Do you need to explain staff changes to your global team, but you're never quite sure whether to say take over, step down.
In this episode I'll break down the key vocabulary so you can describe company movements clearly and confidently.
Of course,
Let's crack on.
Hello and welcome to Confident Business English.
My name is Anna.
I'm a Neural Language Coach.
I work with senior managers just like you every single day.
My job is to help you build that confidence through practical language tips, which is what we're going to have a look at today, but also mindset strategies so that you can communicate more effectively and take action, because that's what confidence comes down to.
It's about moving forward and taking action even when It feels intimidating and scary.
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Here's the inspiration for this week's episode.
I have a client who, like you perhaps, has to lead quarterly meetings with teams from all over the world.
Brazil, APAC, Europe, the US, you name it, they're there.
It's a big meeting.
Recently, there had been several team changes and they wanted to update the team on that naturally.
But when it came to explaining those changes in English, they really weren't very confident about how to describe the movements.
This specific vocabulary topic is very important for you as a senior manager because at some point you may find yourself needing to update your global team or a large audience on organisational changes.
And of course, you want to get it right.
You're speaking in front of a lot of people.
You want to sound professional.
You want to communicate clearly and avoid saying anything that might potentially be contentious.
For example, if you use the wrong term, it could accidentally imply The wrong reason that somebody left or joined a company.
So that's important, especially when you're communicating to a big audience in front of the whole team.
You want to make sure as much as you can that you get it right first time and to avoid gossip and all of these things or annoying people or giving the wrong version of events.
Basically,
What we're going to cover today then, is we're going to look at some common expressions not all of them, of course, I can't squeeze every single thing, but the main ones for joining a company, moving roles, especially internally, and also leaving a company or position.
And the context is, again, this global meeting.
So we are announcing this in front of people.
So there's going to be some terms that we're not going to use like, yeah, John was fired.
Yeah, we're probably not going to say that at the global meeting.
So that's the context and it's important to bear that in mind.
The key point here before we begin is number one, there are quite a lot of terms.
That alone makes it a little bit more difficult.
Number two.
The differences can be subtle, so the terms are quite similar, but they can be different meanings, so precision matters.
And the third point from a technical standpoint.
In English there's a lot of passive voice with this topic.
Because, for example, we could say, The company hired John, but we don't really care about the company.
We care about John.
It's much more natural and common to hear John has been hired to lead the team, for example.
Let's start then with joining the company.
Great news, I have to tell you.
There is no need for us to reinvent the wheel here.
We're going to go with an absolute classic, which is just to join the company.
This is the best one when you're talking about external hires.
For example, you're in that meeting, you're telling people about the staff changes and you could say John has joined us as head of marketing.
Welcome, John.
Notice here how I'm saying as head of marketing, as here functions as in the role of.
Sarah's joining us from Google.
We're really happy to have her here.
Michael joined the company in April.
Welcome, Michael.
Great to have you on board.
If.
If you wanted to make it a little bit more formal, we could go with appointed.
John has been appointed as the new CEO, for example.
Perhaps if it was somebody that wasn't in that room or on that meeting, maybe it was the new CEO or new CFO, for example.
You might want to refer to it as that.
Sarah has been appointed as the new CMO for the company.
We're really looking forward to working with her.
Now let's add another layer to this because we're not always hiring people to be an employee.
You may also bring people in to do a specific job, for example, a consultant or somebody that you are outsourcing, but they are part of the team.
Notice here how I said to bring someone in.
You'll also hear bring somebody on.
I don't think there's really a big meaningful difference between the two, but let's go with bring in for these examples.
For example, you're in that meeting and you could say well, I'm really pleased to say that we've brought in Lisa as an external advisor.
Or with the passive voice.
I'm really pleased to say that Lisa has been brought in as an external advisor.
We're really looking forward to working with her.
Welcome, Lisa.
Clear so far?
Yes.
Should we move on?
All right.
New category, internal movements within the company.
This was actually the point where my client was a little bit more hesitant.
They weren't really sure.
Three phrases I'm going to share with you.
The first one is to move into a new role.
Into is a preposition.
It's together.
And this is a very neutral phrase.
And it's great for talking about an internal transfer. or change of position.
And especially I would say it's best for if it's a lateral move, you're moving across.
Not necessarily.
