How to Read the Room: The 3 Questions Intuitive Leaders Ask

Let’s talk about reading the room, and specifically about the first two minutes of a meeting, because those two things are more connected than they may look. My name is Ramona Shaw, and I’m the host of The Manager Track podcast.

So reading the room is one of those pieces of feedback that gets handed to people with not much meat on the bone. Like, what does that even mean? You have to get better at reading the room. When somebody tells you that you need to read the room better, and you walk out of that conversation with no idea what you’re supposed to do differently the next day, then it often gets treated like a personality trait. Like, what is this? Charisma, being more socially attuned, something that you either can do or cannot do. And it seems really hard to learn or to even teach.

But I don’t think reading the room is a trait that cannot be taught. Because when I watch somebody who’s good at this, what they’re actually doing is running through a short list of questions in their first couple of minutes, and then adjusting what they say based on those specific answers in their heads. In other words, the people who look intuitive in meetings are running a short list of questions faster than everybody else. So today I want to talk about what that list includes so that you can do the same when you walk into a meeting and you’re trying to read the room.

And this matters because quite a large amount of your credibility in a room of people that don’t know you well or don’t have a lot of interactions with you, that gets decided before you said much of substance. So it’s the first two minutes, and then your ability to adapt as you’re reading the room.

But before we get into that list, let me start with what I don’t mean when I say getting better at reading the room. Because sometimes this concept of reading the room kind of gets overblown with things that actually are not part of what we’re talking about, at least not in this context.

What I don’t mean with reading the room is reading other people’s emotions. Emotion is an input, of course, and you do want to check in with them, and you do want to pick up on strong emotions, but it’s also one of the less reliable ones because plenty of people at work have very good faces or ways to manage their face or to overrule their emotions in a moment, and you might not see what’s going on underneath.

Now, another thing I don’t mean is empathy. While empathy also is great and also needed in order to be effective in any meeting or with people, empathy is what you do with the read once you’ve made it. So you have to read the room first before you can demonstrate that empathy. So reading the room is not about empathy. Reading the room in our context here is more like intelligence gathering. We’re collecting signals and data.

When I break this down with clients, it comes down to about three questions that you answer in the first couple of minutes, and then you keep answering them or having them in your mind for the rest of the meeting.

The first one is: Who is actually running this meeting? And I don’t mean who scheduled it or who has the biggest title on the invite, but who is running it? And those are, by the way, different people more often than you’d expect. Oftentimes, someone who sends the invitation is actually not going to be the one running the meeting. Someone with the biggest title we might assume might be running the meeting, but they’re also not. So those are different people and different roles, often, and you definitely want to pay attention and ask yourself that question first.

One thing to watch for as you’re reading the room is who is looking at whom. When somebody makes a statement, eyes go to the person whose reaction to that statement matters, and that read takes you about four seconds max. So instead of also looking at who’s making the statement, turn around and look at who people are looking at if you’re unsure who’s actually running the show and who’s the person with the most influence in the room.

And again, you might be the person with the most influence in one room, and someone else might be the person with the most influence in a different room. So just because you’re the one with the highest title or your influence is biggest over here, don’t assume that’s the case in this other meeting. So always go in with this blank slate, trying to figure this out. If, of course, the audience is not that known to you. If you go into your team meeting, that’s a whole different story, and reading the room as such, while it still matters in order for you to address the mood in the room, it’s not quite the same as you going into a meeting with influential people and stakeholders and you not knowing who’s going to be the one who influences. So pay attention to where people go to see their reaction.

Second, you can also watch who gets interrupted and who never does, because interruption is a status signal, and it’s a fairly honest one. Now some people have a tendency to interrupt more often than others. That’s a whole other story. But pay attention to this. When this person talks and someone else interrupts, it’s very likely that the interrupting person either sees them as equal or as higher up than the other person over here. The most influential person in the room hardly ever gets interrupted. And when they do, again, the person who interrupts most often is someone who sees themselves as equal, not necessarily all the time, but in that conversation. Now, and of course, I’m saying most of the time because some people just have the habit of interrupting all the time. They don’t even recognize it. But let’s leave that aside.

And then also watch who summarizes. When somebody says, “Okay, so what I’m hearing is...” dot, dot, dot, and then the room takes the summary and moves on, that person is holding the room, is holding the frame of the conversation.

