One of many managers at your organization, you walk into a meeting with a manager of a different department who is of equal status to you. Your departments are totally separate and run completely differently, but because of changes in the business, you now have to meet for the first time and plan how your departments will work together. You go to their work area, and from the moment they beckon you to sit down on the comfy sofa opposite them, you get the impression that this working relationship will be anything but comfy. You can’t tell if their face is in a smile or a grimace, but they are certainly looking down at you, with their chin sticking up, and there is an air of arrogance about them. You hand up to them the hard-copy of your plan; they frown down at it and at you and jab their finger at proposals written on the paper as they rattle off the associated challenges. You get the overwhelming feeling that this working relationship is going to be tough going, and that you and they are never going to see eye to eye.
GETTING OFF ON THE RIGHT FOOT with a colleague is not always easy. Even before you get going on the real work, you may first need to work at negotiating around some big egos, which can translate into territorial protection and aggressive, arrogant and undermining behaviors. But does this really mean you will you never see eye to eye? Let’s SCAN this situation, suspend judgment and be more descriptive of what is going on.
Let’s review the key signals giving you the feeling this relationship is doomed: The other manager’s reaction to you is at first ambiguous in that you cannot tell whether they are grimacing or smiling when you meet; then they respond to your work with arrogance and aggression, chin up, looking down at you, frowning and jabbing their finger at your work. Not a great start to a harmonious working relationship, for sure.
First off, are they smiling or grimacing? As you read elsewhere in this book, there are many types of smiles. There is the Duchenne smile of genuine pleasure, where the corners of the mouth rise up, as do the cheeks, thus forming crow’s feet at the outside of the eyes. There are also fake or social smiles—for example, what is dubbed the Botox smile, where the eyes don’t smile but the mouth does. This smile is common with people who feel they have to smile to fulfill the social norm, but they themselves are not feeling the pleasure of the situation. This type of smile looks forced, insincere or downright painful, closer to the look of a grimace, as in our scenario. In this case, the other manager may have been trying to look and act welcoming to you, and the strange forced grimace may be displaying that there are problems for them around that. Studies have shown that people will often try to smile even when they are in clinically painful situations, and they may attempt to smile more the better they know the person administering that painful procedure. Smiling through pain may be our instinctual attempt to strengthen social bonds and so limit the painful activity.1
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
A Nod Always Means Yes
It is very important for us, as social animals, to feel accepted by the group and also to accept others, to hold our groups together. While head nodding can show encouragement to others and indicate agreement, it can also be a signal of appeasement—placating someone—without necessarily agreeing with them. Head nodding is also quite often the result of isopraxism, the natural mirroring of another’s behavior. In a group setting, it is sometimes both contagious and unconscious. Often those at the top of the social hierarchy can experience a room full of people nodding their heads at their idea and assume everyone agrees with them, only to discover later that no one accepted the idea or even understood it. And a completely still head can mean “We don’t get it,” “We don’t accept it,” “We don’t agree” or “We don’t like it” just as much as does shaking the head from side to side.
Back to our scenario, in which the other manager quickly displays what appears to be negative body language: Chin pointing up here may suggest defiance and can certainly look threatening. When the chin is raised slightly, it shows off the carotid artery in the throat; as well as appearing taunting to the other person, it looks arrogant, as the raised chin will often be accompanied by looking down the nose. Furthermore, a more prominent chin display can often be associated with a physically more pronounced jaw, a trait that can arise in anyone when levels of testosterone are increased over a long period. The hormone testosterone causes the jaw and eyebrow ridges to become more prominent. Furthermore, higher testosterone is associated with higher risk-taking. Human beings have evolved to understand this on a primal level; it is embedded in many cultures that when we see the display of a raised or jutted chin, we should beware. Even if testosterone levels are not abundant, our response to this physical feature is ingrained, and so we would respond to body language that aggressively shows off that feature with concern. In our scenario, sensing the aggression of the other manager may make you feel the need to steer clear or alternatively to gear yourself up for an altercation.
