If you want to have more visibility, you need to speak up.
But to speak up you do need to have a certain level of confidence with the technical parts of the language.
That's why today I'm going to go with three essential verbs to help you feel more secure speaking.
Let's crack on!
Hello and welcome back to Confident Business English.
If you are a senior manager working in an international company and you already have to work in English, but you lack confidence communicating, this podcast is absolutely made for you.
My name is Anna and I work with senior managers, just like you, from all over the world, every single day, as an accredited neuro language coach.
This week on the list.
I wanted to go over these three specific business verbs because they are extremely common in a professional setting, but they are often misused and they are quite confusing.
As with nearly all my episodes, this was inspired by a client who literally asked me how do I use these verbs?
As I said in the introduction, it's really important for you to feel comfortable when you have a doubt about the technical part of the language, because especially if you are somebody that hesitates when you speak up,
You kind of need to know that it's the right option.
Otherwise, you're not going to feel secure.
And that lack of security is going to come across when you speak.
And it can also affect your fluency, because perhaps you hesitate or you sort of say oh, what was that word, or whatever.
So if we can fix these things.
It's going to push you to speak more.
Hopefully it'll be smoother and you'll speak with more conviction, which gives overall a better impression as a senior manager.
So the three essential business verbs we're going to have a look at today are to maintain, to keep and to stay.
I want to go through them one by one with examples, then I'm going to illustrate it with a story and hopefully that helps kind of knit it all together nicely.
The goal here, of course, is to get you using these verbs as naturally as possible.
The biggest common error that you should know about in advance is that professionals tend to overuse, maintain when actually we would use other options.
This generally doesn't lead to a breakdown in communication, but today we'll go through what are the right choices.
Let's kick off with the verb maintain.
The first one and the most straightforward is to maintain something physical like an office or equipment.
Perhaps you work in the facilities sector, in which case it costs a lot of money to maintain an office building.
It can also be very expensive to maintain specific equipment.
Perhaps you work in a field where There is maintenance, for example, of renewable energy equipment.
I was just talking the other week with one of my clients that has to maintain some of those little mowers, the automatic mowers and the automatic things that wipe the solar panels.
All of these things require a lot of maintenance.
Software also has to be maintained.
Note here how the structure is to maintain something, a noun.
The second part is it's not just maintaining physical things.
There are also intangible things that require maintenance.
The main one here I want you to think about is maintaining relationships.
If we build something or create a relationship or start it, we have to maintain it, especially in a business context, right?
We have to maintain relationships.
We have to maintain trust with our team.
Also as a company, you have to maintain a certain reputation or brand image.
Again, notice here how the structure is to maintain plus a noun.
All good so far?
Great, moving on, keep.
The first things.
Here are just some set phrases with keep that are really straightforward to remember, and these are mainly for communication and contact.
I'm sure you may have heard this.
Please keep me in the loop.
Can you keep me informed?
Please keep John updated.
We can also keep in touch with people, right?
You might like to keep in touch with people from your previous job, for example, if you got on with them very well.
You might also keep in contact with certain people in different offices within your organization.
Those are set phrases, always with keep.
Just before we move on.
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The next category and I think this is important to highlight individually with keep is to keep something the same.
Or another way of saying this is to keep something as is or as it is.
This is really common in a business context, especially because we're always getting suggestions to change things right.
Let's imagine that one of your team members says I want to change the meeting from Monday to Thursday.
And you're like, well, actually, I prefer to keep the meeting the same.
Let's keep it on the same day.
Or perhaps there's a policy about working from home.
Maybe there's been a request to change something and your position is, you know, I think we should just keep the policy the same or keep the policy as is.
We can always review it later down the line.
Even if we're talking about pricing.
Perhaps there was a proposal to the board to change the pricing structure, but the board has come back and said no, we prefer to keep the pricing structure the same as before.
Even with people, imagine there's a suggestion to change part of the team or maybe even an idea.
It doesn't just have to be a formal proposal.
But your position is, actually, I prefer to keep the team as it is for now.
We can review it further down the line if we have to.
What would be the common mistake here?
Well, just to replace it with maintain.
Let's maintain the meeting on the same day.
Let's maintain the team the same.
Is it the end of the world?
Not really, because I can understand you, but this is the correct way to say it.
Moving on.
We're staying with keep, and this is could continue to have something or possession of something.
Again, if there's been a proposal to change it.
And this can be physical things, it can be intangible business things people, suppliers.
Let's imagine there's been a proposal to shut down one of the offices in London.
But actually the board comes back and said, no, we want to keep that office.
We want to continue to have that office.
You may wanna keep your desk if you move into a different office, or maybe, in terms of office perks, you might suggest that they keep the coffee machine on the second floor.
Although I don't really know why, because I have yet to try a coffee vending machine that actually dispenses anything that's actually drinkable.
Please let me know if I'm wrong here, but I have a sort of vendetta against coffee vending machines.
Then it can also be non-physical business, things like to keep a meeting, to keep a step in a process or to keep an entire process because you think it's worth continuing to have.
There might even be a suggestion to change the branding of the company, but actually your team suggests no.
I think we should keep the branding.
It's working really well for us.
There are also other things that we can continue to have, and that is in the context of people, HR and also procurement.
I'm going to introduce you to a new phrase here, which is to keep somebody on.
This is in the context of continuing to employ somebody.
If you've employed somebody and you have them on probation for a certain period, you may then decide if they're doing a good job and you think they're a great fit to keep them on.
You can also, if it's an external person, you could bring in a consultant to do some work and then decide to keep them on because they're a really valuable part of the team.
If you work in procurement, you can decide to keep a supplier once you're renewing that contract.