So those are some important reads to make throughout the meeting to better understand the dynamics and then pivot and adapt your own communication to meet those dynamics. Now for you yourself, for us, there are basically four roles that we can take on in any meeting. We’re either there to decide something, we’re there to inform others of something, we’re there as a resource in case something comes up in our area of expertise, or we’re there as an audience. May seem like, oh, that’s unnecessary, but an audience is a real role as well. And unless it’s a wasted audience, there per se isn’t something wrong with that.

Sometimes we have to just be there to be absorbent of the information or to be kept in the loop, or it’s just part of the team conversation or the team meeting, and we all should be present. And our presence in itself is sort of a signal that we belong. But the role in itself in the meeting is that we are just there as an audience.

So walking into any meeting, it’s important for you to know what is your role. Are you there to decide? Are you there to inform? Are you there to be a resource or are you there to be the audience?

Most of the people I coach who feel like meetings are going badly for them are mismatched on this. So when they feel like, “Oh, I’m just not doing well with meetings,” then it’s often that their role is not matching their actual behavior. So somebody who is invited to a meeting because they’re supposed to be a resource, but then they behave like someone who needs to make a decision, they come across as not understanding how the organization works or what has already been discussed, or the power dynamics or the relationships are being ignored. And that is not a good impression to leave behind typically. Similarly, someone who is there to decide or to be part of the decision-making process but behaves like an audience will leave an impression too, and people will notice that you were quiet in a decision-making process and that your opinion wasn’t shared. So if you don’t know which one you are and what the expectation is that other people have on you and your role in the meeting, then you should ask.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But you could ask, “Hey, before Thursday, what do you need from me in that room, in that meeting? Am I presenting? Am I weighing in? Or am I just there for context?” I’ve never seen that type of question land badly, and I’ve had plenty of people that I coached that went back and asked that question and then came back to me and said, “I’m so glad I had that conversation, ’cause it made me and my boss or my colleague be way more in sync and aligned of how to run this meeting and whose roles we have.”

It also just demonstrates proactivity and thoughtfulness in the process, where people realize, oh, you are preparing ahead. You want to show up well, and you’re being proactive about it, not too busy and then frazzled showing up and not knowing what your role is. So it reads as being prepared, and that is a good thing.

Now, the third way is about what the room is hungry for at that moment. And I find it’s usually one of two things. It’s either the room wants competence or it wants relationships. And now, might that sound a little bit odd, so let me explain.

A room that wants competence is anxious or concerned about whether the thing that they’re trying to do or that they’re working on is going to work, is going to be successful, whether they have the solutions in place that they need. They basically are looking for numbers, expertise, specifics, decisions, and they basically want people to get to the point quickly, and they are aiming to get to the truth as close as possible. Now, a room that wants relationship, on the other hand, so we had competence, now relationship is the other part. That sort of tension or possible tension is kind of a different one.

In such a situation, it’s often that, oh, hold on, someone got surprised, somebody got caught out of a decision, or two people are starting to protect territory, and people can feel it in the room. There’s a political thing going on. There’s a relationship dynamic going on, and now you need to tune in not into competence, but into relationship.

And where this goes wrong is when you feed the room in that moment with the wrong thing. So if there is unspoken personal tension in the room, and you respond by, let’s say, tightening your data and moving fast through your deck and trying to be as accurate as possible, you might come across as a bit tone deaf and not being able to read the room, and people will remember this. If the room wants a decision and you are slow to check in on how everybody’s feeling about the timeline, it comes across like you’re stalling. They’re in this moment actually looking for a decision.

The way that you can tell is to listen to the questions. Competence questions are about the work itself, like, “How does this work? When will it be done? What happens if it breaks? What does it cost?” The list goes on. Relationship questions are about people and political dynamics. “Who decided this? Why wasn’t I part of the conversation? Who’s responsible for it?” And so on. So when the questions stop being about the work and start being about who decided something or whatnot, the dynamics shifted, and it’s really important to distinguish competence tracks from relationship tracks.

So to quickly wrap this part up, the main questions to ask yourself are: Who is actually running this meeting right now? What is your role in this meeting? And then third, what does the room need right now? Those are three really important questions to ask yourself.

Now the next bit is the one that I most want you to take with you, because the three reads that we just covered are the part that people will often eventually figure out on their own, maybe not as structured or intentional as we just did, but it’s often part of what comes out through some self-reflection.

But most people try to read the room early on, maybe around like minute two, and then they run the entire rest of the meeting as if nothing shifts. But the read that you get early on has, you know, I’m making this up, but about like a ten-minute shelf life. And at that point, often the dynamics change and it’s a new situation. You have to read the room again to be able to adapt. So a meeting can open with everybody wanting speed and specifics, and then somebody realizes a decision got made last week without involving them, and now the whole room is about that, and you’re standing there presenting a slide.

