Who is the Boss Starling?

There's a few hundred starlings roosting in the dead elm on the other side of the barn. If I was still heating with wood I'd have taken it down by now. It's a few hundred yards from where I'm sitting on the stoop, but the air is filled with the sound of hundreds of starlings talking to one-another. Suddenly; silence. It's as if somebody hit a switch. Not a cheep or a chirp to be heard. Complete dead silence for at least thirty seconds. Then, a single chirp, and as quick as it stopped, the cacaphony of those hundreds of starlings fired right up again. I figure the one that issued that first chirp must be the Boss Starling. But my question is, and hopefully some ornithologist reading this can provide an answer, how do the other starlings know who the boss is?