Is body language really that important?

I'm developing a course on Building Positive Relationships. Part of the content for this is understanding how to read body language. Searching the interwebs for what others have to say on the topic is raising a lot of concerns for me.

I'm a student of psychology. So for me, understanding human behaviour is pinnacle to all that I do. It's why I'm in training. I love being able to spot behaviours, interpret them, and respond accordingly. But this has taken time and a lot of training. I started when doing an 'A' level in psychology, then my undergrad, onto my postgrad and now the career path I've chosen. That's 15 years of training. And I still don't know if I'm as savvy about human behaviour as I might either expect to be or should be.

A google search on the topic of body language will present you with far more choice than you know what to deal with. So I'm adding to that mix a hopefully balanced representation of how an understanding of body language can aid your ability to develop relationships you have in whatever capacity you deem appropriate.

So where do we start? I guess let's dismiss some myths first of all:

1) One piece of work oft cited is work carried out by Albert Mehrabian. His work is misrepresented as stating that 7% of what you say is important 38% of the tone of your voice is important and 55% of your body language communicates what is important. Trainers and communicators have been led astray with this fact. It refers specifically to a combination of the three elements accounting for our liking of a person who is communicating a message their feelings. That's it. It has no bearing on any other type of communication.

2) Folded arms means defensiveness. Really? So when I'm walking around a room and I'm listening to a discussion that's happening within a group and (importantly) I'm not taking part, I'm being defensive about it? Uh uh. No. That's wrong. The key to understanding what the folded arms have to be met in context. Basics of this rest in the fact that if you're having a difficult conversation with someone and they cross their arms at some point during the conversation it's likely you've said something to put them on the back foot.

3) If your eyes look left you're lying, if they look right you're being truthful, if you look to the upper right you're making things up, if you're looking to the upper left you're accessing memory. Jeez Louise. If you believe any of that, you're being a mug and you deserve to be taken advantage of. Here's a challenge to identify if it's a science. Find the original piece of work this is based on or subsequent work that claims to validate these findings. I've looked. I've found nothing. I've found a lot of books claiming to teach you the success to body language. That's not science.

And the science? Well the only person I trust in the field of body language is professor Paul Ekman www.paulekman.com. Why him? Well his work has been ground breaking in helping organisations such as the police force, immigration, national security, and negotiators to understand what signals they should be looking for that can either give them leverage in their situations, or provide them with context that someone may be about to act violently.

As an aside, a programme called 'Lie to Me' was developed based on his work - but don't take the programme as science, it is entertainment after all.

So back to Paul Ekman. His work has identified that universally (although this was recently disputed) there are 6 common facial expressions that we all comprehend - happiness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise and sadness. It's fair to say in Western society these expressions can be readily understood. How did he do this? He took images of a complete range of facial expressions and showed them to a tribal people who had little contact with the Western world. He found that with this tribe those 6 expressions were readily identified correctly each and every time over successive trials. We can (and appropriately) extrapolate that this is therefore true across all modern cultures.

If you want anecdotal evidence - look at how young children react to adults. Those basic expressions elicit from children predictable responses. Happiness encourages happiness, anger prompts defense, fear prompts uncertainty, sadness encourages sympathy, disgust provokes curiosity, and surprise elicits either laughter or fear of reaction.

But what about all this stuff about it being the crucial factor in how successful: your presentation will be, if you'll get that job, how much someone is flirting with you, if you'll win that pitch? This is where I start to get really cautious about what 'experts' are saying.

Body language is an important factor in how you are perceived by others, and how you respond to others. Being mindful of what behaviours others are displaying will enable you to either act differently yourself or encourage behaviour from others. But it's only one factor. The preparation you do for an interview (for example), the research you've done, the way you answer questions, the rapport you build, your delivery of message, all these will be equally important in your success of your interview. All these factors need to be in 'congruence' or aligned in order for success to be given its best shot. None individually or collectively will guarantee success.

So where does this leave the topic of body language? My insight here is this. Be mindful of your body language, and others body language. It will often give you a clue about what the other person is likely to either feel or think. Whatever you think you have observed, always follow up with a confirmation or question about that observation. E.G. "Bob, the way you fold your arms when delivering your presentation gives the impression that you're portraying an image of being in control. Are you anxious about the topic or the presentation in some way?" or "Bob, I've been observing for a while that you've not participated in this conversation and you seem to be quiet. Do you have something you want to add to this?"