And if you’re trying to stand there and present or talk about something on slide eleven or page two to people who stopped caring about what’s on there on that competence front but are now really thinking about, “Why wasn’t I included?” you’re again mismatched.

And what often then happens if we’re mismatched and we don’t keep up with the dynamics and the evolution of the meeting, that’s when people will either disengage, they go quiet. People who maybe have been fully invested and seemed to have a strong conviction suddenly seem to kind of withdraw from the conversation, and it may become somewhat obvious that, hey, we’re not going to get to a decision or to a good outcome here. We need to change course. And often the pace changes too. So it could either go into the direction where people kind of speed up things and people start to talk over each other. You can sense there’s a bit of an escalation. Or like I said earlier, it’s flattening out, people start to disengage, or it might just turn into something that’s sort of the polite approach, where everybody’s just waiting for the meeting to be over ’cause we’re not really talking about the big elephant in the room anymore.

So when you catch something like this, it’s not just to pick up and adapt, but often also to say the thing out loud. “Hey, something just changed in this conversation, and I’d rather not skip past it. What’s the actual concern here? What’s the most important thing for us to talk about right now before we can move on?” Or, “Hey, I can keep going through this, but I don’t think the deck is what’s on people’s minds right now. What is the concern here on the team or in the room?” Now, everybody has already noticed the shift. When you’re the one who’s presenting that you can read the room, it doesn’t just mean that you’re reading the room internally. It also means that other people know that you can read the room because you are the one who not only reads it, but also has the courage to call it out and to visibly and explicitly adjust your approach or the frame of the conversation. So the person who then seems to be the one who’s commanding the situation. That is a good thing.

So a quick pause here. If this is learning and you want to get good at it rather than just being aware of it, that’s what the Executive Presence Program is for. It’s an eight-week program for mid-level to senior leaders, expert leaders, or people leaders who are more exposed to senior leadership in bigger rooms with a greater scope of responsibilities, or they want to get there. We talk about conviction, confidence, presentations, presence, emotional management, executive communication, and strategic and critical thinking. A lot of things that go into it, and it’s exactly designed for people at mid-levels of their careers who want to reach that next level. Learn more at archova.org/executive-presence-program. We will, of course, link to all of that in the show notes as well.

Okay, let’s get back to it. There are two pieces of research worth knowing here, because together they explain why the first two minutes carry so much weight. The first is Nalini Ambady’s work at Harvard on what she called thin slices. She showed people silent video clips of teachers they’ve never met, two seconds long, no sound, and then strangers rated them on things like warmth and competence. Now, those ratings lined up with the actual end-of-semester evaluations from students who sat in the class for months, and they heard them speak, they heard their voices. They actually had at least way more exposure to figure out how competent they were. The correlation between the two assessments, or the groups who made these assessments, was point seven six, which for this kind of research is about as high as it gets. So two seconds of silent video predicting a semester of experience. That’s really meaningful.

The second is Susan Fiske’s research on social perception, and what she found is that when we size somebody up, we’re answering two questions: Are you warm and are you competent? Again, it goes back to those two things we’ve just covered. Intent, then ability. So warmth gets judged first, which makes a certain amount of sense evolutionarily speaking, since whether somebody means you harm is more urgent to know than whether they’d be any good at it. So can I trust them is actually more important first when we think about our survival instincts before, you know, how competent are they? That’s the second question after that. Also, the Center for Creative Leadership has a body of work on the behavioral signals leaders miss in a room and what missing them does to psychological safety on a team, and it points in the exact same direction here as well. The cues are usually right there, and most of us are looking at our own notes, or we might be typing something. We’re multitasking. We’re not paying attention. But it’s exactly in those early minutes when people decide on your intent well before they get anywhere near trying to assess your competence.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about those two minutes. There are five things, and only one of them is about what you actually say. The first one to pay attention to in the first minutes, these cues that we just referred to, is posture. And I’m not asking you to do anything strange in a bathroom stall like power poses. That’s not it. Just take up actual space. Feet flat on the floor, sit back in the chair instead of hunching forward or over your laptop. Hands where people can see them. There’s a trust signal that we get when we see people’s palms. You also don’t need to sit like this, but just hands visible. When we’re leaning slightly forward over a screen like we would naturally do if we were still trying to type up an email, it reads as tension, and tension gets read as either unprepared or defensive, depending on who the audience is. We don’t want that. So if you’re on video, sit back far enough that people can see your shoulders. Ideally, they can see your hands and gestures when you speak and when you gesture as well. That matters more than you might think, and I truly believe this is such a low-hanging fruit. It’s so easy to just make sure that in the first two minutes on a call or in a meeting room, you pay attention to your posture and you make sure that you present yourself well, hands are visible and all of that.

