Introduction
After co-authoring my first book, Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence, I traveled the world, speaking and consulting with companies and leaders on the challenges of twenty-first-century collaboration. My mission was to help CEOs and organizations solve the practical challenges of managing across global, multigenerational, matrixed, and virtual teams.
Everywhere I went, the same questions kept coming up: How do I keep my teams feeling connected to each other and to people on other teams? How do I help people of different ages and working styles who rarely meet in person communicate effectively? Why does it seem infinitely harder to foster trust, engagement, and the confidence to take risks? And finally, why do my own communications so often seem to miss the mark, producing unintended and anxiety-filled consequences?
The more I worked with my clients to solve these problems, the more obvious it became that they were caused by the very digital tools that had set us free in so many ways. Our failure to grapple with the communication-altering side effects of our shiny new digital tools—email, text messaging, PowerPoint, Zoom—created widespread misunderstanding and conflict, which in turn manifested as across-the-board anxiety, fear, distrust, and paranoia.
The good news is that our communication problems are eminently solvable with some attention to a skill I call digital body language. I have taught many leaders how to model digital body language for their teams and how to introduce it to their cultures, with remarkable results. I have trained managers, HR teams, and coaches how to embed digital body language skills into their leadership programs. And I have advised everyone from doctors using telehealth to professors using online learning platforms to lawyers, consultants, and board directors using virtual meetings how to master this skill. One leader told me that simple changes in digital body language not only transformed the communication in her entire organization but also enhanced the customer experience that she was able to provide from afar. Another executive told me it changed how he connected with his wife and children while traveling for business.
Now I’ll show you how digital body language can help you.
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When people ask me how I started doing what I do, I tell them it’s a story that’s lasted my whole life.
As a first-generation American girl born to Indian parents, I came to English in an indirect way. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. At home, my parents, both physicians who had immigrated to the United States in their twenties, spoke Punjabi—a language close to Hindi—and only rarely English. My mom and dad both made it a high priority that my two siblings and I honored traditional Indian values and customs. Silence was a sign of respect to elders, and listening a prized trait. Learning English, doing well academically, and almost everything else came in second.
Growing up in a white, conservative, suburban part of the country, I spent a lot of my childhood trying to fit in. There weren’t many girls who looked like me, or who were the children of immigrants, or who sat down for dinner every night at 9:00 p.m. (Indian families tend to eat late.) At the same time, I felt almost no allegiance to India. Whenever I visited, my family there referred to me as “the American-born cousin.” Who in India was named Erica?
Caught between two cultures, I went inside myself.
Often you would hardly know if I was in the room. In school I was shy, quiet, more an observer than a participant. Raising my hand or calling any attention to myself was unimaginable to me. I did well in school and on tests, but the comments in every report card I received from kindergarten to twelfth grade said the same thing: I wish Erica spoke up more.
As a girl pivoting between the thickly accented English of my parents and my own bad Hindi and wanting to feel like I belonged somewhere, I developed a few tricks, one of which was the ability to decipher other people’s body language. Body language offered the key to understanding the foreign worlds around me. I became obsessed with decoding my classmates’ signals and cues, no matter how subtle. Tone, pacing, pauses, gestures. The popular girls walked around with their heads high, shoulders pulled back, almost literally looking down on the rest of us. The older kids showed their disinterest by slouching during school assemblies, their eyes turned to the ground or each other—never to the adult speaking. At home, I holed up in my room watching Bollywood movies on my family’s old VCR, focusing on the actors’ faces and hands instead of on the storyline (Hindi was still alien to me), rewinding over and over again, trying to understand what was being said by observing the actors’ nonverbal cues.
My preoccupation with translating nonverbal cues soon became a source of power as I learned to mimic the body language of my more confident peers and decode what my Hindi-speaking family members were saying to me with their furrowed brows.
After September 11, 2001, virtually everyone who looked like me in America was suddenly treated with instant suspicion in public spaces. One afternoon around that time, my father was waiting to pick me up at the local YMCA after tennis practice. Someone behind the front desk panicked—my dad “looked suspicious,” I guess—and called the police. For the next 45 minutes, my father fielded questions from the officers, politely explaining that he worked as a cardiologist at a nearby hospital. I looked on as he sat behind a table, speaking patiently with the officers—his eye contact direct, his palms wide open, signaling his respect to the officers and his understanding of why this was happening. I could also tell by his flushed cheeks that he was embarrassed. A few months later, my dad donated a significant percentage of his income that year to the 9/11 fund.
I remember being angry at the police, but also at my father. How could he respond with kindness to what I saw as racial profiling and ignorance? Patiently, my father asked my siblings and me, wouldn’t it be better to consider what other people might be thinking and feeling instead of responding with indignation or rage? To put ourselves in their shoes? That was an inflection point for me, a day I began thinking harder about how humans convey empathy via body language and what it can accomplish.
