Abstract
The question this briefing answers: why does the loudest person in the room so often get promoted, what does the room actually hear in a forceful voice, where does that advantage stop paying, and what can quiet people, forceful people, and the people who chair meetings do differently?
It separates the two routes to influence, dominance and prestige, and describes what makes a forceful voice persuasive: the signals of competence it sends, the sound of the voice itself, and the anxiety that makes rooms want a strong leader. It then sets out who is allowed to be loud, and why the answer differs for women and men.
The middle chapters set out the limits: the curve on which too much assertiveness costs as much as too little, the fade of dominance over time, the leader who protects their own position at the team’s expense, and what extraversion really buys at work. A late chapter covers the finding that people cannot hear their own volume. The practical chapters end with what a chair can design, and say plainly where no trial has been run.
Keywords: assertiveness; dominance; prestige; extraversion; leader emergence; leadership effectiveness; promotion; meetings; voice pitch; speaking time; gender; backlash; uncertainty; self-awareness; line-crossing illusion; status over time. # PART I. THE MEETING
Chapter 1: The Loudest Voice in the Room
1.1 The Room
The scenario below is a composite. It draws on recurring patterns in research and advisory practice, and it describes no real, identifiable person or organisation.
The steering group for a new logistics system had met every fortnight for four months, and by the spring it was clear that the project was late, over budget and short of anybody willing to say which of the three suppliers’ problems mattered most; a programme manager who had joined the group from finance said early in the meeting, in a firm voice and before anybody else had spoken, that the integration supplier was the problem, that the other two were noise, and that the group should give the integration supplier thirty days to fix it or replace them. Nobody in the room had more evidence than she did, two people had less, and within ten minutes the meeting was discussing her thirty days rather than the question it had been called to answer. Nobody in the room would have described it as being talked over, and most of them, asked afterwards, said the meeting had finally made progress.
An analyst from the operations team, who had spent most of the previous month inside the suppliers’ data, said quietly towards the end that the delays seemed to come from a mismatch between two of the suppliers rather than from either one, and that replacing one would not fix it. The chair said that was a useful point to take offline, and summarised the meeting as agreeing the programme manager’s plan. Nobody asked him to say more, and they made the decision in the next five minutes.
1.2 Afterwards
Six months later, the programme manager was promoted to lead the next phase, and those who sat in that meeting described her as decisive, the person who cut through the noise when the project needed it. The thirty-day ultimatum had, as it happened, been partly right: the integration supplier did have problems, and fixing them helped. The mismatch the analyst had described took another five months to surface, and when it did, the group spent a meeting working out why nobody had seen it sooner.
A year after that, the phase she led was running well on the technical side and badly on the human one. Two of her stronger team members had asked to move; her peers said that she was hard to disagree with, and she was surprised to hear it, because she thought of herself as direct rather than forceful and had, she said, been trying to hold back. Both readings were sincere. They could not both be accurate.
1.3 The Question Worth Asking
The usual way to tell this story is that the loudest person always gets promoted, and that the room should have listened to the analyst. Part of that is true, and Chapter 2 sets out how much. The more useful question is psychological: what did the people in the room actually hear when the programme manager spoke, why did it move them so quickly, why did it stop working a year later, and why was the person at the centre of it the last to know how she came across?
The previous briefing in this series looked at how judges form judgements of potential from what they can see and showed that people who speak more and sound surer are read as leaders. This one takes up the trait behind the loudest voice in the room, which is less about volume than about assertiveness: the readiness to take charge, push a view and claim the floor. The evidence suggests that it comes in two forms that rooms reward for different reasons, that its value follows a curve rather than a line, and that most people misjudge their own place on that curve, in both directions.
Stated plainly: a firm voice set the agenda, was rewarded for it, and a year later cost the team, and the person with the firm voice couldn't hear it.
Chapter 2: Always, Mostly, and Not for Long
2.1 The Story We Tell
Most people tell a simple story about loud colleagues: confidence and volume are rewarded, and quiet competence is overlooked. It is attractive because almost everybody has seen a version of it, and because it puts the fault in the room rather than in anybody’s choices. Most of it is also partly true, which is a large part of why it survives.
The story is not wrong so much as incomplete. A large body of evidence supports the claim that more extraverted and assertive people are more likely to be picked as leaders and to rise, and the title uses the word "always" for a reason. The evidence is much less kind to the other half of the story: that being loud is all it takes, and that the loud person keeps what they win. The detail matters, because the parts of the story that are wrong are the parts that tell people what to do about it.
