Jacob Warwick once watched two company presidents present to the same board on the same day, with similar pedigrees and similar results. When a board member challenged the first, he crossed his arms and started talking faster. When the second was challenged just as hard, she took a breath and answered slowly. She walked out with more funding.
Warwick concludes that "your work doesn't speak for itself. You have to speak for it." We agree, and would push it further. How people speak when the stakes are high is a skill with a price attached, and organisations that file it under personality are letting chance decide who gets promoted. Where his advice runs thin is on who gets to use it. The same sentence does not buy the same result for every speaker, which is why coaching delivery belongs to managers instead of being left for employees to work out alone.
Warwick advises executives and founders on compensation, and his newsletter describes him as the adviser behind more than $1.25 billion in lifted outcomes. In a recent post on Predetermined, he sets out seven habits: slow down, cut the hedging, stay calm under fire, stop over-claiming, describe your work as outcomes, find out who really decides, and hold your position in negotiation. Most come with a story from his advisory work, and most come with a line to borrow.
Hedging is a tax that falls due when the stakes are highest
Warwick's sharpest example is the salary ask. "I was sort of hoping we could maybe talk about my salary" tells the listener you are unsure, so why should they be confident? "I'd like to talk about my salary this week" does not. There is evidence behind the instinct. In experiments published in 2005, Kevin Blankenship and Thomas Holtgraves found that when a message mattered to listeners, versions containing hedges, hesitations and tag questions produced "less favorable attitudes and more negative perceptions of the message and source" than plain versions.
That study tested persuasion among students, not promotion decisions, and it deserves that discount. Still, the penalty showed up under a specific condition: hedging cost speakers most when the audience cared about the subject. A promotion case, a budget defence and a hostile board question are exactly those conversations, so the verbal habit that does no harm in a status update does its damage in the meetings that set careers.
The same mechanism applies to how people describe scope. Warwick's VP of technology had been at his company five years, was known as "the tech guy" and was paid about 30% below market. The change was in the description: from the person who implemented systems to the leader who drove $42 million in growth through technology. Within a few months he had two offers in the top 10% of pay for his role. Most managers will recognise, from the other side of the table, Warwick's point that "I manage a team of four" caps you.
The discipline here is precision, and it rules out bravado as firmly as it rules out mumbling. Warwick's COO who told his board he had deep technical experience, then stumbled on basic technical questions, lost credibility on everything else he had ever told them. The skill is calibration: say exactly what you did, no smaller and no larger.
The same script does not land the same for everyone
On causation, that objection is fair and we accept it. Nothing in the post shows that a phrase caused a raise, and Warwick's negotiation advice on silence and first offers rests on his own client experience rather than any evidence he presents. Yet the objection proves less than it appears to. The VP's market value existed before anyone redescribed his work, yet his own employer, after five years, was paying him about 30% below market. Delivery did not create the value. It decided whether anyone priced it, and that is the cost of treating speaking as incidental to performance.
The harder problem comes from research on who can safely follow the advice. A 2023 study by Krings in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, a hiring experiment, found that older women and younger men who self-promoted heavily were still judged competent, but "were regarded as less interpersonally warm, received lower interview performance ratings, and were less likely to be hired." A column on CEPR's VoxEU describes an experiment in which women rated their own performance 22% lower than men even when the rating could not affect their pay, and suggests women may hold back because they have learned that self-promotion carries a penalty for them.
Put together, "position yourself before someone else does" is sound advice that some people pay for following. Those people should still speak up, but the listener shares responsibility for what gets rewarded, and in most organisations the listener is a manager.
Delivery did not create the value. It decided whether anyone priced it.
Coaching delivery belongs in the manager's job
If speaking well under pressure is a skill, it can be rehearsed and assessed, and managers see enough of their people's work to do both. Many companies invest in coaching analysis; far fewer seem to coach how the analysis lands in the room where it is judged. Treating delivery as a managed skill looks something like this:
- Rehearsing high-stakes asks the way teams rehearse a board deck, including the hostile question. Warwick's CEO candidate, told her approach was "fundamentally flawed," turned the room by asking which part concerned the board member most; a line like that is easier to find when you have prepared for the attack.
- Listening for hedges and task verbs in your team's updates, and asking for the number and the outcome before the update travels upstairs.
- Separating substance from delivery when you evaluate people, settling what someone delivered before deciding how convincing they sounded.
- Noticing whose assertiveness reads as confidence in your meetings and whose reads as presumption, since the hiring evidence shows that judgement is not applied evenly.
The last two items are the uncomfortable ones, because they turn Warwick's advice around. His post is written for the person in the hot seat. But the board in his opening story was also making a decision, partly on the evidence of crossed arms and a faster voice. Senior leaders sit on both sides of that table, and the habits they reward in others shape which careers advance as much as their own phrasing shapes theirs.
Warwick's two presidents had similar results and walked out with different funding. Perhaps the board read composure correctly as a sign of command; perhaps it rewarded a calmer nervous system. Either way, delivery was being graded, as it is in every promotion committee and pay review. A company that declines to coach it, or to check how it grades it, has handed the outcome to whoever arrived already fluent.