My interest in nonverbal communication continued in college, where I read every book on the subject I could find; later, I called on my growing expertise professionally when I began teaching public speaking. Being able to understand and classify cues and signals, along with the poise and confidence this skill gave me, helped me win internships and, eventually, ridiculously competitive job opportunities. All of this despite my father’s insistence that Indian-Americans couldn’t succeed in business and that I should instead focus on an occupation like medicine, or engineering, where Indians at least had a tradition of success. But I persevered—and it seemed to pay off.
My preoccupation with body language gave me the confidence to teach courses in leadership as a graduate student and, later, as a teaching fellow at both Harvard and MIT. It motivated me to start my own business before I was 30, which I was able to scale from a what-if? idea into a global company despite having no clue what I was doing, or any media experience, investors, or connections. Before I knew it, I was addressing global leaders at the World Economic Forum, getting interviewed by Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, becoming a “sought-after” keynote speaker by CEOs and top executives, and teaching twenty-first-century collaboration skills to thousands of leaders across a range of industries, companies, and countries.
If it sounds like I’m bragging, please! I hope it’s clear by now that what I consider my “expertise” comes from shyer, humbler beginnings. There’s a lot to be said for being withdrawn, refusing to raise your hand in class, and watching Bollywood movies alone in the dark after school. The point is, my whole life I’ve believed, as many do, that the essence of empathy and trust isn’t about what we say but how we say it, and how often we check ourselves to make sure that our words and their meanings are as deliberate and clear as possible. Studying other people’s body language as well as my own has taught me a lot, although the practical application of it has come through quite a bit of trial and error—in my case mostly error.
Hadn’t my own experience taught me that my poor posture and dead-fish handshake made a negative impression on prospective employers? Hadn’t one teacher told me that my habit of nervously twirling my hair signaled my insecurity? Hadn’t I found out that a professor’s tightly set lips or tensed nostril signaled whether I had aced or blown a test or paper? As a speaker, didn’t I know that the difference between success and failure was about intuiting what an audience wanted and adjusting my message accordingly?
Once, early in my career, I delivered a keynote presentation in front of a big audience. It was the weekend, and the fourth day of an all-firm lawyer retreat. Not surprisingly, the audience was tired, peevish, disengaged, and tuned out. Some people looked overtly hostile. Others were slumped in their chairs, heads hanging to the side, eyes glancing up at the clock. The last things anyone wanted to hear about that day were the advantages of collaboration. Their body language almost begged me: Not another framework, please.
So I pivoted. Removing my heels, I took a seat on the edge of the stage, and scrapped my usual introduction. “Talk about the emotions you’re feeling right now,” I said. “Fatigue, tension, boredom, anticipation, rage, you name it…” Well, the mood in the room changed, just like that. I was no longer talking at the audience; I was talking with them. Everyone started to loosen up, relax, smile, laugh. A speech that could have been a disaster turned into an interactive hour of genuine connection and animated discussion.
Over the next few years I began to make it a point, as I do today, to suss out the body language of audiences. Blank expressions mean that I’m going too fast and need to slow down. Crossed arms signal defensiveness or resentment. As for me, I know that gesturing or adjusting my hair too much signals my own lack of confidence.
This brings me to a few years ago, when I started hearing one story after the next all centering on the same theme: miscommunication in the workplace.
As I said, I’d been giving keynote speeches and consulting with clients around the world, teaching people how to collaborate better at work. The most common questions I received were: How can we innovate faster and further by capitalizing on the expertise of digitally fluent employees while still leveraging an experienced workforce that is set in its ways? And how can I get these two groups to truly collaborate with each other? More and more clients and audience members of all ages were expressing high levels of fear, anxiety, and paranoia about communication in their workplace. Leaders were doing what they’d always done—for example, sharing messages of support and trust with their colleagues and teams—but more and more of those messages were being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or missed altogether. These leaders weren’t dumb or lacking in social skills, and many were conversant in cutting-edge methods of building strong cultures.
As I dug more deeply into the responses I was getting, the biggest complaints seemed to revolve around how communications were being translated inside those same workplaces. That is, how a message that was meant to be friendly and to the point could be read by the recipient as angry or resentful, causing less engagement and innovation and even the loss of top performers.
This issue was illustrated by a meeting I had with a client, a senior leader at Johnson & Johnson whom I’ll call Kelsey, who had gotten some tough feedback from her team on morale issues. In Kelsey’s performance review, her boss commented that her “empathy was weak.” When Kelsey and I first met and began talking, I kept my eye out for the standard, universal markers of subpar empathy: an inability to understand the needs of others, a lack of proficiency in reading and using body language, poor listening skills, a failure to ask deep questions. I was confused. Kelsey seemed to have fantastic empathy skills. She made me feel at ease, her body language signaled respect and understanding, and she listened deeply and carefully. What was going on?