2.2 What Is Right in It
A synthesis of 97 earlier meta-analyses, covering 165 work outcomes, found that extraversion was positively associated with about 90 per cent of them, with an average correlation the authors described as a small, persistent advantage at work (Wilmot, Wanberg, Kammeyer-Mueller & Ones, 2019). The same review found a modest link with being picked as a leader and a larger one with being rated effective as a leader. A meta-analysis is a study that combines the results of many earlier studies rather than running a new one, and a synthesis of meta-analyses is one level further removed again, so it is strong on the direction of an effect and weaker on the detail of any one setting.
The rise continues over a career. In a study that measured the personality of 457 people as students and followed them up about fourteen years later, extraverts were the most likely to have advanced in their organisations, while people who were selfish, combative or manipulative were no more likely to have gained power than anybody else (Anderson, Sharps, Soto & John, 2020). That second result matters for what follows, because it separates being assertive from being unpleasant: the advantage went to energy, sociability and assertiveness, and it did not go to aggression.
How solid is this? A synthesis of meta-analyses and two preregistered longitudinal studies support this, meaning the predictions were registered before the data were analysed. The career study relied partly on self-reported rank, people’s own account of their position, and partly on colleagues’ ratings, and it describes students at three universities.
2.3 What the Evidence Says Instead
The evidence adds three things to the story. The first is that loudness is two different things: one that rooms reward because it is admired, and one that rooms reward because it is hard to resist, and Chapter 3 separates them. The second is that assertiveness pays up to a point and then costs, so that the very loudest people are rated as worse leaders than people in the middle, which is the subject of Chapter 8. Neither of these is visible in a single meeting, which is why the simple story feels so complete when you are in the room.
The third is time. The advantage of a forceful voice is greatest when a group first meets and fades as the group learns what each person actually contributes, which is why the programme manager was rewarded in the spring and struggled a year later. None of these findings says that quiet people are better leaders, and the briefing is careful not to claim it; they say that the room’s first reading of a loud voice is a forecast, and that it is often wrong in ways that can be predicted.
Stated plainly: loud people do tend to rise, but loud is two things: it pays only up to a point, and its advantage is largest at the start.
PART II. WHAT THE ROOM HEARS
Chapter 3: Two Ways to the Top
3.1 The Insight
Psychologists who study status in groups distinguish two routes to influence. Prestige is influence granted freely because others admire a person’s skill or knowledge and want to learn from them, while dominance is influence taken through force, pressure, or the threat of making things uncomfortable for anyone who disagrees. Both work, which is the uncomfortable part, and most loud colleagues are using some mixture of the two. Neither route requires the person using it to be aware of which one they are on.
3.2 What the Evidence Says
In a study of 191 students working in groups of four to six on a survival-ranking task, the researchers measured how much each person’s private ranking moved the group’s final answer, and asked group members and outside observers to rate each person’s dominance and prestige (Cheng, Tracy, Foulsham, Kingstone & Henrich, 2013): people rated as dominant and people rated as prestigious both had more influence over the group’s decisions, and the two routes were independent of each other, so that somebody could score high on one and low on the other. Group members liked the prestigious individuals a great deal, while dominance had almost no relationship with being liked, meaning dominant members could be influential without being popular. The study did not measure whether either kind of member had better answers, so it shows how influence is won rather than whether it is deserved.
In a second study from the same paper, 59 people watched short clips of these groups while an eye tracker recorded where they looked. Dominance and prestige together accounted for nearly half of the differences in how long observers looked at each person, and dominance drew the eye at least as strongly as prestige did. People looked at the forceful members. They also deferred to them.
How solid is this: evidenced by a two-study paper with students in a single setting. The behavioural measure of influence was explained less well than the ratings were, so the result is clearer for who seemed influential than for who changed the answer.
3.3 What It Means for You
The forceful colleague in a meeting may be influential because people respect what they know, because people would rather not argue with them, or both, and from the outside the two look similar. The steering group in Chapter 1 could not have said which route the programme manager was using, and she probably could not have said either. Both routes produce the same visible result in a meeting: the room moves.
The difference matters because the two routes have different costs over time. Influence that rests on admiration tends to bring people towards the person who holds it, and influence that rests on pressure tends to hold only as long as the pressure does. That difference takes months to show.
3.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
A useful private test, when a colleague’s view has carried a meeting, is to ask whether people agreed because they were persuaded or because disagreeing felt expensive. Persuasion usually leaves people able to repeat the argument afterwards, and pressure usually leaves them able to repeat only the conclusion. The test is rough but cheap, and you can run it in any meeting.
Stated plainly: people get to the top either by being admired or by being hard to argue with; both work in the room, and only one of them makes people like you.
