Three ways to correct it in the first meeting without losing the account
The kickoff meeting has just started, and the client's CFO has already asked you to see whether coffee is available in the room. You are the engagement lead. Beside you sits your associate, a 29-year-old man, laptop already open. Over the past eleven minutes, the CFO has aimed every substantive question at him rather than at you. Every so often your associate's eyes drift over to you. The CFO does not. Once you respond regardless, the CFO offers a courteous nod and then turns to your associate to ask if he concurs.
A clumsy handling of this moment can cost you the account outright, or, if not, the room, and losing the room will cost you the account more gradually. A skilled handling leaves you with a client who will entrust you with the next three years of engagements. If you let it slide, each meeting from now on will echo this one, and in the client's mind your associate will end up as the one leading the work. Eventually the client asks for him by name, and your firm, which bills on the strength of its relationships, hands over what the client requests. The problem was never really the coffee. The next three years are.
The turn
The CFO has not decided anything at all. He is operating on a default, and a default is far easier to overwrite in the first meeting than in the fifth. He is not your adversary. He is an assumption with a budget. Winning the argument with him is not something you need to do. What you need is to replace that presumption before it hardens into habit.
Why this has less to do with your demeanor
The 2025 Women in the Workplace study reported that female leaders are two times more likely than male leaders to be taken for someone in a junior role. That describes a habit that keeps recurring, not a judgment on how you carry yourself. It happens to senior women at client tables across the Sacramento region and beyond. Many women answer by doubling their effort at the next meeting, and the client interprets that as evidence that the associate supplied the thinking while the lead merely supplied the drive. Waiting it out is the expensive option. The inexpensive option is one brief sentence, spoken within the first eleven minutes, before anyone in Sacramento has fixed on a narrative.
Three approaches to fixing it at the first meeting
Step one. Take the question back smoothly, with no hesitation at all. "I'll take that one. It's my call on the engagement." Then answer the question fully. Say it once, kindly, and watch the room shift around you.
Step two. Redirect the coffee. Address your associate directly and say, "Would you check with the front desk about coffee?" Give him that errand in the same even tone you would use to hand him a spreadsheet. He is an associate, running errands is part of that role, and the client has only just seen you delegate one.
Step three. Define the reporting structure as you leave the room. "I will personally lead our weekly check-in with you. He will manage the data workstream and report to me." In saying this aloud, you have laid out the org chart, and the client heard it from the person who sits at the top of it.
Not one of these three amounts to a confrontation. Each is an everyday line any lead could deliver, and that ordinariness is what makes it work. A leader who keeps being mistaken for junior staff ends the error by behaving like the senior person, openly and without apologizing for it.
Over coffee, the CFO brought up something with you in Sacramento. Next week he will bring the forecast to you, because on day one you showed him who to bring it to.