The answer had less to do with Kelsey and more to do with today’s tech-reliant workplace. Instead of lacking empathy, Kelsey, like nearly everyone I counseled, didn’t know what empathy meant anymore in a world where digital communication had made once-clear signals, cues, and norms almost unintelligible. A tone of voice? Approachable body language? Those things didn’t cut it anymore. The digital world required a new kind of body language. The problem was that no one could agree on what even made up that kind of body language.
For example, Kelsey believed she was doing everyone a favor by keeping her emails brief. But her team found them cold and ambiguous. Kelsey sent calendar invites at the last minute with no explanation, which made her teammates feel disrespected, as though Kelsey’s schedule mattered more than theirs. During strategy presentations, Kelsey would glance down repeatedly at her phone, making others feel like she had checked out.
Kelsey’s digital body language, then, was abysmal. It canceled out the very real clarity that comes when workplace colleagues (okay, humans in general) feel connected to one another via physical body language.
I realized that our understanding of body language needed to be redefined for the contemporary workplace. Today we’re all “immigrants” learning a new culture and language, except this time it’s in the digital space. Being a good leader today means not only being aware of other people’s signals and cues but also mastering this new digital body language that didn’t exist twenty years ago, and which most people today “speak” as badly as I spoke Hindi as a kid!
It was the world’s dirty little secret: some of the time—most of the time—people couldn’t make heads or tails of the tone behind messages they were getting in emails, text messages, conference calls, and so on. Nor were they entirely aware of how their own messages were being received. More than just a glitch or a nuisance—technology is such a pain!—our shiny new communication tools were causing serious issues. Work and decision-making had slowed. Teams were in disarray. Employees were left unmotivated, distrustful, uncertain, and paranoid.
It seemed that misunderstood “digital body language”—or rather, the lack of a set of universally agreed-upon rules—was creating big problems across the globe: in workplaces, communities, and even families. Everyone knew about these problems, but no one talked about them, except anecdotally. We had all grown up knowing how to read and write, some of us better than others (says the girl who remembers the day in school when, reading aloud from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, she pronounced the word “peculiar” as “peck-you-liar,” which her classmates never let her forget), but there was no instruction manual about how to read signals and cues in a digitized world. Instead, people at work were squandering hours or even days in uncertainty, anxiety, and disquiet.
I was hardly a Jedi Master at all this either. I’d wasted entire mornings endlessly re-reading a single email, trying to figure out what an ellipsis or the single-word query Thoughts? meant. I’d heard about friendships imploding over a WhatsApp conversation. What about the “like” on Facebook or Instagram from a colleague who hadn’t returned your two recent phone calls? (Did it signal “I’m sorry”? Was it a prelude to calling you back, a way of testing the friendship waters? Or was it a signal that from now on, you and that person would now be communicating exclusively via social media? What did it all mean? Something? Nothing?) What about the executive who signs off every email with Thank you—doesn’t that show clarity? On the face of it, sure—so why does it come across to his colleagues as insincere and inauthentic?
I genuinely believe most people have good intentions. They just may not know how to convey those intentions.
How can we re-establish genuine trust and connection, no matter the distance? By creating a nuts-and-bolts rulebook for clear communications in the modern digital world. Communicating what we really mean today requires that we understand today’s signals and cues at a granular level while developing a heightened sensitivity to words, nuance, subtext, humor, and punctuation—things we mostly think of as the field of operations for professional writers.
But if you think writing clearly is a niche or inessential skill, think again. When asked what the best investment professionals could make in their careers was, Julie Sweet, global CEO of Accenture, answered, “Develop excellent communication skills.”1 Sweet added that any employee, even a junior-level one, could significantly heighten their value by “articulately summariz[ing] a meeting … put[ting] together a presentation and [sending] emails that are really salient and to the point.”2 Much has been said about developing top-of-the-line presentation and public-speaking skills, but Julie Sweet has seen the future, one in which a supposedly “soft” skill—communicating well, especially in your writing—is a critical competitive advantage.
What does good digital body language look like in action? It means never assuming that our own digital habits (e.g., answering every email we get within 30 seconds, or never listening to our voicemails) are shared by everybody else. It means taking a few extra seconds to ask ourselves whether our sentences, words, or even punctuation might be misinterpreted. It means being hyperconscious of the signals and cues we send out, constantly checking in with ourselves, and learning along the way.
The book you’re holding in your hands decodes the signals and cues of who gets heard, who gets credit, and what gets done in our ever-changing world. It will serve as a commonsense playbook that will help you understand how to communicate your ideas, negotiate relationships, speak your truth, and build trust and confidence with people very different from you. In the pages ahead, I will introduce simple strategies to help you and your teams understand each other and banish the confusion, frustration, and misunderstanding that arise from email, video, instant messaging, and even live meetings. My mission is to help you get closer to anyone—intellectually, emotionally, personally, professionally—and make you stand out as a trusted, straightforward leader, no matter the distance.
Copyright © 2021 by Erica Dhawan