Chapter 4: Loud Sounds Like Competent
4.1 The Insight
The second thing a room hears in a loud voice is competence, whether or not it is there. People who take the floor readily do things that look like expertise, such as offering answers, speaking in a settled tone and proposing a course of action, and groups read those behaviours as evidence of ability. Some of that reading is accurate. Much of it is clearly not.
4.2 What the Evidence Says
In two studies of task groups, people higher in trait dominance were rated as more competent by their teammates, by outside observers and by the research staff, and the effect held after the researchers controlled for each person’s actual ability (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). In the second study, participants solved mathematical problems, their measured ability was known, and the people who emerged as leaders offered the most answers rather than the most correct answers. The authors explained that dominant people gain influence mainly by appearing helpful and capable, rather than by grabbing power, which fits the finding in Chapter 2 that aggression on its own does not get people ahead. The competence ratings came from three separate sources, making it unlikely that one group of raters was easily impressed.
The previous briefing in this series described the same pattern from the judge's side, finding that people who speak more are picked as leaders whether or not they are right (MacLaren et al., 2020). What this study adds is the mechanism: the loud colleague is not usually winning by intimidation, but by sending signals the room cannot easily tell apart from skill. That is a harder problem to fix than bullying.
How solid is this: evidenced by two experiments with small student groups. Groups of strangers working briefly on set tasks may rely more on surface signals than colleagues who have worked together for years.
4.3 What It Means for You
When a forceful colleague seems more capable than a quieter one, the impression is worth treating as a hypothesis rather than a finding. The quieter colleague may have less to offer, and sometimes does, but the room will reach that conclusion whether or not it is true, because the signals it is reading are produced by temperament as much as by knowledge. Treat the impression as a question to check against the record rather than an answer.
4.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
The most helpful habit is asking a quieter person for their view before the louder one frames the question, then asking for the reasoning behind each view rather than the conclusion. Reasoning is much harder to perform than confidence, and it gives the room something other than delivery to judge. It also slows the meeting down slightly, which is usually the point.
Stated plainly: dominant people are read as more competent than their measured ability supports, mostly because they offer more answers, not better ones.
Chapter 5: The Voice Itself
5.1 The Insight
The phrase the loudest person is usually a metaphor, but part of it is literal. The sound of a voice, its pitch, its loudness, and how much both vary, carries information about rank that listeners pick up without realising it, and it shapes who they choose to lead. Nobody chose their voice.
5.2 What the Evidence Says
In one set of experiments, recordings of men and women saying the same sentence were raised or lowered slightly in pitch, and listeners chose which version they would vote for (Klofstad, Anderson & Peters, 2012). Both men and women chose the lower-pitched voice more often, for male and for female speakers, and in separate samples the lower-pitched female voices were judged more competent, stronger and more trustworthy by about seven listeners in ten; in a different kind of evidence, a study of 792 male chief executives of large American companies found that those with lower-pitched voices managed larger companies and earned more, after controlling for age, education and other measures, with a fall of about 22 Hz in pitch associated with about $440 million more in company size and about $187,000 more in annual pay (Mayew, Parsons & Venkatachalam, 2013). Neither study shows that anybody chose a leader for the voice deliberately, and neither measured how much the voice counts against everything else a listener weighs.
The voice also changes with rank. When 161 students were randomly given a high-ranking or low-ranking role before a mock negotiation, those in the high-ranking role changed how they spoke, with shifts in their pitch and in how much their loudness varied, and a separate group of listeners who knew nothing about the roles could tell from the recordings alone who held the higher rank, using cues that included loudness and its variation (Ko, Sadler & Galinsky, 2015). Rank, in other words, is both heard and spoken.
How solid is this: evidenced by experiments with manipulated recordings and student samples, and by a correlational study of chief executives. The chief executive study shows an association, not that a deeper voice causes success, and its authors said the mechanism was not understood.
5.3 What It Means for You
Some of what a room hears as authority is a matter of acoustics that nobody chose. A person with a higher or softer voice, including many women and many men, starts with a small disadvantage in how commanding they sound, and listeners often don't realise they are responding to it. Neither, for the most part, are the people doing the speaking.
5.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
The practical lesson is for listeners rather than speakers: when a voice sounds authoritative, it is worth asking what it said. For speakers, the finding that the voice changes with felt rank suggests that the sound of authority follows the sense of it, which is one reason preparation, which raises the sense of having a right to speak, may matter more than vocal technique, though no study here tested that directly. Speaking more loudly, on its own, is unlikely to help anybody be heard.
Stated plainly: listeners prefer leaders with lower voices and rank them in loudness and pitch, without knowing they are doing it.
