader. He has been promoted on the very first day he was eligible. Every single time.
I am telling you this as an almost embarrassingly proud father. And also as a man who spent thirty years learning the lesson his sons seemed to be born already knowing.
The oldest with his quiet stubborn patience. The youngest with his relentless questions. Two different lessons. Same father, still catching up.
“I don’t understand” is not a confession of weakness. It is the bravest sentence in any organization. And the job of a leader is to make sure it is never swallowed.
My English will never be perfect. It is, and always will be, “not very good looking.”
But at least now, I say it out loud.
Are you building a team where people perform fluency, or a team where they’re actually learning? Because one of those teams builds things that last. And the other one just nods.