Again, the common mistake here would be to use maintain rather than keep.
Not a major breakdown in communication.
I can still follow you, but keep is the right option here.
Just to clarify also the structure, keep plus nouns.
How are you doing so far?
I know it's a little dense.
We've got a lot to get through, but let's keep going.
That's actually a beautiful, unintentional segue into our next topic, which is about keep plus the gerund.
We have to keep growing.
We have to keep expanding.
This is a way to highlight that an action will continue.
We want it to continue, has continued, is continuing.
Suppliers keep increasing their prices.
The company keeps expanding across Europe.
We plan to keep bringing in more people and we keep actually getting good feedback from our clients, which is great, but employees keep complaining about the new system.
Again, the common mistake here would be to say suppliers have maintained increasing their prices.
It would sound a little bit odd because we're not talking about maintenance, right?
So the correct option is to use keep plus the gerund here.
You could also use continue plus the gerund, which is a little bit more formal and neutral.
Next we've had a look at keep.
Let's have a look also at actively maintaining a certain condition.
For example, we need to keep on top of this.
This is kind of a set phrase that you can learn as well.
We need to keep motivated.
Let's keep focused.
It means we're going to put an active effort into maintaining that condition.
As an add-on to this.
Another really good phrase to learn with keep is the structure, with causing someone or something to maintain a condition.
If you talk about the team, right, you have to get the team motivated.
And once you've got the team motivated, you have to keep them motivated.
It's the same thing with stakeholders.
You have to get the stakeholders on board, but then you have to keep them on board.
Notice here how the structure is to keep someone a certain way, to keep everybody engaged, to keep the team aligned, to keep the directors on board.
We don't only use this with people, we also use this with things.
Active effort to keep things in a certain condition.
For example, if you're a finance person, you want to keep costs low.
If you work in projects, you want to keep projects on track.
If you work in health and safety, you want to keep serious incidents as low as possible.
And if you work in sales, perhaps you want to keep your options open.
You need to see how you're going to meet that target before the end of the year.
Still with me?
Yes.
Excellent.
We're done with keep.
We're moving on to stay.
First of all, let's have a look at stay with an adjective which does the highlight continuing in a certain condition.
If you're in sales, you want the company to stay competitive.
If you're in finance, you want the company to stay profitable.
And if you're a country manager of perhaps, a retail store, you want to stay ahead of the competition by ensuring that you have a great shopping experience, etc.
The other way that you might want to use stay and this is really focused on individuals and teams is to encourage people to remain in a specific state, attitude or whatever.
So imagine if you're giving somebody their performance reviews and you're giving them some pointers about where they may need to improve.
You might say if you feel this person is kind of all over the place and they're not prioritizing properly, I really need you to stay focused on what we're doing right now.
If it's also a manager that's not very good at maintaining cost control, then you could say look, I really need you to stay within the budget this year.
That then, was a whistle stop tour, which just means a quick tour of all the different ways that you may need to use maintain, keep or stay as a senior manager in an international context.
To finish, I would like to put this vocabulary into a business storytelling exercise.
So we're going to talk about John.
Surprise, surprise.
John is head of facilities management at a major European bank.
He's based in Germany and he oversees all the different premises of the bank across several different countries.
A big part of his job, as you may imagine, is to oversee the maintenance of all the installations at the premises.
Of course, buildings are very expensive to maintain, so it's important to exercise very close cost control.
And as well as that, of course, as you probably have to do as well, John has to try and maintain really good relationships with all the individual building managers that head up each bank, and he does that by having regular monthly meetings.
That way, of course, they can keep in touch with each other and keep each other in the loop about everything that's going on in the different offices and share best practice.
Currently, John is overseeing several different projects, as you may be as well.
In one of the office buildings in London, for example, they decided not to keep the second floor and stay only on the first floor.
So he's sorting out that transition.
There was also a suggestion to actually change the monthly meeting to a bi-monthly one.
But John decided to keep it as it is because he thinks it's really important to have the meetings more regularly.
He also had a new building manager start at the beginning of the year.
He's been really happy with his work so far.
So he's planning to keep them on past their probation period.
He also recently had a meeting with his boss to discuss a difficult negotiation with a building company regarding rental costs.
They don't really seem to want to move, but his boss told him to keep trying to get them to bring down the costs.
In terms of the company itself, it's kept expanding over the last few years and it's going to keep growing, with new offices opening up around the world.
It's a very busy period with a lot of change and it's very difficult to keep on top of everything.
But of course John is doing his very best to try to keep the facilities team engaged and motivated, even though it is a very, very busy period.
The HR team has raised some issues as well that have been coming out of the annual survey.
There were some comments about the working environment in some of the offices.
And some of the employees were saying you know, we've raised this before, but things have stayed the same.
There haven't been any changes.
And employees keep complaining about facility systems that aren't working very well.
Lucky John.
All right, that brings us to the end of the John story.
I hope that helps bring some of the technical parts to life and you can actually see how that vocabulary might work for you in your role, because it's always a little bit different.
Some roles are going to use different vocabulary than others, but these are verbs that come up often in many different contexts.
Now that you've listened to the episode, that is the first step.
I would really encourage you to try to put this into practice.
Think of how this works first of all in your language, so that you can help your brain connect the dots.
You can either think of or write out some examples that are relevant for you, even stories that could illustrate this vocabulary.
That's quite memorable for your brain too.
In terms of a practical point, you could pick one sentence from the episode today that you would like to try out and just give it a whirl.
Next time, write it on a post-it note, write it on a note on your computer to give you that little push to say it.
And I'll see you same time, same place next week.
Bye bye.
