Yah. With coworkers from all over the planet during my career, it didn't take long to work out that the quality of someone's ideas had little to do with the fluency of their speech. We grow up thinking of ungrammatical or hard-to-understand speech as something we associate with small children who haven't learned the language yet, and we have to adjust our view of the world to really get that difficulties with the language don't predict difficulty with thinking.
I observed though that people who work with formalisms and ideas that get evaluated according to 'hard' inflexible criteria, like engineers and programmers, tend to get it faster than most, because by hard criteria, ideas work or don't work. Or doing things in terms of an idea is easy or hard, regardless of where or with whom the idea originates. People who work exclusively with people, however, don't really have those 'bright lines' and tend to evaluate people in terms of social norms. As a result they form poor expectations of colleagues who have difficulties with language and that tends to lead to unfair evaluations of their ideas and performance.
More than once 'sensitivity training' was required to bop someone over the head and guide them toward making profitable decisions instead of stupid ones. GOD I wish they'd use a better name for it; 'sensitivity training' does not convey that it reduces business stupidity, and it's widely seen as a thing sort of irrelevant to actual business decisions. Instead, people who hear it called by that name think of it as just training them to be 'sensitive people' who offend others less. Which is true, but often they don't value that. Its effect on what you decide is more important than its effect on who you offend.
