The question assumes there is one answer: a stance, a way of holding your hands, something you could practise in a lift on the way to a meeting. The research that has looked hardest at how people actually acquire rank in a group suggests the question is badly formed, because there are two routes and they call for close to opposite behaviour.
The relevant work is a 2013 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Tom Foulsham, Alan Kingstone and Joseph Henrich, called Two Ways to the Top.
Two routes, measured separately
The distinction the authors work with comes out of earlier anthropological work. Dominance is rank acquired through fear: intimidation, coercion, the credible threat of cost. People go along with it to protect something they value. Prestige is rank granted freely, on the basis of demonstrated competence, by people who want to learn from you or be near you.
That framing traces back to a 2001 paper by Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White in Evolution and Human Behavior, titled The evolution of prestige: freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. The title carries the argument. Deference that is given rather than extracted is bound up with learning, and it is worth something to be near people who are good at things.
Both are strategies for ending up at the top of a group. They are not two labels for the same thing, and the paper’s central claim is that they are statistically separable.
In the first study, 191 people worked in 36 groups on a task, then rated each other. Both dominance and prestige independently predicted how influential a person was seen to be, how much agency they were credited with, and their measured behavioural influence over the group’s decisions. The effects held when the researchers controlled for likeability, which matters, because otherwise you could argue the whole thing was people simply preferring who they preferred.
Two different sets of behaviour were working in the same room at the same time, and the people using them were not interchangeable.
What the eye tracking added
The second study, with 59 participants, used eye tracking to ask a narrower question: where do people actually look?
Both the dominant and the prestigious targets drew substantially more visual attention than group members who scored low on either. Perceived dominance and prestige together accounted for roughly 48 per cent of the variance in how much of the time observers fixated on a given person, and about 46 per cent of the variance in how long those fixations lasted.
The detail that makes this more than obvious is what it survived. The effect held independently of how much the person spoke and where they were sitting, which are the two explanations you would reach for first. Visual attention was tracking something about the people themselves rather than their airtime or their position at the table.
This is closer to an answer to the original question than any posture advice, and it is not a posture. It is a reading that observers arrive at from the whole of someone’s conduct in a group, and it goes to two quite different kinds of person.
The cost attached to one of the routes
Here the two paths separate sharply, and it is the most useful finding in the paper for anyone actually deciding how to behave.
Prestigious individuals were rated as highly likable, by their own group members and by outside observers watching recordings. Dominant individuals were rated as dislikable, by both.
Both were influential. Only one was liked, and that gap did not narrow when outsiders with no stake in the group watched the recordings.
So “seeming commanding” and “being someone people want to defer to” are not the same target, and advice that treats them as interchangeable is skipping the part where you choose. If what you want is compliance in a single meeting, the evidence suggests the dominance route works. If what you want is people bringing you their problems next quarter, the paper points somewhere else, towards demonstrated competence and the willingness to let it be seen.
That is a slower instruction than a stance, and it is not really about the body at all.
What the study cannot tell you
Several things, and they are worth stating rather than implying.
The samples were university participants in a single research setting, which is the standing limitation across most of this literature and not a criticism specific to this paper. Whether the two routes carry the same weight in workplaces with different norms about deference, or in cultures with flatter expectations about rank, is a separate question the design does not reach.
The behavioural influence result was weaker than the authors expected, explaining about 12 per cent of the variance. They say so themselves. The perceptual findings, how influential someone seemed and where people looked, are much stronger than the finding about whether the group actually did what that person wanted.
The groups were short-lived and assembled for the research. A task group that meets once is not a department you have worked in for six years, and the durability of either route over long periods is not something this design can address. The paper is one careful piece of work, not a settled account of how status operates everywhere.
There is also no checklist here. The study measured peer and observer ratings of dominance and prestige, not a validated inventory of gestures, so it cannot be converted into instructions about hands, chins or where to put your feet. Anyone selling that conversion is adding something the data does not contain.
It is worth knowing, separately, that the most famous version of the body-language claim has had a difficult decade. The specific promise that holding an expansive stance for two minutes changes your hormones did not survive larger replication attempts, and that literature is now genuinely contested rather than simply established.
What the Cheng paper offers instead is less satisfying and more usable. There is no single way to come across as high status, because there are two, they draw the eye about equally, and the difference between them shows up not in how people rate your influence but in whether they can stand you.