Now, the second is actually looking prepared, which mostly means having your material open before the meeting starts. Could be a notebook, could be the email you need to reference, the agenda, whatever that is. But the person who is still hunting for the file while 12 people watch and wait for you to read the agenda, they burn... In their minds, it might only take a few seconds, but in people’s minds, it’s like 30 seconds that they have to wait for you to pull up your documents. Just doesn’t leave a strong impression, especially early on in the meeting where the two minutes really matter. So you wasting 10 seconds on finding the email, usually not good. So don’t give that away. Keep that to yourself. Be prepared, especially for those important meetings.

The third one is composure, and composure is actually mostly about your pace in this type of setting or in our context. Adrenaline, so when we are nervous or have some anxiety, that speeds you up and you can’t feel it happening from the inside. You may feel like your pace is normal, but your breath becomes more shallow and the way that you speak will become faster. So in order to counter this, even if you are nervous, is to deliberately slow your first sentence down by what feels about 20%. And I think this is somewhat conservative here with me saying 20%. When I’m in trainings, I often tell people, imagine you’re speaking at like a .5x on a podcast. Like when you would listen to something at half the speed, that’s kind of how you internally need to feel like you’re talking in order to really bring that composure across for most people. Yes, it will feel too slow to you, but trust that it will land as normal and well composed to everyone else. So that is just calibration and knowing that your self-perception is not the perception other people have of you. And with that also, take the pause when somebody asks you something hard. Just two seconds of quiet before you answer will read as thinking it through. An instant answer tends to read as reacting and sometimes even defensiveness. So be totally okay with pausing before you respond.

And then another part here is precise language. If you can prepare, prepare for what you’re going to say, how you’re going to kick off the meeting, how you state the main objective. But being precise with your language matters, especially in those early ninety seconds to two minutes. Are you going to be wishy-washy and very generic, or can you hone in exactly? You might say, “Hey, this is a brainstorming session. I kind of just want to hear everyone’s opinions and whatnot so that then we decide sort of how to move forward from here.” That was as unprecise as it could be. I used a lot of filler words, and I didn’t actually get to the main point. In contrast, if I said, “Thanks for being here. The main objective of our meeting today is to have a clear decision on how we proceed with this project and the immediate next steps identified, including who’s responsible for what. We will start off doing X, and then we will transition into discussing Y. I’m going to hand it over to Mark or Sarah to recap and give us a status update on where we are right now.” No filler words, very precise on what exactly is going to unfold.

Similarly, if I said, “Hey, I just kind of want to sort of see where everyone’s at and talk about the numbers.” Okay, very unclear what that meant. And a lot of hedging, like kind of, some, just, words like this. These are hedging sentences or sometimes also filler words. When we use those filler words or these hedging statements, in the way that people perceive it, it’s as if you’re apologizing for taking up space in the room. It’s like a certain discomfort with taking up the space. And it’s not actually what we intend to do, and sometimes it’s not even because we are having any kind of insecurities. It is habitual. That’s actually a good thing because having filler words and saying “um” is habitual and therefore means that you can change it. ’Cause not speaking with filler words or ums and so forth, or hedges, can be learned and can become a habit as well. And I’ve worked with so many clients who’ve made that transition from speaking with filler words and hedges to dropping that and having really solid, clear speech afterwards. Just a new skill, a transition phase that’s hard, that requires discipline and preparation. Then you build a new habit, and that becomes your new norm. So now a quick thing to point out, I didn’t say to be more aggressive or assertive or forceful. I basically said here to delete words, okay? So that was the main message here.

And then the last one, and I alluded to this a little bit before, that is framing. Which basically means that your first sentence names what this is and where it ends. So you set the frame for the conversation. Sometimes you’re not managing or handling the full conversation, but you’re just giving an update, and then the same applies to that. You are setting the frame for the update that you’re presenting. So if you are actually leading the meeting, it could sound like this: “Here’s where we are. Here’s what I need from you by the end of this conversation, and here’s what we’re not deciding today.” So that is clearly setting the frame of what we’re doing, what we’re not doing. Now, that last part there of what we’re not doing does more work than the other two combined. Naming what’s out of scope is how you keep a meeting from wandering off, especially when you know there are other issues, and some of the people in the room care more about those other issues than the thing you need to talk about. So it tells the room that you’ve thought about the shape of the conversation, and you’re able to manage it. You’re not just there to share expertise.