The numerous websites making claims about what body language 'really' means aren't lying to you. They're just giving you a very biased, one sided view of the world. They're not telling you to contextualise everything you are observing. As a psychologist that's what helps me to understand pretty accurately what I'm observing.

Having the right conversation

In recent weeks I've been training and advising about using coaching as a format to develop staff for first time line managers. I mean line managers should be doing this anyway and that's why it's important to stress that coaching is a key technique in their bag of tricks that they should be able to do - Well.

But why is this the case? Why do managers need to bother doing this kind of activity to develop their staff? Why not leave it to the L&Der in the business/organisation to take care of it through training or other initiatives? Because the line manager is nearly always the first port of call for any questions or issues a direct report has. As such, the responsibility of being a line manager means there's many things to take into account and be mindful of. The best phrase for being a line manager I have heard is they carry the responsibility of pastoral care for their direct reports. I think that captures the whole thing of being a line manager really nicely.

I've mentioned this in previous posts that giving feedback is a key part of being a line manager. I've not yet written about why coaching is equally important. So here it is. In a recent CIPD learning and talent development survey, coaching still comes out as the top activity line managers can and should do to develop, motivate and engage their staff. All credit to the survey for highlighting this. Often, it's seen as the responsibility of someone else in the organisation to make this happen - typically the L&Der. But the L&Der's roles is to to just facilitate and enable the L&D to happen, either through interventions they have prescribed as approrpiate, or by involving leaders across the business to deliver tailored interventions.

Let's first just be clear about what coaching is and what it can help with. Coaching is a methodology to help a member of staff arrive at their own conclusions. I hate sentences like that. They seem like they're fluffy when they're not. Let's break it down using a model - GROW.

Goal - the first place to start in a coaching conversation is to understand what the coachee wants to get from a coaching conversation/session/relationship. This should be a searching conversation where the coach spends time asking questions about motivations, aims, and understanding what to focus on.

Reality - this is by no means the next step in the process, but it does help to understand other factors to bear in mind. Has the coachee considered the various implications of what they want to achieve? Do they have a plan for achieving their goal? Are they being realistic about achieving their goal and about learning how to achieve their goal?

Options - again, not linear but to be considered. In achieving the goal, what are the various options available to the coachee? Have they looked into various options or are they focusing on once path only? Why have they either chosen path (a) or not considered options (b) (c) and (d)? Do they know what is required of them to achieve their goal? Will they need to engage in other activities in order to achieve their goal?

Will - not necessarily last. What is their actual motivation for doing this activity? Have they thought things through with enough consideration that they can make a decision about what they want to do next? What support do they need? Who will be their 'go to' people to help maintain their motivation? Have they considered implications - financially, family, friends, work?

Those are brief paragraphs to provide an overview of how to have the right conversation. When line managers get this right, staff feel valued because they're being given a chance to talk, be heard, and be supported. They'll increase their discretionary effort they choose to exercise because they attach value to the organisation courtesy of the efforts of the manager. They'll talk openly and positively about their organisation in differing ways to people they have regular contact with and contacts they make in their network. They'll feel like they're being developed by virtue of the time and effort you are giving them for their personal and professional development.

Do we still need traditional CVs?

Hi all, it's been a long while since I last blogged. Mostly to do with lack of time. Time off here, looking after kids there, getting courses delivered. You know, life. I am tweeting a lot though - A LOT!

Anyhow, this week I went to the L&D HRD exhibition hosted by the CIPD. By Lord, we do like our acronyms don't we. It was a good day of conferences, seminars, topic tasters and learning arena sessions. I appreciated some presentations more than others, and that's partly because I think I'm a bit of a know it all. Partly because I'm quite harsh on presenters. Partly because the content wasn't anything new. All that aside, I did come away with a lot of food for thought.

One of these is about the use of the traditional CV. In an age when social media and social networking sites are central to how you live your life, the question has to be asked - do we still need traditional CVs? Well let's first discuss the role of a traditional CV. Your CV should give an immediate insight into your key skills, abilities and experience. That's always been the tradition. And, you know, include things like: education, qualifications, opening statement, personal details. Sure, fine, great. I've said this in a previous post (http://pabial.blogspot.com/2009/12/those-damned-cvs.html) - this tells the potential employer nothing about you as an individual and how you may approach work, your attitude, and your probable fit to the company/organisation you're about to be part of.