Chapter 6: When Rooms Want the Loud One More
6.1 The Insight
The appeal of a dominant voice is not fixed. It rises when people feel that events are out of their control, because a forceful leader offers a borrowed sense of control, and it falls when things feel steady. That is why the programme manager’s thirty days landed so well in a steering group that had spent four months feeling lost. The steering group in Chapter 1 had exactly that feeling, and it is common in projects that have run late for long enough.
6.2 What the Evidence Says
In a series of studies, people living in American areas with more economic uncertainty, measured from local unemployment, housing vacancy and poverty, said they would prefer a more dominant and less prestigious leader for their own town or city (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017), and in data from more than 138,000 people in 69 countries over about twenty years, rising unemployment predicted a stronger preference for a strong leader who did not have to bother with parliament or elections, and part of that link ran through people’s sense that they lacked control over their own lives. Uncertainty made people want someone forceful in charge. The studies measured preferences for political leaders, and the workplace link is an inference, though the mechanism they describe isn't specific to politics.
How solid is this: evidenced by correlational studies with large samples, including a cross-national panel. The preference measures were about political leaders rather than workplace managers, and the link through lack of control was partial.
6.3 What It Means for You
Uncertainty at work, such as a troubled project, a reorganisation, or a bad quarter, is exactly the condition in which a forceful voice is most likely to be followed, and where careful analysis is most needed. The person who sounds certain is being rewarded for supplying relief, and the relief is real even when the plan is not. Relief is easy to mistake for good judgement.
6.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
A group that notices it is anxious can name the anxiety and ask what decision it would make if it felt calm, which separates the plan from the comfort of having one. A leader who wants the quieter analysis heard in a crisis can ask for it explicitly, because the room will not ask on its own. Anxiety rarely announces itself in a meeting, so somebody has to name it.
Stated plainly: people want a dominant leader more when they feel out of control, so the loud voice wins most easily when the room is anxious.
Chapter 7: Who Is Allowed to Be Loud
7.1 The Insight
The reward for taking the floor isn't the same for everyone. Men who gain power tend to talk more and are rewarded for it, while women who gain power tend not to, and those who do are often judged more harshly, so that the loudest person in the room is partly a product of who is allowed to be loud. Volume, in other words, is partly a matter of permission.
7.2 What the Evidence Says
In United States Senate floor debates, senators with more power spoke for longer if they were men, but there was no comparable link for women (Brescoll, 2011). In an experiment with 156 adults, a female chief executive described as talking more than others was rated as less competent and less suitable to lead than one who talked less, by both men and women, while a male chief executive who talked more was rated more highly; a meta-analysis of 71 studies found that women were penalised more than men for explicit dominance, such as direct demands or claiming the floor, mainly in how much they were liked rather than in how competent they were seen to be, and that subtler, nonverbal signals of dominance carried little or no penalty (Williams & Tiedens, 2016). Taken together, these findings suggest that the penalty falls on the most visible forms of taking the floor rather than on confidence as such.
The structure of a meeting matters too. In 94 discussion groups deciding how to share money they had earned, women spoke less than their share under majority rule, and the gap largely disappeared when groups had to reach a unanimous decision, especially for women who were outnumbered (Karpowitz, Mendelberg & Shaker, 2012). The rule changed who spoke. It did not change who was in the room.
How solid is this: evidenced, from archival data on senators, experiments with online samples, a meta-analysis of experiments, and a laboratory study of discussion groups. The experiments used descriptions of imaginary people rather than real colleagues.
7.3 What It Means for You
A quiet woman in a meeting may be quiet for the same reasons as a quiet man, or because she has learned, accurately, that speaking as much as the loudest man in the room will cost her. A loud woman may be paying a likeability cost that a man saying the same things would not pay, and she may know it. The behaviour is the same, and the reading is not.
7.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
When judging who is assertive enough to lead, it helps to ask whether someone else would read the same behaviour the same way. The rule a group uses to decide is also a lever, because asking for agreement from everybody gives the people least likely to speak a reason to be heard. It costs time, and the evidence suggests that it changes who speaks in the room.
Stated plainly: powerful men talk more and gain from it, powerful women who talk as much are often marked down, and the decision rule of a meeting changes who speaks.
PART III. WHERE LOUD STOPS PAYING
Chapter 8: The Curve
8.1 The Insight
Most people think leaders need more assertiveness, so the more forceful candidate is the safer choice. The evidence suggests a curve instead: too little assertiveness costs a leader the ability to get things done, too much costs them their relationships, and the people rated as the best leaders tend to sit in the middle. The middle is not the loudest point on the scale.
