There’s been change in your organization that has meant annoyance and complication for you. Trooper that you are, you’ve been putting out your usual exceptional work. It’s just that now they all seem to hate it. Take the latest project. You worked diligently on your part of it and were in overdrive getting it done, with all the new responsibilities and changes you have had to cope with at the same time. When the team gets together for the progress meeting in the makeshift boardroom late in the afternoon and you present your stuff, people are wincing and grimacing, frowning, slumping over and sharply exhaling, and rubbing their faces. Someone even does a facepalm and groans. This is so painful for them, you think. They obviously all hate my work.
FEELING LIKE YOUR WORK isn’t appreciated or hitting the mark, particularly when you are giving it 110 percent, may make you angry or depressed and can certainly be a knock against your confidence and self-esteem. But is it true that your colleagues hate the work you are producing? SCAN this situation. Let’s suspend judgment and be more descriptive of what is going on.
Hate is a strong feeling of extreme emotional dislike and may be accompanied by a collection of body language key signals indicating anger, disgust and hostility, as you’ve seen in other chapters. For anger: vertical lines between the brows, brows drawn together, tense lower lid, tight and narrow lips, glaring eyes, dilated nostrils, jutting lower jaw, the head tipping down to protect the neck with the chin. All three facial areas must be involved in the gesture. For disgust: wrinkled nose, downturning mouth, tense lower lip. And for hostility: the energetic display of some or all of the indicators for anger and disgust, along with a readiness for physical aggression. This could be clenched fists, raised voice with downward inflection, feet stamping to stamp out the object of hostility or the torso turning away from the object of hostility, looking to avoid the hated thing.
Your coworkers are frowning, certainly one of the signs of anger and disgust; however, as we have noted previously, knitted eyebrows that make up a frown on their own do not necessarily equal anger. If the frown combines with wincing and grimacing—wrinkled nose, eyes squeezed shut, mouth twisted—these body language signals are associated with pain, either physical or psychological.
Add to that the slumping over and the sharp exhaling, which suggests that the wind is getting knocked out of their sails and they are experiencing an exasperated, sinking feeling. Slumping over and letting the air out of the lungs shows they are deflating, and submissive to power or pain, as opposed to energetically pushing back against it in anger or hostility. Let’s not forget the groan either—an expression of or reaction to pain. Alongside the slumping and exhaling, they are rubbing their faces, a self-soothing gesture. The facepalm, also a blocking gesture, suggests hiding, maybe in fear or shame.
So far, although you may be right on the money that your colleagues are experiencing a strong emotion, hate does not fit the description. Though a couple of the signs may be associated with anger, there are not enough accompanying signs to suggest it fully, and there are no energized postures of aggression or fight, usually associated with anger or hate.
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
A Pictograph Says a Thousand Words
In 2015, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, Casper Grathwohl, described emoji, the company’s Word of the Year, as an increasingly rich form of communication that crosses language barriers. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”1 An emoji, the small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication, and its precursor, the emoticon, both function within text-based communication along the same lines as nonverbal cues in face-to-face communication. Now in any social media situation, we can qualify the meaning of our text or indeed replace the words with graphics that show a picture summing up how we are feeling. But how well do they really function to show the feelings we want to communicate? Are these cool little pictures really getting across what we think they are?
Studies such as that by Hannah Miller and colleagues from the University of Minnesota
find there are plenty of ways to misinterpret emojis, with their increasingly nuanced
graphics. One of her main findings was that since emojis render differently on different
platforms, there can be vastly different interpretations of the same emoji. She notes
that Emojipedia, a website serving as an encyclopedia for emojis, lists seventeen
such platforms, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and LG, which means there
may be at least seventeen different renderings for a given Unicode emoji character.2 Miller concludes that emoji usage between different platforms can create an environment
ripe for misconstrued communication. Furthermore, the research found that even when
used on the same platform, the same emojis were interpreted by users completely differently. One example she
cites is the Apple emoji for “grinning face with smiling eyes,” where some people
surveyed found the emoji to show positive emotion, while others thought it was more
negative. So the digital equivalent of nonverbal communication may be just as likely
to give us the wrong impression as an in-person interaction. Being mindful and using
critical thinking is the key to getting it right when interpreting words and emotions
expressed via emojis! 
Well, it’s certainly something, this reaction to your work. Is it you? Is it them? Is it you and them? Let’s look at the context to shed some light on this. You are meeting with the team members, each of whom is working on different aspects of the project, so you will have shared goals and objectives. However, any group ties you may have shared previously have been transplanted into a new dynamic environment, potentially against an overwhelming backdrop of change, and you are all experiencing something like a twister effect, where things are not how they were before, where your entire team is now trying to make sense of how any of your work is going to fit in with the new standards and direction. In other words, you’re not in Kansas anymore.
A new working order has every chance of causing pain and confusion as people attempt to navigate the new system and potentially repurpose themselves within it. Most organizations will experience change multiple times, needing to innovate and adapt to realities that are constantly evolving and developing as society changes at an ever-increasing rate. The stress and uncertainty that accompany organizational change are well documented, and one thing we can count on is that organizational change can be difficult, causing daily negative feelings for many employees.3
Ask what else is going on. Our description here kicks off with how you feel about the organizational change. You are annoyed and confused, and furthermore you feel you’ve had to work extra hard through the difficult times. Being on a team or in a department or a silo with others with whom you have worked harmoniously before may not be enough to keep you working harmoniously after a big change, what with a new regime and new rules, systems, managers and staff and with that, new pressures. But you feel you’ve been a trooper, which suggests you feel solidarity with the team.
Chances are you are not the only one with these feelings. But how much are you wearing your annoyance like a scratchy shirt, looking uncomfortable and irritated, sighing, rubbing your face and burying your face in your hands? Are others in the group simply mirroring your body language? Do they in fact feel the same as you? And lastly, are you operating in a makeshift room at the end of the day? A cramped, physically uncomfortable environment after a long hard day may be the final straw that causes everybody, including you, to become and to therefore look exasperated and beaten down.
So the new judgment is that your coworkers do not hate your work per se but, like you, are feeling exasperated and annoyed. You may all be mirroring each other’s body language, which speaks volumes about the pain and hardship you and they are experiencing as your organization transitions. How can you test to know for sure, though, to then try to improve the situation, not just for you but for your coworkers as well?
There is no way of presenting your work outside of the change that is currently going on. However, you could try to present your next lot of work in a different environment, and at a different time of day, to see how people respond. Make sure your body language is upbeat and optimistic. You cannot control the macro-environment, or in other words, the change in the organization. But you might be able to control something of the micro-environment—for example, the room you are presenting in, the time you are presenting and your overall body language. If you get the same negative results at that point, ask your coworkers to pinpoint the elements of your presentation that are causing them distress. If after all of that they are still doing the same thing, it may well be that your behavior itself is overbearing, too much for your coworkers to take given the changing landscape, and perhaps you can attempt to transition yourself into an area of the newly realized organization that may be better suited to your strengths.
QUICK SCAN
S: Although your coworkers are showing strong signs of something negative, you need to suspend judgment, particularly of a strong emotion like hate, and evaluate all the signals.
C: Organizational change can easily create a tense and fractured working context for everybody.
A: Are you alone in experiencing the pain of the organizational change? Ask: Is it you? Is it them? Is it you and them?
N: If you make the new judgment that your body language may be influencing others, that they may be mirroring you, then simply change your behavior and see if others change theirs with you.