Here’s a quick question for American readers fresh from a Thanksgiving family gathering – or indeed anyone who has gathered around the table with family or friends recently: Who dominated the conversation?
Research (and anecdotal evidence from my own Thanksgiving experiments) suggests that high-status or high-power voices tend to dominate. Of course, anyone who has an annoying Uncle Bob who won’t stop inflicting his retrograde political views on the cringing revelers who share his DNA knows that dominance is not always welcome. But at least in the case of public speakers, it’s both welcome and expected.
You’re supposed to hold the floor, as the saying goes, for that hour when the lights are up, the audience is seated, and the introducer has just spoken your name.
Over Thanksgiving I spent an hour talking with some NYU students, future rulers of the world all, and we focused for a time on what it takes to have a leadership voice. To be in your low twenties and in school means, except for a few self-chosen few, to have soft, tentative voices. These wonderful young people were no exception. Theirs were the voices of, well, students – not experts, not leaders – yet. So I coached them on how to find their leadership voice in terms of pitch and strength. Soon they’ll all be dominating their classes, no doubt, and after that their chosen professions.
And now research comes along that suggests that my work was unnecessary. Those students – and everyone else – already know what a high-power voice sounds like. It’s louder, and it varies more in loudness and less in pitch than low-power voices. It asks fewer questions (our voices rise in pitch when we asks questions) naturally enough and states things more declaratively.
What the researchers did was ingenious. They told one set of subjects to imagine that they were more powerful than everyone else, and another set of subjects that they were less powerful. Then they had them play-act a beginning statement of a negotiation. The high-power subjects modified their voices (from a pre-recorded baseline) to sound more powerful and the low-power subjects did the reverse – and when listening to them, yet another set of subjects corroborated the experience.
So we all know what high-power sounds like, and, if we can convince ourselves we are high-powered, we can easily adopt a more high-powered voice. We know what status sounds like. And we know how to enhance our own, if we can imagine ourselves possessing it.
Now, when you’re getting ready to speak, one of the keys to success is both believing that you have some expertise worth sharing – and making the audience believe it. That kind of power, or status, will help you succeed. Studies show that audiences want two things from their speakers: credibility and trust. The former comes from high-powered expertise, and the latter from authenticity and openness. So it’s not about faking it until you make it, but it is about believing sincerely that you have something worthwhile to share with the audience and adopting the voice to match that authority.
And, if you accomplish this self-talk well, you’ll not only be able to give a good speech, but you’ll also be able to talk over Uncle Bob.
Happy Thanksgiving.
What an impactful article, Nick! Most of us don’t stop to think about what we project with our voices… This is a great reminder of both the fact that our voices matter, and that we have the power to change what we project at a moment’s notice.
I can easily see this make a huge difference in the way we convince others of our credibility and competence at the negotiating table (consultants, take note!).