8.2 What the Evidence Says
In the first of three studies, former co-workers of 168 MBA students wrote open comments about each student’s strengths and weaknesses as a colleague (Ames & Flynn, 2007). Assertiveness came up in about a third of the comments on strengths and in just over half of the comments on weaknesses, which made it the most common theme among weaknesses by a wide margin, and those weaknesses split almost evenly, with 48 per cent describing too much assertiveness and 52 per cent too little; comments about intelligence, conscientiousness and charisma, by contrast, almost always complained of a shortage, which makes assertiveness unusual among the qualities people look for in a leader: it is the one people are criticised for having too much of. The raters had known the students as colleagues at work before business school, so the comments describe working behaviour rather than classroom impressions.
In the second study, co-workers rated 388 MBA students on assertiveness and on four parts of leadership, and those at the high extreme of assertiveness were rated as worse leaders than those in the middle. In the third, 213 people rated the most recent manager they had worked for, and both the least assertive third and the most assertive third were rated as less effective than the middle third, by about 0.8 to 1.2 points on the rating scale, and the reasons differed by direction: the least assertive managers were marked down because they did not get things done, and the most assertive were marked down because they did not get along with people, and the curve held after the researchers controlled for extraversion. The curve was not a matter of a few extreme cases, since it appeared in each of the four parts of leadership that co-workers rated.
How solid is this: evidenced by three studies of ratings by co-workers and subordinates, in samples drawn from MBA programmes. The ratings reflect impressions of leadership rather than measured results, though they come from people who worked with the leader.
8.3 What It Means for You
The forceful voice that wins the first meeting is often the same voice that, at a higher setting, costs a leader their team. That is what happened to the programme manager in Chapter 1: the assertiveness that served her in a stalled steering group became, in charge of a team, the thing her peers named when asked what was wrong. Her strength had become her weakness without changing.
The curve also means that the quiet candidate is not safe by default. Too little assertiveness was just as common a complaint, and managers at the low end were seen as less able to get their way and accomplish the work. Both ends of the curve cost something.
8.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
A selection panel can ask about both ends of the curve, not just one: what happens when this person disagrees with a peer, and what happens when somebody disagrees with them. The second question is the one most panels forget, and it is the one the curve says matters most for the most forceful candidates. Many panels ask only the first, because it is the more comfortable question.
Stated plainly: assertiveness was the quality colleagues most often named as a weakness, half the time for too much of it, and the most forceful managers were rated worse than those in the middle.
Chapter 9: The Fade
9.1 The Insight
The second limit is time. Dominance buys influence quickly when a group knows little about its members, and the evidence suggests it stops buying it. Over weeks and months, rank moves towards the people the group has come to admire for what they contribute. The early advantage is not imaginary, but it rests on less information than the group will later have.
9.2 What the Evidence Says
In a study of 263 students working in 66 project groups across a sixteen-week semester, members rated each other’s dominance, prestige and rank four times (Redhead, Cheng, Driver, Foulsham & O’Gorman, 2019). At the start, both dominance and prestige were linked to higher rank, but over the following weeks only prestige continued to raise a person’s rank, while dominance's lasting effect on rank was negligible. Rank, in turn, fed back into prestige, so the people who had earned admiration early tended to gain more of it. The groups worked toward a graded project, so members had a real stake in who was actually contributing.
A separate study of status in task groups found that extraverts tended to lose status over time as their contributions fell short of the expectations they had raised, while more anxious members tended to gain it as their contributions exceeded expectations (Bendersky & Shah, 2013). An earlier video in this series covered that finding, and it follows the same pattern: first impressions come from confidence, and later ones from what people actually deliver. Confidence opens the door. Delivery keeps it open.
How solid is this: evidenced, from a longitudinal study of student project groups and a field study with an experiment. University project groups have a clear end point and visible contributions, which may make the fade faster than in organisations where contributions are harder to see.
9.3 What It Means for You
If you are the quieter person who was passed over in the first meetings, the evidence suggests that the room’s opinion of you is more likely to move with time than the opinion of the colleague who started with the advantage. That depends on your contributions being visible, which is the subject of Chapter 14, because a fade that nobody can see does not happen. Visibility is the condition on which the whole of that fade depends.
If you are the forceful one, the early influence is real, and it is borrowed against what you deliver later. People will follow a dominant voice for a while, then follow the person who turns out to be right. The advantage is a loan, not a gift.
9.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
Promotion decisions that are made early, after a few months of visible energy, are made at the point where the evidence says first impressions are least reliable. Waiting for a longer record, or asking the people who have worked alongside a candidate for the longest, gives the fade time to show. Time is the cheapest corrective available to a panel, and it is easily skipped.
Stated plainly: dominance helps people rise at first, but only being admired for what you contribute keeps raising your standing over time.
