Some of the most watched people on earth have stopped trying to persuade anyone.
They speak to dominate instead. No ground given, no doubt admitted, the certainty arranged so that disagreeing looks foolish rather than reasonable. It’s deliberate, it’s skilled, and it’s working.
I’m not going to name anyone. You’ll think of whoever comes to mind, and you might disagree with my view of them. This isn’t about who’s right; it’s about how they communicate and what we learn from observing it in action.
What concerns me isn’t what happens on those stages. It’s what’s happening in ordinary meeting rooms, where the people who’ll be running businesses in ten years are watching all of this and drawing a conclusion.
The conclusion isn’t that it’s acceptable to speak this way. It’s that speaking this way works.
I’ve spent fifteen years teaching people how to move a room, and I think that conclusion will cost us more than we realise.
None of this is new. The scale of it is
Speaking to dominate rather than to persuade is as old as speaking itself. It has happened in boardrooms, pulpits, courtrooms and campaigns for as long as there have been rooms to stand at the front of. I’m not going to pretend anybody invented it recently.
What has changed is how visible it has become, and how well it appears to be going.
A speaker can now reach more people in an afternoon than most leaders in history managed in a lifetime. What a great many of those people are watching, day after day, is a way of speaking that gives no ground at all and pays no price for it.
Which is exactly how this gets learned
We don’t mostly learn behaviour by being told about it. We learn it by watching what happens to the person doing it.
Albert Bandura, working with Dorothea and Sheila Ross, showed children a film of an adult behaving aggressively. He varied only what happened to that adult afterwards. When the adult was rewarded, the children copied him and said they’d like to be like him. When the adult was punished, they did neither: Vicarious Reinforcement and Imitative Learning.
It isn’t only the behaviour that teaches. It’s watching that behaviour succeed.
It isn’t imitation. It’s permission
The obvious objection is that no head of department, anywhere, is sitting at their desk deliberately copying a head of state. Of course they aren’t.
That isn’t how it travels.
When a way of speaking is seen to work at the highest level of consequence, and nothing bad happens to the person doing it, that way of speaking stops being disqualifying. Nobody decides anything. A line simply moves, and people who are new to all this never saw where the line used to be. All they see is behaviour that gets results and costs nothing, coming from people more senior than them.
That’s who’ll be running things in ten years. Nobody told them this was how to do it; they watched.
What it actually costs a business
It would be easy to treat all of this as a matter of taste, or manners, or personal style. It isn’t, and this is the part I’d ask any leader to take seriously.
When someone speaks so that disagreement looks foolish, the people who disagree don’t change their minds. They go quiet. They take what they know home with them, and it doesn’t come back.
So decisions get made on partial information, and the missing part is usually the inconvenient part. The doubt somebody had about the timeline. The number that didn’t add up. The thing that went wrong last time this was tried, which only one person in the room remembers.
It surfaces eventually. Just later, more expensively, and usually with nobody’s name attached to it.
Then there’s what it does to you, if you’re the one at the front. Agreement is what you’re there for, and there’s nothing wrong with getting it, but there are two ways to get it, and only one of them tells you anything. If people agree because you convinced them, you’ve learned that your case holds. If they agree because they thought disagreeing would seem unwise, it means you haven’t really learned anything new. You’ve also lost whatever they were going to say. Bad news. A half-formed doubt. The thing somebody noticed but can’t quite prove. Both kinds of agreement look identical from the front, a room nodding, and the more senior you get, the fewer people are willing to tell you which one you’re actually getting.
Certainty was never the problem
Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not asking anyone to soften their views, water down their case, or fill their speaking with more maybes and perhapses. That’s not better speaking. It’s worse, and it helps nobody.
Plenty of speaking worth doing divides opinion, and should. The campaigns for abolition and for votes for women split churches, families and the movements themselves. Anyone who has ever told an organisation something it didn’t want to hear has divided a room, and was right to. Read the letter King wrote from the Birmingham jail in 1963. It gives no ground whatsoever. It is also, from beginning to end, an argument, addressed directly to the people who disagreed with him, taking their objections one at a time and answering them: Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Total conviction, not an inch given, and still, all the way through, arguing with people rather than talking over them.
The real challenge isn’t how confident someone is. It’s whether they allow space for others to also be right.
What we can actually do about it
None of us is going to change how the most watched people in the world speak. That’s worth saying early, because it’s usually where this conversation stops. Somebody points at the state of things, everyone agrees it’s bad, and nothing follows, but that’s not where the damage happens to you. It happens on Thursday morning, in a meeting of nine people, when somebody says something that shuts the conversation down and everyone lets it go.
Nobody voted for that, and there was no memo. It became normal because people watched it happen and said nothing about it afterwards, and that is exactly how it becomes normal in reverse.
Here are four things. None of them is complicated. All of them are harder than they sound.
If you lead anything
The people who work for you watch how you speak far more closely than you think, and you’re setting a standard whether you chose the job or not. The most useful thing you can do is let them see you be uncertain. Say you don’t know. Change your mind in front of them and say what changed it. They won’t believe it’s safe to do until they’ve watched you do it and come to no harm.
Watch what you call things
When somebody leaves a room with no way to answer back, what does your organisation call that? If the word is strong, or powerful, or decisive, then something has just been taught to everybody who heard you say it. Praise is how permission gets granted. Withholding it is how permission gets taken away.
If you’re in the room rather than at the front
This is where most of us spend our working lives.
Someone has just closed a conversation down. You have a doubt. So does the person next to you, and probably two others, but nobody wants to be the only one.
Say something anyway. You don’t need a case, or evidence, or even a clear thought. “I’m not sure about this” will do, and so will “can I ask something?”
Then watch what happens; almost always, somebody else follows. The first person to speak takes all the risk; everyone after them takes almost none. That’s why it matters that it’s you, and why it matters just as much to back whoever goes first.
And the hard one
Apply all of that when you agree with the speaker.
Two people can speak in exactly the same way. Neither gives an inch. Neither admits a doubt. When it’s an argument we disagree with, we call it arrogance. When it’s one we already believe, we call it conviction.
I do this, and I suspect you do too.
That’s why things often stay the same. Whoever is speaking, there’s always a side approving, so the speaker never feels any real cost, and the behaviour carries on.
Where this leaves us
It’s easy to look at all of this and decide it isn’t your problem. That it’s happening somewhere else, to somebody else, at a scale you can’t influence. I understand the instinct, and I’ve had it myself. I also think it’s what lets it keep travelling.
Because standards don’t get set on the largest stages. They get set in ordinary rooms. In what we praise, in what we let pass, and in what a younger person watches the people above them admire.
We are teaching this. Every day, through what we reward.
Which is also why I’m not despairing about it. Anything that can be taught this way can be taught differently. I’d rather we were deliberate about it than find out later what we passed on by accident.
Where to take this next
If you’d like to work on this alongside other professionals, and hear what your own speaking actually sounds like to somebody else, our open public speaking courses give you the space and the honest feedback to hear yourself properly, often for the first time.
Where the work is more personal than that, our one to one public speaking coaching is a confidential space to look at what you genuinely want from an audience, which is where all of this is really decided.
If it’s your organisation rather than any one person that has absorbed these habits, our in-house presentation skills training works with your teams, in your context, on the presentations they actually have to give.
If this struck a chord, please share it, particularly with anybody who leads a team. I’d like to hear from you too. What does your organisation call it when a speaker leaves a room with no way to answer back?
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