Depending on where you grew up and established your professional career, you may not ever think about the language you speak. For professionals whose mother tongue is English, its use in communicating in the workplace may be taken for granted. After all, English has long been considered the global language of trade or the 'lingua franca' of international business. 

However, while over 1.3 billion people speak English, only 400 million are native speakers. This statistic helps to put into perspective just how many of our colleagues or peers could, at the very least, be bilingual.

As professionals in the global workforce, we need to think about language more profoundly and why learning to communicate with influence warrants further attention. Language is at the core of our cultural identity, and, as we've covered in previous posts, culture influences our behaviour and how we naturally interact in the workplace.

If you're a bilingual executive or personal assistant, or executive support professional who speaks another language but rarely gets to use it, take note! You have an additional superpower that needs to be acknowledged and leveraged! Those language skills can bring certain advantages that help put a new slant to being "agile".

The advantage of having bilingual skills means that certain cognitive strengths may come more naturally. 'Cognitive flexibility' - so valued by employers and referred to as one of the must-haves' future skills' - is the ability to adapt behaviours and thinking in response to changes in the environment. This means you have to be agile when the situation calls for decision making or problem-solving.

Cognitive flexibility includes looking at a situation from different angles, applying different lenses to derive not just one but various possible solutions. As a bilingual professional, this quality is inherent. Cognitive flexibility arises from the ability to switch from one language to another in response to a given situation.

As executive support, adaptability needs to be your forte which means seeing beyond the issue at hand to the solution rather than being stuck on the problem needs to become a discipline. Cognitive flexibility can help you view change from a positive perspective that delivers options.

Researchers believe that people with bilingual skills can store an immense amount of information and have a greater retention capacity. This ability comes from the need to switch between two languages, allowing bilingual speakers to be selective in the language that helps them in a given situation while pushing back the other.

Bilingual professionals use this ability to grasp new concepts and understand a workplace's rapidly changing business needs. An in-depth business understanding is crucial to making reasonable decisions, anticipating business needs, implementing preventive actions, and improving task organisation.

Being bilingual helps to hone skills that enable high performance. Working memory allows an individual to store information and use it to get the desired result. If you speak more than one language, then your working memory can only get better.

If you are a bilingual or multilingual executive or personal assistant, recognise this invaluable business skill and give it due credit. It is a skill that can help you achieve unparalleled career success. Become aware of the skills that bilingualism develops in you and leverage them to open a world of career development opportunities.

For monolingual professionals, there is nothing to fear! The same competencies that may come naturally to bilingual colleagues and peers are just as accessible. All it takes is a commitment to targeted professional development. And while you don't need to learn another language (although it is a lot of fun!), developing the soft skills that strengthen cognitive agility is well within your control.