Chapter 10: When a Dominant Leader Feels Threatened
10.1 The Insight
The third limit is about what happens after the forceful person is in charge. Most leaders, most of the time, act for the group, but leaders who are strongly motivated by dominance can switch to protecting their own position when they feel it is under threat, at the group’s expense. The switch is conditional, and it can be predicted.
10.2 What the Evidence Says
Across five experiments, people placed in charge of a group and told their position could change were given chances to help or hinder the group (Maner & Mead, 2010). Leaders high in the motivation to dominate, but not those low in it, withheld useful information from the group, excluded a highly skilled member and kept a capable member from influencing the group’s task, but only when their position was unstable. When the group was competing against another group, the self-protective behaviour disappeared, because the leader’s interests and the group’s lined up again. The behaviour was specific to leaders who wanted dominance, which suggests that it is the motive rather than the position that matters.
How solid is this: evidenced, from five laboratory experiments with students. The positions of power were created for the experiment and lasted minutes, and real leaders face more complicated incentives.
10.3 What It Means for You
The most capable member of a team can be a threat to a leader who rose by dominance, and the evidence suggests that such a leader may sideline them without ever describing it to themselves in those terms. That pattern is worth remembering when a strong team member is repeatedly left out of the work that would make them visible. Threat is the trigger to look for, not personality alone.
10.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
The finding about competition suggests one practical lever: when a team’s attention is on a shared external goal, a dominant leader’s interests and the team’s tend to point the same way. Uncertainty about the leader’s own position, such as an unresolved reorganisation, is the condition to watch. Insecure positions bring out the worst version of a dominant leader.
Stated plainly: leaders driven by dominance can sideline their most capable people when they feel their position is at risk, and a shared outside goal reduces it.
Chapter 11: What Extraversion Really Buys
11.1 The Insight
None of this means that extraversion is a confidence trick. The evidence suggests that it carries a small, real advantage across a wide range of work outcomes, and that the advantage comes mostly from its energy, its positive emotion and its assertiveness, with surprisingly little from the part most people picture when they think of an extravert, which is sociability. The party animal is not the asset.
11.2 What the Evidence Says
The synthesis of 97 meta-analyses described in Chapter 2 also compared the narrower parts of extraversion (Wilmot, Wanberg, Kammeyer-Mueller & Ones, 2019). The tendency to feel positive emotion had the broadest benefits, followed by dominance, assertiveness and activity, while the authors concluded that the sociability facet confers few benefits and that sensation seeking is largely disadvantageous. Sociability’s exceptions were peer-rated performance and overall leadership, and dominance and assertiveness were more strongly linked with being rated an effective leader than extraversion as a whole. These are averages across many studies, and the spread around them is wide enough that a single workplace could look quite different.
That last result sits awkwardly with a claim this series has made before. An earlier and widely cited meta-analysis found extraversion more strongly tied to being picked as a leader, which psychologists call leader emergence, than to being effective as one (Judge, Bono, Ilies & Gerhardt, 2002), and the previous briefing repeated that finding. The later synthesis reports a stronger link with effectiveness than with emergence, which suggests the gap between being picked and being good is narrower for extraversion than the earlier review implied, though most ratings of effectiveness come from followers and bosses, who may be responding to the same signals that got the person picked.
How solid is this: evidenced, from a synthesis of meta-analyses, with average effects that are small and vary across settings. The comparison with the earlier review rests on two summaries built from overlapping but different studies, and the full set of sources behind each figure was not read for this briefing.
11.3 What It Means for You
The curve in Chapter 8 and the positive average here are not in conflict. A trait can help on average, across the range where most people sit, and still cost at the extreme, and assertiveness appears to do both: moderate assertiveness helps a leader get things done, and the forceful extreme costs them their relationships. Both findings are consistently reported, and both can be true at once.
What extraversion buys, then, is mostly energy, warmth of mood and the willingness to push, and those are worth having. What it does not reliably buy is the judgement about when to push, which is where the most forceful people go wrong. Timing is the missing skill, and it is not the same as volume.
11.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
When a role is said to need an extravert, it is worth asking which part of extraversion it needs. A role that needs somebody to drive decisions through needs assertiveness, a role that needs somebody to sustain a team through a hard year probably needs positive emotion, and very few roles need gregariousness for its own sake. Many job descriptions do not make that distinction.
Stated plainly: extraversion helps a little across most of working life, mainly through energy, mood and assertiveness, and the sociable part people picture helps least.
PART IV. BEFORE YOU ACT
Chapter 12: You Cannot Hear Your Own Volume
12.1 The Insight
The most surprising finding in this area is about self-knowledge. People are poor judges of how assertive they come across, and the errors run in both directions: many forceful people think they are being appropriately firm, and many people who are pitching it right believe they have gone too far. The finding runs against most people’s intuition about themselves.
