Moment 182: How To Make People Respect You In Seconds: Evy Poumpouras

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

In those environments, if someone's not, if you feel like your manager or your boss or the CEO, or even like a colleague, isn't showing you respect. And I've read your story, so I know that this happened multiple times in your life where there'd be someone around you that wasn't showing you the respect you deserve. And I have a lot of people that come up to me and they say, I'm struggling because my boss is not showing me respect, or my colleague, this colleague isn't listening to me, or A, or all these kinds of things. Where does your mind default to when I say that? Like where do you go to in your mind? What is your like action A?

Evy Pompouras (0:39)

So with the last one you just said, my colleagues don't listen to me. I would come back and I would say, give me an example of where they don't listen to you, right? So I would say to you, when you do speak, do you look at people when you speak? Do you project your voice? So it's called paralinguistics. Everyone's so focused on what they say, like reading my notes or reading my agenda. They don't think about the tone pitch of the voice. How are you delivering this? Are you projecting your voice?

Steven Bartlett (1:04)

Give me an example.

Evy Pompouras (1:05)

Do you talk like this when you speak? I have a question. I just want to share something. People are going to like glaze over. I have a question. Or even just the tone, how you under, Hi, I'm Evy. Hi, I'm Evy.

Feels different. Those are simple things you can do to make sure people hear you. The other thing is, I say this a lot when I speak to companies because communication is a big thing. Don't just talk to talk. There's this thing out there, and especially with women, where it's like, make sure they hear you. Make sure your voice is heard at the table. I'm fine with that. Do you have something beneficial to say or value to say? Because if you don't, don't say anything. Half the meetings I go to, I don't speak. Because I maybe I have nothing to say.

Steven Bartlett (1:55)

It's so interesting. I am from being in many boardrooms for many, many years, probably 15 years being in marketing boardrooms, 15 years, about 10 years being in marketing boardrooms with CEOs, with my team, with lots of different people, lots of different teams. I've had thousands and thousands of meetings. I eventually observed something in myself, which is a bit of a prejudice that I have, which is the minute someone speaks, based on their contribution score, which is like a credit score, based on all of the contributions you made in the past, in those first couple of seconds, if their previous contributions were all valuable, everyone in the room would stop and look and lean in. But if they had developed a low contribution score because they'd continually talked for the sake of talking, i.e. they're just like, I'll give you an example. In my New York office back in the day, there was this one guy who we'd be in a brainstorm trying to solve a problem. And he would start speaking. And you'd see by the way he started speaking, he hadn't actually thought through what he was going to say. He'd go, what about if we put a, I don't know, like a pop-up, and like maybe we'll do some TikToks. And so honestly, what I then observed from that individual is every time they open their mouth, people would instantly basically like dismiss the idea because they had such a low contribution score. And like we all have a contribution score. You have one, I have one, based on the last 10 years of when we've opened our mouth, how valuable it was to the people around us. Like that individual, whenever he spoke, I would see the person sat next to him, who I won't name, almost like low-key roll their eyes in the first five seconds and shut it down before he'd even got it out. And then there was this other guy called, in my UK office called Paul, never spoke, like never really said anything, super mature, super experienced guy. The minute he said anything, because every time he opened his mouth, it was important and valuable and considered. Everyone went, he could interrupt anyone, the instant silence, everyone stares over at this guy. Because when he contributed, we all knew that he had something valuable to add. And I, so I would say to my team, and I said this to this team, that we're here with us in New York, just make sure you protect your contribution score.