What sixteen years of marking Cambridge exams taught me about executive English

I've assessed thousands of candidates at C1 and C2 level. The gap between the two is almost never vocabulary.

It's the same thing that separates senior-sounding English from merely correct English: register. Textbook corporate English is long, formal and careful. The English actual leaders use is short, direct, occasionally almost blunt. Most non-native speakers over-correct toward formality, because formality feels safer.

It isn't safer. Length reads as uncertainty, and uncertainty costs you authority.

Five expressions I hear constantly from senior people, with what tends to get said instead.

1. "Let me come back to you on that."

Instead of: "I'm very sorry, I don't have this information at the moment."

Non-native speakers apologise far too much for not knowing something, and a long apology signals insecurity. Senior people don't apologise for a missing fact. They say they'll follow up, and move on.

2. "Let's park that."

Instead of: "We can discuss this another time."

Solves a real problem: shutting down a tangent without making the other person feel dismissed. "Park" implies the topic is set aside, not rejected. Usually followed by "let's pick it up afterwards."

3. "I'd push back on that."

Instead of: "I don't agree" (too blunt) or "Well, maybe, perhaps I think possibly..." (invisible)

This is where I see senior people lose the most presence. In your own language you have a full range of tools for disagreeing with nuance. Translating strips them out, so you either undershoot and disappear or overshoot and sound aggressive. This sits exactly in the middle.

4. "Just to be clear "

Instead of: "Sorry, I think perhaps I did not explain myself well."

Don't take the blame for a misunderstanding you may not have caused. Works in reverse too: "Just to be clear, you're saying the deadline moves?"

5. "I'll take that away."

Instead of: "Yes, of course, I will do this, no problem, I will send it as soon as possible."

Short, confident, done. The longer version isn't wrong, it's doing five times the work for the same result, and length reads as eagerness rather than competence.

The pattern

Every phrase here is shorter than what people typically say instead.

That's the real lesson, and I see it in the exam room too. Candidates assume more words signal more respect, more effort, more politeness. In English business settings the opposite is usually true.

You don't need a bigger vocabulary to sound more senior. Usually you need a smaller one, used with more precision.

Reading a list won't change how you speak, though. Pick two , not five, and use them in your next three meetings, even when they feel unnatural. That awkward phase is short.

If you'd like to work on this properly, I coach senior professionals one-to-one on the English they actually need. See how the coaching works.

Ruth Finnie is a Business English coach with over 20 years' experience and a Cambridge English examiner since 2010.