12.2 What the Evidence Says
In a series of studies, people who had just negotiated with each other rated their own assertiveness and their counterpart’s, and then guessed what their counterpart would say about them (Ames & Wazlawek, 2014). Of the people their counterparts saw as under-assertive, 57 per cent believed they had come across as appropriately assertive or too assertive, and of those seen as over-assertive, 56 per cent believed they had come across as appropriate or under-assertive, so that people who had got it wrong had roughly an even chance of knowing it, and the authors also found what they called a line-crossing illusion: many people whose counterparts thought they had pitched it right believed they had come across as too forceful, and some of them made costly concessions afterwards to repair a relationship that was not damaged. Most of the participants were business students practising negotiation, a setting in which people are encouraged to push, so the figures may differ elsewhere.
An earlier study by the same research group found a similar pattern in workplaces, with about half of the managers’ subordinates who saw them as too assertive or not assertive enough also seeing themselves as unaware of it (Ames, 2008). The pattern clearly reaches beyond the classroom. Self-knowledge about assertiveness appears poor wherever it has been measured, and those most affected are at the extremes.
How solid is this: evidenced by four studies, three with MBA students in negotiation classes and one with an online sample of 500 American adults. The figures for the self-awareness gap are from the university’s account of one study, and the workplace figure is from a review article by the lead author.
12.3 What It Means for You
The programme manager in Chapter 1, who thought she had been holding back, was not unusual. Feedback that one comes across as forceful is likely to surprise the people it is about, and feedback that one comes across as reasonable may surprise the people who thought they had overstepped. Both surprises are common, and neither says anything bad about the person.
For quieter people, the line-crossing illusion is the more useful half of the finding. The sense that you pushed too hard is a poor guide to how you actually came across, and acting on it, by apologising or giving ground, can cost more than the push did. Retreat has a price too, and it is usually paid in the next negotiation.
12.4 What It Looks Like in Practice
The only reliable correction is outside information: asking a trusted colleague who was in the room how one came across, specifically, and before acting on one’s own reading. For people who suspect they are at the forceful end, the useful question to a colleague is not whether they were too much, which invites reassurance, but what the quietest person in the room would have said if they had spoken. A colleague who sees you often will usually give a more useful answer than one who sees you rarely, because they can compare meetings. Judgment from practice.
Stated plainly: about half of people who get their assertiveness wrong do not know it, and many who get it right think they went too far.
Chapter 13: The People You Will Mislabel, Including Yourself
The evidence in this briefing describes tendencies across many people, and it is easy to turn it into labels for particular colleagues. Each of the following is a person the evidence makes it tempting to misread. None of them is rare, and most readers will recognise at least one.
13.1 The Forceful Colleague Who Is Right
Some loud colleagues are loud and right, and the programme manager’s thirty days helped. Prestige and dominance are independent, so a forceful person can also be admired for genuine skill, and the evidence on the curve says that assertiveness becomes a problem at the extreme, not that it is a problem in itself. Forceful and correct can travel together.
13.2 The Quiet Colleague With Nothing to Add
Some quiet colleagues are quiet because they have nothing to add on that subject, and the curve applies to them too: too little assertiveness was as common a complaint as too much. Treating quietness as a sign of hidden depth is the same mistake as treating loudness as a sign of competence, made in the other direction. Silence is not evidence of anything on its own.
13.3 The Assertive Woman
A woman described as pushy may be behaving exactly as a man described as decisive would, and the evidence in Chapter 7 suggests that the description is doing much of the work. That does not mean every such description is wrong, only that it is worth testing by asking whether the same behaviour from somebody else would be described the same way. The comparison is simple to run, and it is easy to forget.
13.4 The Dominant Leader
A leader who sidelines a strong team member may be acting out of threat rather than malice, and the evidence in Chapter 10 says that the same person, given a shared external goal and a secure position, may behave quite differently. None of this evidence allows anybody to identify a colleague as a dominant personality from the outside, and nothing in this briefing should be used to label a named person. Context explains more than character here.
13.5 You
Most people place themselves in the middle of the curve, and the evidence in Chapter 12 suggests that about half of those who are not there do not know it. Nothing in that evidence exempts the person reading this, or the person who wrote it; the only test that works is to ask someone who watched you in a meeting rather than trust your own sense of how it went. Your own impression is the least reliable source.
Stated plainly: loud people can be right, quiet people can be empty, and you are probably wrong about where you sit.
