Status Exercises for Leadership: Warm High Status at Work

Status is already in the room

Keith Johnstone's useful provocation in Impro is that status transactions are happening all the time. Status is not reserved for kings, villains, managers or formal ceremonies. It is negotiated in ordinary encounters: who approaches, who waits, who interrupts, whose joke is rewarded and who changes course for whom.

That makes status different from organisational rank. A job title brings real authority and responsibility, but played status is the behaviour happening now. A junior specialist may hold the room while explaining a risk. A senior leader may lower their played status to receive expertise. Two peers can change status several times in one conversation.

The point is not to diagnose people as permanently high or low. It is to notice a moving relationship. Once the movement becomes visible, a team has more choice about whether the pattern is helping the work.

Status is not only something a person has. It is something people continually do together.

Four ways to see an invisible transaction

During the Rice Cookie Improv workshop I led, we kept returning to four observable areas. They make status practical because they replace vague labels with behaviour a group can actually discuss.

• Space: who occupies it, enters it, yields it and controls access to it?
• Time: who can pause, interrupt or delay a reply, and who responds immediately?
• Attention: who watches whom, and whose reaction seems to matter most?
• Changeability: who expects others to adjust, and who is most affected by a new offer?

Before interpreting intention, describe what happened in space, time, attention and changeability.

High status is not the villain

When I ask a group to play high status, the first version is often a caricature: a hard stare, a loud command, a body that takes everything and gives nothing back. It is theatrically clear, but it confuses status with hostility.

Warm high status looks different. It is unhurried without being obstructive, clear without becoming contemptuous and comfortable enough to give attention away. A warm high-status person can make a decision, admit that they do not know something and invite another person's expertise without collapsing their own authority.

Low status needs the same care. It is not a victim, a disability, a marginalised identity or an invitation to punch down. In a responsible workshop, participants play observable choices rather than stereotypes about who deserves power.

A useful workplace parallel: prestige and dominance

Organisational researchers often distinguish prestige-based leadership from dominance-based leadership. These are not identical to Johnstone's theatrical status, but the distinction offers a useful workplace parallel. Prestige earns influence through recognised competence and regard; dominance relies more on pressure, fear or control.

A study of 53 work teams by Sun Young Sung and Jin Nam Choi found that prestige-oriented leader behaviour supported team creativity indirectly through more supportive interaction. Dominance-oriented behaviour was associated with coercive interaction and, in a further analysis, with less supportive interaction and a negative indirect effect on creativity.

In three experiments with 1,884 participants, Ard Barends and Wendy de Waal-Andrews found a consistent difference in trust: prestige-based leadership increased it, while dominance-based leadership reduced it. The practical inference is not that every warm person has high status. It is that authority does not need intimidation in order to be credible.

The strongest high status does not make everyone else smaller. It makes useful contribution safer.

Make the pattern visible before trying to fix it

The secret-card party in the workshop made status visible through play. An applied exercise called Status Shuffle uses a similar device in a small-group brainstorm: participants receive concealed playing cards, contribute from the assigned status, shuffle and repeat. The debrief follows the ideas. Which ideas were adopted? Which needed a higher-status speaker before the group valued them?

For a corporate group, I would use a fictional or low-risk challenge rather than a live dispute. I would also add one final round without cards, using a structure such as round-robin contribution or silent idea collection. The group can then compare not only how status felt, but how meeting design changed whose thinking became available.

The exercise is not evidence that hierarchy is always wrong. Decisions still need owners and expertise still matters. It reveals when the social signal around an idea is being mistaken for the quality of the idea itself.

Use status on purpose

There is no single correct status for every moment. A crisis may need somebody to take space, slow the room and give a firm direction. Discovery may require the same person to wait, become more changeable and direct attention toward people who hold different information.

For me, the useful leadership question is not how to look more powerful. It is what the work and the people need from my status now. Sometimes the answer is to stand steady. Sometimes it is to move. Very often, the best high-status choice is to help another person become more capable in the room.