Confidence is not volume

The story

Tannen opens with a promotions meeting at a large multinational. Manager after manager went through his group. There were women in every group and not one was put forward. The reason was always the same: she doesn’t have the self-confidence for the next level. The division head began to wonder how every talented woman he employed could be short of the same thing.

Then there is the chief executive with five minutes to decide on five months of a team’s work. His rule: if the presenter seems confident, yes. If not, no.

It sounds sensible. You cannot check the work, so you check the person. The trouble is the word “seems”.

Tannen studies linguistic style: how direct you are, how long you pause before you speak, whether you say “I” or “we”, whether you play your certainty up or down. We learn these habits as children, then read everyone else as if they used ours.

A woman called Sally moved from Texas to Washington, D.C. In Texas she was known as outgoing and confident. In Washington she waited in meetings for a pause long enough to speak in, and it never came. Her boss decided she was shy and suggested an assertiveness course. Sally hadn’t changed. The pause had.

In one study Tannen cites, first-year students predicted their marks. In public, the women predicted lower marks than the men. In sealed envelopes, the predictions were about the same. The women did not expect less. They had learnt that saying it out loud sounds like boasting.

Tannen calls these differences between men and women tendencies, not rules, and the point holds without them. What you hear in a meeting is style. Whether someone is right, you have to find out another way.

So the chief executive’s rule does not select the best proposals. It selects the people who talk like him.