7. Seating Position

Your position at the table is another important indicator of your status at a meeting and making a conscious choice of seat can provide an easy way to boost your ability to get heard.

You probably intuitively know that the head of a rectangular table is usually the power position and it’s where you would expect the chair or the person running the meeting to sit.  From here s/he can readily make eye contact with everyone and command their attention.

Authority is enhanced by control of, or even proximity to, technology.  So the person sitting by a presentation screen, conference-calling equipment or even, to a lesser extent, a flip chart holds higher status than the person at the other end.

The next most powerful seating positions are the centres of the sides.  From there, seats become progressively less influential until you reach the corners, which are generally the least powerful positions in the room.  Unless, that is, there is a second rank of seating around the outside of the room.  Occupy one of these chairs and you are effectively relegated to observer status.

The longer the table though, the harder it becomes to reach everyone, both vocally and with eye contact.  So at a certain length of table a tipping point is reached and power switches to the middles of the long sides.  It’s impossible to be exact about how many chairs there need to be before this happens as it will partly depend on how much space each chair occupies.  But it explains why the British Prime Minister, for example, sits in the middle of a side, rather than at the head of the table.

Round tables

Circles are the shape of democracy when it comes to meetings because there are no power positions at a round table and everyone is equally entitled to speak. There’s a good reason why the best known feature of life at Camelot was the shape of King Arthur’s table. And it explains why it’s the favoured shape whenever national leaders gather together.

Make a choice

When you walk into a meeting room, you make a choice about which chair to occupy.  The likelihood is that this choice is currently made by System 1 as you slot yourself into an available position that suits how you perceive your status.  But you almost certainly have the scope to make a different choice.

I am certainly not advocating striding assertively to one of the power positions unless you are ready to do battle with the alphas in the room.  Raise your status too dramatically and others will feel affronted and make it their mission to bring you down.  Even those whose System 2 thinking is generous – “it’s just a chair, why shouldn’t s/he sit there?” – will not have such benign System 1s.  And what’s more you will not be able to sustain your raised status in the face of what may even be a coordinated attack.

But by choosing a chair closer to the power positions, perhaps just one seat in from the corner, you will subtly raise your status without raising the hackles of others.