How tone, posture and pace decide who gets heard in meetings

Every team has somebody who gets heard the moment they open their mouth, and somebody else who says the same thing five minutes later and gets nothing. Rank explains some of it, though less than people assume. If you watch a meeting for long enough, the person who gets heard is often not the most senior person present, and the person nobody hears is sometimes the one whose name sits above everyone else's on the org chart.

Improvisers call this status. I use the word because once you can see it happening in a meeting you can do something about it.

Status is something people do, not something they have

In improvisation, status has nothing to do with job title. It is the position a person takes relative to the people around them, moment by moment, in how they hold themselves and how they speak. Two characters in a scene with the same job can play it at very different levels, and an audience can tell within seconds which of them is running the room, without being able to say how they know.

They know because status is carried in small physical things, and tone, posture and pace do most of it. Whether a voice rises at the end of a sentence or settles. Whether the body is still or fidgeting. Whether the words come out at a speed that assumes people will wait, or at a speed that assumes they won't.

Status and presence is the third of the four habits in the sessions, and it gets a block of its own in the Half Day and the Programme. It comes after listening and building because you need those first. Somebody who is heard and has nothing to say has not gained much.

What high status looks like in a meeting

Watch the person who gets heard and you will see roughly the same things every time. They are still. They start speaking at the pace they intend to continue at, rather than rushing the first sentence out before somebody cuts in. They finish their sentences and stop, and they leave the silence afterwards for other people to deal with. They look at the people they are speaking to, not at the table or the slide.

None of it needs volume. Some of the highest-status people in a meeting are quiet. What they have is time. They take the meeting's time as if it were theirs to take, and their colleagues, without ever deciding to, let them.

What low status looks like, and why seniority doesn't prevent it

Now watch the person who doesn't get heard. The sentence starts with an apology, "sorry, just a quick one". The pace picks up halfway through, because they can feel the patience around the table running out and they want to reach the end before it does. The tone lifts at the finish, so a statement comes out sounding like a question, and everyone is free to treat it as one. If there is a pause afterwards they fill it themselves, usually by walking the point back.

The point may have been the best one in the meeting. It was delivered in a way that told everyone it didn't need taking seriously, and so it wasn't.

Seniority does not protect against any of this. Plenty of directors play low status in their own meetings and their teams learn to talk across them. Plenty of people two years into their first job play high status without knowing it, and colleagues turn to them when a decision is needed. Status is a set of habits, and habits follow the person rather than the job.

How to be heard in meetings when you usually aren't

Because it is made of things people do, it can be changed, and the changes are physical. Slow the first sentence down. Sit still while you say it. Let the sentence end on a full stop and leave the silence alone. Drop the apology at the front. None of that takes much courage. What it takes is noticing what your body is doing at the moment it matters, which is hard to do from a description.

There is a second half to this which people tend to forget. High status all the time causes problems of its own. The person who plays it in every meeting stops receiving offers, because nobody brings a half-formed idea to somebody who takes up that much room. The useful skill is being able to choose. Lower it when you want the team to bring you things, raise it when you need a decision to land.

Why it has to be practised rather than explained

You cannot watch yourself in a meeting. You can be told afterwards that you rushed, or that you sounded unsure, and it will not help much, because by then you have no memory of what your body was doing at the time.

In a session people work on this in pairs and small groups. They say the same thing with a different tone, or a different posture, or at a different pace, and watch what changes in the person opposite. Someone who has just done that knows which version got heard and what they did differently to get there, and that is what they take back to the office. The Half Day is the shortest session that includes this block. If you have a director who gets talked across in their own meetings, or a new starter everyone turns to and nobody can say why, that is the one to look at on the rate card.