Now if you’re just part of the meeting and you now are either asked to give an update or whatnot, you’re not framing the meeting, but you’re now framing your contribution, and that can be super short. For example, “I have one thing on this, and it’s a risk we haven’t named yet.” And then say the thing, and then stop talking. That framing again is a way to help people understand where you’re going with this. So again, you’re saying, “This is what I’m going to talk about,” before you talk about it. Most people will quickly jump in and just say, “Well, how about this and this risk?” That’s jumping right in without any framing. And you see this happening all the time. So pay attention to some of your meetings and see who frames what they’re contributing versus people who don’t frame it. Now, if you’re in a team meeting or a group of three, framing doesn’t quite work the same way, especially after the beginning of the conversation, after the meeting’s frame has been set. But if it’s a bit more formal, more structured, and you want to raise your hand, and a lot of people are talking and senior people are in the room, that is the moment for you to be a bit more formal and to frame your contribution.

Now the most common way people give away authority in the first two minutes is by continuing to talk after they’ve already made their point. When you made your point, let it sit there. Someone else might pick it up or not, but stop repeating yourself. Even if people in the room look slightly confused, it’s way better to ask a question and say, “How clear was this? Do you know what to do next?” Or, “With that in mind, what is your perspective or what am I missing?” Some kind of question versus noticing that people are a little bit confused, not quite getting what you’re saying, and then just saying it again or saying it again from a different angle. That’s usually not what works, so pay attention to it.

Now a quick example here. I worked with a director a while back. Let’s call him Marcus. Sharp, over-prepared, well-liked, and he kept getting told, though, he wasn’t senior enough in the executive meeting or he wasn’t presenting himself as senior enough. Which is kind of tough feedback. Like, what does this mean and how do I present myself more senior in the meeting? It’s hard to apply. So I asked him to walk me through the first two minutes of that meeting or his contribution, and what came out was that he waits until somebody asks him a direct question, and then he answers it very thoroughly. Which sounds reasonable at first, but what is also obvious is that if you wait for someone to actually call your name and ask, the chances that you speak often or speak where needed is probably pretty low. People may not think of you or may assume that you will speak up when you have something to contribute and not just whenever their name is called.

So what happened is while he was there to be a resource and sometimes even to inform, the role he actually took on was a lot more like an audience. Maybe 80, 90% of the time he was an audience in his role. And so we changed one thing, not his presentation, nothing about how he actually expressed his expertise, but one sentence in the first five minutes of every meeting with executives or senior leaders. And it could be a question, it could be something he was noticing about the room, it could be an agreement with a reason attached to it. The only rule that we had was it had to happen early, and it could be brief, it could be long, it didn’t even matter. And it was not about, “Oh, just say something for the sake of it.” It was to get into the habit to pay attention and be alert early on to see how he could contribute and add value versus leaning back, being an audience unless he was being asked. So that complete shift in the behavior changed his mindset as well.

And four months later, that perception started to change. He was involved in more pre-meetings. He was way more involved in the decision-making process. He could tell he had more influence and more impact, and that led to a promotion later on. Nothing about his actual work had changed in those four months or his knowledge. What changed was how he read the room and then how he acted on it.

So what I’d leave you with is more of a mindset than a tactic. When an individual contributor walks into a meeting, let’s say, they come in with a message to deliver. They maybe prepare the message. The message is good, and they’re going to deliver it more or less regardless of what’s happening in the room. Now, what I watch leaders do is walk in reading the room first, and then deciding which version of the message that room can actually take right now. So same but different outcome. It’s really paying attention to who you’re talking to before you talk.

So with that, before your next meeting, I’d ask yourself whether you want to be right in that room or effective in it. Because on any given Tuesday, those aren’t always the same thing. Being right versus being effective, two different things. The room is telling you what it needs when you’re tuned in and you can read it by asking those questions and adapting as we just talked about. Most of us are too busy to notice, to pay attention to this, to ensure that we set a strong impression early on. But that is becoming more and more important as you elevate in your career.

If this was useful, subscribe and go watch a related episode on executive presence next, which will be linked in the show notes. That’s what we got for you today. I’ll be back next week with another episode of The Manager Track podcast. Thank you for tuning in.