Interviews/assessment centres/recruitment practices are designed to evaluate those things. But that's once they've got passed the CV stage when you're already committing time and resource to evaluate these candidates further. Wouldn't it be great to have a pool of 12 potentially great candidates all bringing something to the party none of the other offers, and have a hard discussion choosing who you think is the best of the best bunch?

This is where I think social media plays a part. We're in a world now where every employer is concerned about making the right choice, the first time. We want our new starters to fly through their probation, get confirmed in post, and ultimately make us money while enjoying the work they do.

At the HRD conference, one of the presentations was about how to get the best out of Generation Y - anyone born roughly after 1980. This generation use technology as part of their daily lives, not thinking about what life might be without them, or even being able to comment on how life used to be without them. The presenter (I forget his name, very bad of me, he runs Unlimited Potential), gave a story where the punchline was from a daughter to her father: "Dad, if I gave a presentation about how to use a fridge, would you want to hear about it?" in response to why she didn't watch her father deliver a presentation on how to use the internet. Gen Y see modern technology as being a fridge - it's there, it exists, you use it for what you need and when you're done you move onto the next thing.

So why's that important? Because more and more people are using social media and social networking sites to interact and learn about the world on a daily basis:

- In October 2009 LinkedIn had 50million users worldwide http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/10/14/linkedin-50-million-professionals-worldwide/

- Facebook currently has 400million active users http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

- Twitter currently has 21.2million unique visitors http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/?metric=uv

(above sites all courtesy of http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com/)

These are staggering figures. Amazingly staggering. And that's not a complete picture of the social media space, just a choice of three. What does that tell us? Well here's some of the things I think are important from just the figures.

It's accepted now that you can be (and most likely will be) looked up through one of these social networking sites. That means in effect your potential employer has complete sight of what you are likely to bring to their organisation in terms of your: attitude, work ethic, potential fit, and a host of other traits not immediately obvious from your traditional CV.

What does that mean for candidates? They have to either be very deliberate about how they use these social networking sites, or be open to scrutiny from potential employers. As an example, I'm serious about L&D. It's my life and I love it. However, my twitter feed may not show that as I tend to rant a lot on there, or tweet about work/office/company related things, but not a lot about my passion for L&D. My LinkedIn profile doesn't say a lot about my work experience, my education or the skills/knowledge/abilities I have as an L&D professional. My blog, is the only place someone would know I care about L&D. Am I ok with that? Yes, I am. Only because I've made a very determined choice that I won't be deliberate about how I'm potentially perceived by future employers. There's a host of people who will violently disagree with my approach and will recommend that if you want to be serious about your job, future jobs, and your career, then your online presence has to reflect what you want to be.

But what about how employers should use social media to find out about you? I mean, they have to be open, fair, consistent in their approach and not allow prejudices or biases to influence their potential hiring decisions. Well this is a whole other can of worms. My initial thoughts on this centre on the following.

1) If a company wants to find out about you, they have to be open about that from the outset on their job advert/site/promotion. You as a candidate then have the option to either allow that to happen or not.

2) The company has to be explicitly clear about the criteria they have for the job role, and therefore what they are looking to find out about you from the sites you have a profile on.

3) If they choose not to bring you in for interview, there must be a direct piece of feedback that relates to the above, and informs the candidate why they weren't chosen.

4) Once you've been chosen to be brought in to interview, your use of social media has to be part of the equation as that's part of how you were selected in the first place.

There's a lot to now consider in the role of recruitment. Recruitment agencies need to be clear about how to advise candidates how they use social media. Employers need to be clear about what's acceptable and why they may want to search social networking sites. Candidates need to be clear about the information they make available to anyone with internet access. Eventually this will lead to further guidance from governing bodies such as the CIPD, ACAS, legislation and employment law professionals. But my impression is that's a long way off.

So is there a need for traditional CVs? Yes. Are they the be all and end all of what an employer will use to select you for future roles? No. How do you then decide to act on any of this for the future? Talk to someone who is best placed to advise about any of this. In this day and age, recruitment specialists are not the purveyors of all recruitment best practice. Look around you, you'll be surrounded by people who use social media in one form or another. They're the ones to seek input from and in some instances, advice from.