Reading Body Language at Work: Five Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

From Carol Kinsey Goman:

Human beings are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioral cues and to quickly understand their meaning. We see someone gesture and automatically make a judgment about the intention of that gesture.

And we’ve been doing this for a long, long time. As a species we knew how to win friends and influence people — or avoid/placate/confront those we couldn’t befriend — long before we knew how to use words.

But our ancient ancestors faced threats and challenges very different from those we confront in today’s modern society, with its layers of social restrictions and nuanced meanings adding to the intricacies of our interpersonal dealings. This is especially true in workplace settings, where each corporate culture adds it own complexities and guidelines for correct behavior.

No matter what the culture at your workplace, the ability to read nonverbal signals can provide significant advantages for the way you deal with people. You can start to gain those advantages by avoiding these five common mistakes.

1) Forgetting to consider the context.

Imagine this scene: You come into the office and notice your coworker who’s seated behind her desk in the cubicle next to yours. Her head is down, her eyes are closed and she’s hunched over, shivering slightly, and hugging herself.

Now the scene changes . . .

You see the same woman, in the same physical position, sitting on a bench at a bus stop. It’s a freezing-cold winter evening with a light snow falling and a north wind blowing. Her nonverbal signals are the same but the new setting has altered your perception of those signals. In a flash she’s gone from telling you, “I’m in distress” to “I’m really cold!”

The meaning of nonverbal communication changes as the context changes. We can’t begin to understand someone’s behavior without considering the circumstances under which the behavior occurred.

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