Digital Body Language is the definitive guide to communicating and connecting in a hybrid world. It will turn your daily misunderstandings into a set of collectively understood laws that foster connection, no matter the distance. Read an excerpt below.
They had been going out for three years when the fight, conducted exclusively via text message, occurred. The fight lasted for hours, back and forth, until at one point, frustrated and weary, Laura tapped out, So r we thru?
I guess so, Dave replied.
Laura was devastated. She called in sick to work the next day, and spent the next 24 hours mourning the loss of her relationship by meeting with friends, looking through old photos, and crying. The next night, Dave appeared on her doorstep. Laura, puffy-eyed, answered the door. “Did you forget about the dinner we planned a few days ago?” he said. “You said we were through,” Laura said. “I meant we were through arguing,” Dave said, “not through as in you and me.”
Oh.
Most of us have had exchanges like this in our personal lives (though maybe not quite so dramatic)—communications so confusing and crowded with intimations that we spend an entire day trying to make sense of them.
Now take these same dynamics and transfer them to the average workplace.
Jack, a midlevel manager, gets an email from his boss. The last sentence—That’ll be fine.—leaves him anxious. The period that punctuates it seems to dominate the screen, a black bead, a microbomb, lethal, suggestive, and—Jack would swear—disapproving. Did I screw up? Or is he merely overthinking it? If he’s not, how can he work for a boss who’s so oblivious about the implications of a period?
Here’s another: A positive, enthusiastic female boss headquartered in New York is assigned to lead a remote team based in Dallas. One of its members, a young guy named Sam, flies to New York a few months later for his first face-to-face meeting with his new boss. After a good preliminary discussion, the boss asks, “So what were your first impressions of me?” Sam hesitates, then admits they weren’t all that good. Almost all of his boss’s communications were no frills and to the point, leading Sam to believe she was unfriendly, withholding, and probably cold. In person, though, she’s the opposite. What made him feel that way? she asks. Sam had to confess it was because she didn’t use abbreviations or exclamation marks.
!!!!!!!!!
When punctuation and acronyms set us off into bouts of uncertainty, self-doubt, anxiety, anger, self-hatred, and mistrust, we can be sure we’re living in unmapped times.- * * * * *
I grew up reading—and re-reading—the books of Deborah Tannen. In 1990, Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, published her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. I wasn’t the only one; everyone seemed to be reading Tannen’s book. An analysis of how we talk to one another using indirection, interruption, pauses, humor, and pacing, You Just Don’t Understand dominated national conversations, spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list, and was translated into 30 languages. None of us needs a linguistics degree to know that the ways we communicate meaning today are more confusing than ever. Why? Well, Tannen studied body language almost exclusively in face-to-face interactions. Her work was informed by linguistics, gender, and evolutionary biology, but also by what you and I convey whenever we cross our arms, look away, or blink. None of us, including Tannen, could have predicted that the majority of our connections would be virtual today. Contemporary communication relies more than ever on how we say something rather than on what we say. That is, our digital body language. When the internet came along, everyone was given a dais and a microphone, but no one was told how to use them. We all just picked things up as we went along. And the mistakes we’ve made along the way have had real consequences in business. You see, these days, we don’t talk the talk or even walk the talk. We write the talk. Texts, emails, instant messages, and video calls are ultimately visual forms of communication. What’s more, each of us has different expectations and instincts about whether it’s appropriate to send a text or an email, when to look in the camera during a video call, how long to wait before we write someone back, and how to write a digital thank-you or apology without seeming sloppy or insincere. Our word choices, response times, video meeting styles, email sign-offs, and even our email signatures create impressions that can either enhance or wreck our closest relationships in the workplace (not to mention in our personal lives). Today, roughly 70 percent of all communication among teams is virtual. We send around 306 billion emails every day, with the average person sending 30 emails daily and fielding 96.1 According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50 percent of the time the “tone” of our emails is misinterpreted.2 Fifty percent! Imagine saying “I love you” to your partner, but half the time their response is “Yeah, right.” Have I felt that exact feeling with my husband, Rahul, after a text exchange? Not gonna lie—I’m guilty too! More data: the New York Times reports that 43 percent of working Americans spend at least some time working remotely, a percentage that skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Another study reported that 25 percent of respondents said they socialize more frequently online than in person.4 A 2015 Pew survey found that 90 percent of cell phone owners “frequently” carry their phones with them, with 76 percent admitting they turn off their phones “rarely” or “never.”5 The average person spends nearly 116 minutes every day—that’s about 2 hours—on social media, which over an average lifetime would add up to 5 years and 4 months.6 Psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman was the first to popularize the concept of “emotional intelligence,” or EI, in 1990. Emotional intelligence refers to our ability to read other people’s signals and respond to them appropriately while understanding and appreciating the world from others’ perspectives. Today, “emotional intelligence” and “empathy” have become buzzwords. They are discussed at roundtables. They are part of every mainstream education curriculum. They show up in value statements across every industry—from professional services to healthcare to technology. And they are trademark words in political campaigns and media conversations. Leaders have sold us on the idea that seeing situations clearly from others’ perspectives can transform leadership styles, work cultures, and business strategies. Empathy, it seems, advances morale, triggers innovation, drives engagement and retention, and raises profits. Surely everyone can agree we need more empathy in the world. Why, then, are we all facing a crisis of misunderstanding at work? Well, a big problem is that reading emotion within the digital nature of the modern workplace is difficult. When the concept of emotional intelligence was popularized, the digital era was in its infancy. Email was a barely unwrapped toy. The very first smartphones were thick slabs and rarely appeared at meetings. Texting was what European teenagers did. And video calls were a foreign species. Today, many organizations and communities exist exclusively behind a screen. We’ve shifted the way we create connections and, consequently, how we work with our colleagues as well as our customers, community members, and audiences. The loss of nonverbal body cues is among the most overlooked reasons why employees feel so disengaged from others. If used properly, and at scale, empathetic body language equals employee engagement. Disengagement happens not because people don’t want to be empathetic but because with today’s tools, they don’t know how. Yes, a CEO can say, “My office door is always open” and tell everyone he’s “accessible” and “approachable.” But what if he’s never actually in the office and the only way to communicate with him is to jump into his daily queue of 200-plus emails or Slack messages? Most of today’s workplaces, in fact, minimize the conditions necessary to foster and augment clear communication, leading to widespread distrust, resentment, and frustration. There is more physical distance between teams. There are fewer face-to-face interactions. There is virtually no body language to read. Plus, every few months, things seem to get faster (or maybe we’re all just imagining it), leaving us no choice but to adapt to the newest normal. We become more thoughtless. We grow more accepting of distractions and interruptions, more indifferent to the needs and emotions of colleagues and workmates. This digital disconnect leads us to misinterpret, overlook, or ignore signals and cues, creating entirely new waves of organizational dysfunction. The question is, why? Copyright © 2021 by Erica Dhawan
Erican Dhawan is a globally recognized leadership expert and keynote speaker helping organizations and leaders innovate faster and further, together. Erica has spoken, worldwide, to organizations and enterprises that range from the World Economic Forum to U.S. and global Fortune 500 companies, associations, sports teams, and government institutions. Named as one of the top management professionals around the world by Global Gurus, she is the founder and CEO of Cotential - a company that has helped leaders and teams leverage twenty-first-century collaboration skills globally. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Fast Company and Harvard Business Review, and she is the author of Digital Body Language and Get Big Things Done. She has an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, MBA from MIT Sloan, and BS from The Wharton School.
Photo Credit: John Demato