It could still be a promotion, but I would say that's probably like when somebody goes into a new department.
For example, in this case with my client, they had somebody that was moving into a communications role when previously they'd been in another role in culture, and they moved into this new role.
If you're in that meeting with the team, you could say I just want to say congratulations to Emma, who has now moved into the communications team.
Equally.
It could be somebody moving into your team, but it could also be somebody moving into a role outside of your team.
Does that make sense?
So it could be.
Congratulations, Emma.
It's been fantastic to work with you.
I'd just like to let you all know that Emma is now moving into a new role within the leadership team.
Then we have two phrasal verbs take up and take on.
They are slightly different but I want you to kind of think about them as twins.
Both of them mean about beginning a new position.
Take up is more neutral, right?
Very common in announcements.
John's taking up a new role in finance.
Sarah is going to be taking up a new role as head of marketing.
Take on, it's about that responsibility.
There's some implication that it's a challenge, right?
John is going to be taking on this new role as head of marketing.
There is that implication that this is a new role.
It's new territory potentially, but not necessarily.
But I would say often it means a promotion or move into a more senior position.
Again, you're in that meeting, you want to explain the changes.
As you will know everyone I think everybody's aware Sarah will be taking up a new role within the communications department in June, or it could also be.
For example, Michael has taken on a new leadership position in APEC.
Finally in this category and this is where it gets a bit tricky is the phrase to take over from.
This is the question my client had.
They were like, oh, is it takeover from or is it take up?
Really important point because the nuance is different.
If you take over from somebody, you replace them in that position.
This is why it's so common in internal positions, right?
James will take over from Sarah as the CEO, perhaps on a temporary basis.
Maybe he'll be the interim CEO.
Linda is taking over from Mark next month.
Perhaps Mark is going on paternity leave.
Sarah is moving into a new role in communications.
So John is going to take over from her later. until we find a permanent replacement.
Finally, new category.
We want to talk about not people moving into different roles and staying within the company, but when they are leaving and exiting the company.
This can be a little bit contentious and we want to make sure that we get it right.
Good news is.
The simplest option is best here.
A very neutral umbrella term that we use here is just to leave the company.
I would like to say that Sarah is leaving the company in June.
Thank you so much, Sarah, for all your hard work and efforts.
Another way that we could say this is leaving us.
That's kind of got a bit more of a personal touch.
I'm really sorry to say actually, that John is leaving us in May and he's going to be taking up a new role in Google, for example.
Here we can use take up or take on to talk about starting a new role in a different company, especially when we're talking about this leaving process.
Another really nice one that you could use here is to move on.
I'd just like to let you all know that John has decided to move on to a new opportunity, and we wish him the best of luck going forward.
It suggests career progression and it also just helps you avoid any difficult things, because maybe people don't always leave on good terms, right?
You know what it's like when you're a little bit more senior, things could happen.
John has decided to move on, even though Maybe he was even forced out, who knows?
But this is a polite way of doing it and a very diplomatic one for this specific setting.
You could also say here that somebody is going to retire.
If that is confirmed, you could say that Pete will retire at the end of this year.
We wish him all the best in his retirement.
Lastly, When we want to talk about senior leadership leaving the company.
You may have heard me talk about this before.
A very, very common phrasal verb to use is to step down.
This is a really good way to think about it is when people are on a podium, like for the Olympics, they stand on the podium and then they step down.
This means to resign. but from a senior position.
Here we're talking about the CFO, the chair, the CEO will step down in September.
John decided to step down at the end of this year.
It needs to be for senior roles.
If it was for a more junior role, I would understand what you were saying, but it would just sound a little bit out of context.
Does that make sense?
So to wrap up, what is the key takeaway from today?
There's a lot of vocabulary that I just hit you with.
You may want to go back and listen to it.
It's not that you need to learn a hundred different ways to describe staff movements with those ones that I've taught you today.
You could go away and talk about it confidently.
And you can use that vocabulary again and again.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
So my advice from today is this.
If you have this type of meeting coming up, pick five or six expressions from today's episode that you feel would be relevant.
Learn them well, practice them, use them in your next team update.
The best thing to do is to try to practice them as soon as possible.
Let's leave that there today then.
If you really enjoyed that episode, don't forget to subscribe, follow and like wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Thanks again for choosing Confident Business English for your training this week and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
All right, bye-bye.