PART V. WHAT CHANGES IT
Chapter 14: If You Are the One Being Overlooked
14.1 Speak Early, Once, With a Reason
The evidence in Chapter 4 says that rooms reward people who offer answers, and the evidence in Chapter 6 says that rooms are most open to a clear proposal when they are anxious. A quieter person does not need to become loud to use either, only to make one specific, reasoned contribution early in a discussion, before the frame is set by somebody else. One contribution made early is usually worth more than several made late, after the group has already settled on a direction. Judgment from practice, following from Chapters 4 and 6.
14.2 Make the Contribution Visible Over Time
The fade in Chapter 9 depends on the group seeing what each person contributes. Writing a short summary of one’s analysis after a meeting and sending it to those who attended turns a quiet contribution into a visible one without requiring anyone to raise their voice. A record of that kind also helps at review time, when the people judging the work were often not in the meetings where it was done. Judgement from practice, following from Chapter 9.
14.3 Check Before You Retreat
The line-crossing illusion in Chapter 12 means that the feeling of having pushed too hard is unreliable. Before you apologise or concede after a disagreement, ask someone who was in the room whether anything needs repairing, because the evidence suggests that often nothing does. Much of the damage people fear may not exist.
14.4 Do Not Try to Be the Loudest
Nothing in this evidence suggests that a quiet person should try to imitate the loudest person in the room, and the curve suggests that it would not help if they did. The aim is to move from the low end of the curve toward the middle, a smaller, more achievable change than becoming somebody else. The middle of the curve is reachable from the quiet end, with practice.
Chapter 15: If You Run the Meeting
15.1 The Insight
The person who chairs a meeting decides, often without noticing, how much the room rewards the first forceful voice. The evidence in this briefing points to a few levers that change that, though it is fair to say that none of them has been tested as an intervention in an ordinary workplace. The levers are plausible, and they are cheap.
15.2 What the Evidence Supports
The finding that requiring a unanimous decision largely removed the gender gap in speaking time is the clearest evidence that meeting structure shapes who speaks (Karpowitz, Mendelberg & Shaker, 2012). The finding that dominant members are read as competent because they offer more answers suggests that asking for reasoning, rather than conclusions, gives the room a better basis for judgement (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009). The finding that uncertainty increases the appeal of dominant leaders suggests that an anxious meeting most needs a deliberate pause (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2017). None of these was designed as a test of meeting practice, so each is a reasoned extension of a finding rather than a tested remedy.
15.3 What Follows, in Practice
A chair can ask the quietest relevant person for their view first, before the most senior or most forceful person has spoken, so that the frame is not set by whoever speaks first. A chair can ask each person to write down their view before discussion, so that the group sees the range of views before any one of them takes hold. For decisions that matter, a chair can ask for agreement from everybody rather than a majority, accepting that it takes longer. Judgement from practice, following from the evidence above.
A manager making a promotion decision can ask those who have worked longest alongside a candidate rather than those who have seen them in the most meetings, and can ask about both ends of the curve: how the candidate handles being disagreed with, and how often they get their way without bringing people with them. Those questions are uncomfortable to ask about a strong candidate. They are also the questions the evidence in this briefing suggests matter most. Judgement from practice, following from Chapters 8 and 9.
Chapter 16: What This Changes
16.1 The Short Version
The loudest person does often get promoted, and the evidence for that is strong. Loudness is two things: dominance and prestige, and rooms reward both, partly because forceful people offer more answers and sound like they know, partly because of the sound of the voice itself, and most of all when people feel anxious. Who is allowed to be loud is not equal, and powerful women who talk as much as powerful men are often marked down. Each of those findings has limits, which the chapters set out, and none of them is a reason to label a particular colleague.
The reward has limits. Assertiveness pays up to a point and then costs; dominance buys rank early and then stops, and leaders who rose by dominance can sideline their best people when they feel threatened. Extraversion helps a little across most of working life, mainly through energy and mood rather than sociability. Most people cannot hear their own volume, which means that the most useful thing anybody can do, loud or quiet, is ask somebody who was in the room.
16.2 What I Still Do Not Know
I do not know whether the curve in Chapter 8 holds in cultures where the expected level of assertiveness is different, and almost all of the evidence here comes from North American and European samples. I do not know how much of the fade in Chapter 9 survives in large organisations, where contributions are harder to see and a forceful person can move on before the fade arrives. And I do not know of a trial that has tested any of the meeting practices in Chapter 15 in an ordinary workplace, which is the evidence I would most like to see. Each of those gaps is a reason to treat the practical chapters as reasoned suggestions rather than settled advice.
Stated plainly: loud gets you noticed and often promoted, the right amount of assertiveness is somewhere in the middle, and almost nobody knows where they sit without asking.