Also in our scenario, you see them jabbing their finger at your work. Pointing a finger targets people, places, things and even personifications of ideas, beckoning the onlooker to direct their focus in the direction of the object being pointed at. We need only look at representations of finger-pointing in art and culture to see some common targets and underlying meanings. For example, in religiously inspired art, there are plenty of examples of the subject pointing upward toward heaven or a deity. And many countries have used direct finger-pointing in military propaganda posters, the finger targeting and singling out the onlooker to sign up for the military. Pointing directly at someone signals “Hey, you!” or “I want you!” Finger-pointing can also implicate or accuse: “He did it!” Witnesses on the stand in a court of law are told to physically point a finger at the guilty party, certainly an accusatory gesture that may help sway a jury to decide that a defendant is guilty. Pointing the finger can also be seen as holding or using a symbolic weapon, as in our scenario. The manager pointing at the target of your work and then jabbing a finger at it would suggest symbolic violence. They are stabbing at your ideas and potentially would like to end them.
So by being more descriptive, you can confirm your feeling that they are aggressive toward you, potentially feeling threatened and defensive. And you can justify your relatively primal response to their body language as you jump to negative conclusions that you will never get along, never see eye to eye.
However, the context of this meeting is one that is new to you and perhaps to them too. You do not normally work together, your departments are completely different, and you have entered into their department, their territory. First off, this is a tribal situation where both parties might feel some strong and unconscious feelings around each other. There are plenty of large companies that have split up into siloed groups with different values and goals, even beliefs about the world. You may feel you are a member of a tribe that values creativity, and now you find yourself alone in a group that values only metrics and measurables and distrusts anything imaginative. Or maybe you are a blue-collar worker from the shop floor, part of a group that values the team you work with, as well as your life outside the organization, and now you are with white-collar management, whom you believe value their individual progress and 24/7 dedication to the company above all else. Furthermore, our unconscious minds go to work when we walk into unknown territory: We can get a strong feeling of discomfort. We may feel unwelcome, at a disadvantage, even threatened. We often know we are not with our usual tribe because the signals around us are unfamiliar. Different icons on the walls, different clothes, different patterns, rhythms and timings of movement all support the verbal indicators that we are potentially not among friends, and that others have the advantage of being on their familiar home turf. But are these differences really insurmountable?
Ask what else is going on. You went into the other manager’s workspace and were invited to sit on their comfy couch prior to the obvious displays of aggression, which would indicate they initially tried to offer you comfort for the meeting, and with it hospitality and a potentially positive outlook to kick things off. The comfy couch puts you physically lower than them—they are not on the couch; they are sitting in a chair opposite you looking down at you. You are looking up at them, and so they instantly have a height advantage and physically dominate you. From your point of view, they are looking down at you and will appear dominant. And if they are slightly raising their chin, this will likely look like a bigger gesture from where you are sitting. The height advantage they have may be feeding into their feelings of dominance and superiority as well, exacerbating the imbalance of power on both sides. Hence it is potentially your orientation to them in the space (opposite and below) that may trigger strong judgments about them that they are arrogant and antagonistic.
Importantly, they do not direct their aggression at you, but instead at the work you hand up to them. And think back to their pained smile: Could this be a social bonding smile around the psychological pain of change? Taking all of this into account, your new judgment could be that they dislike some points in your work or the process but do not dislike or feel aggressive toward you personally. They seem to have been quite specific in targeting the problematic points with the finger jabbing. They are likely wanting to negotiate some of your ideas. Tensions are likely to be running high, what with the future of the organization to some degree depending on your cooperation and getting to useful outcomes in the meeting. The pressure is on. And importantly, you are sitting with a physical disadvantage, being lower than they are, looking up at them, in a territory unfamiliar to you.
How can you test this theory, and retain some hope that you will ultimately see eye to eye? Though there is some risk of moving into their territory or personal space, you may be better off getting up from the couch, finding a chair and sitting at a more complementary angle to them—for instance, a 45-degree angle to where they are sitting and not at an adversarial angle, which sitting opposite can seem like, making a face-off more inevitable. Once you are physically on the same level and not lower and opposite them physically, you can bring your attention to the paper, looking at it from the same point of view as them, and help direct any conflict into the proposals on the paper (i.e., the work), rather than toward each other personally. If there is conflict, you can now physically move it away from issues of personality or tribal allegiances and punch it out on paper. Be prepared to even get nonverbally aggressive yourself with the paper, but not with your colleague. Don’t be shy to scratch out proposals and start again. Find ways of sharing the tools and the space; give the other manager your pen with which to alter text or write suggestions where they see problems in the work. In other words, by mirroring their attitude but keeping the focus on the work and not the personality or potentially antagonistic group they represent for you, you move into an influential state and get into the flow with them. That is the best foundation here for you to be persuasive, moving them to the best results for you, for them and for everyone involved.
THEY DON’T EVER LOOK YOU IN THE EYE
Our friend and colleague EDDY ROBINSON is a noted Anishinaabe artist, musician and speaker who educates non-Indigenous people to seek out a deeper understanding of what it means to be Indigenous as part of a path toward reconciliation. Here’s what he told us about the nature of some North American Indigenous nonverbal behavior and assumptions and historical stereotyping about Indigenous people that stand in the way of better understanding and communication.
If arms are folded they are the chief. Hollywood and corporate America took full advantage to popularize this idea into probably one of the most recognizable Indian stereotypical images of all time. However, this stoic chief pose is totally fictional, even down to the idea of the chief system itself, which is something that was forced on many Indigenous communities in North America. Indigenous leadership of course existed but not necessarily within the notion of one person solely leading the community.
Indigenous people won’t look you in the eye: Wrong again. Indigenous people use eye contact like anyone else. The one difference that may be notable is that whereas a common practice within some non-Indigenous cultures is to look directly at someone and hold their gaze when listening, alternatively in some Indigenous cultures, in respect and attentiveness to the meaning of what another is saying, listening can happen from a holistic place: emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually, and so the listener may not be making long eye contact while listening carefully to someone. This non-eye contact is not an indicator of disrespect or indifference; indeed, it could mean the exact opposite.
However, one could argue there may be some non–eye contact as a direct result of hundreds of years of institutionalism and oppression. There is no denying colonization happened in North America. And so, whether you are Indigenous or not, most times when visiting an Indigenous community for business or pleasure, you may be greeted with a sense of distrust. When visiting an extremely oppressed community, the indicators of distrust may be more obvious to the naked eye.
Dr. Martin Brokenleg, an author and psychologist in the fields of trauma, resilience and Indigenous youth, talks about a process of recognizing trauma within Indigenous youth through an Indigenous lens.2 I believe this viewpoint can be placed over many communities that have been oppressed or have endured colonization to some degree to help understand the nonverbal communication we might experience within them:
Casing—The first level of interaction when engaging with those in Indigenous communities is like any other feeling-out process. Is this person safe? What position of power does this person come from? How are other people interacting with this individual? Crucial nonverbal and verbal data are collected during this stage.
Testing—After the person has been scrutinized, people slowly begin to engage the individual in small increments, but with distrust. The person is tested with conversations intended to trigger anger or other deemed unsafe behaviors. If the person exhibits these, then they will not be trusted.
Predictability—Often the trusting relationship is not entered into until there has been enough truthworthy behavior over time to merit it. Therefore trust may take longer to build than with other groups.
QUICK SCAN
S: You need to try to find a way to make this new working relationship productive, so it is in everyone’s best interest to suspend judgment that that will never happen and look at what pain could be hiding behind the grimace.
C: You are in uncharted territory, an unknown and potentially unfriendly context in a different part of the company with a different way of doing things.
A: The other manager did invite you to be comfy. Ask yourself if they may feel tense about the meeting and the new arrangement. Also, notice the disadvantages of sitting lower down.
N: The new judgment you can make is that there is still hope, with better meeting-room planning, better positioning, better and more friendly body language. It’s likely that neither of you is the problem, so focus on getting the work right together.