This Meeting Is a Waste of Time
You have been asked to get your team together to brainstorm strategies, innovations and solutions to certain challenges. You bring in the group, the pastries and the coffee and ramp up for an exciting session. Some people are naturally more vocal than others, and conversations are taking off. However, you are very keen to hear from everybody, so you are trying to keep the floor open for all. Someone is looking as if they want to chime in, like they have something important to say. You see their eyebrows repeatedly flashing up, their mouth opening, and they sit up straighter and lean in. But when you offer them space to speak, they sit back, lower their eyebrows, drop their gaze and say, “No, I don’t have anything to add.” This makes you feel insecure about the group dynamic, the direction the conversations have been going, and instead of just ignoring the quiet one, you become consumed with what they are thinking and become perplexed about what they aren’t saying that clearly they would like to say. You become certain that others in the meeting are not getting value from your facilitation. The atmosphere of the whole group feels to you like it is turning sour. That’s it, it’s doomed! They all think this meeting is a total waste of time.
SURELY MANY OF US HAVE BEEN in meetings that prove to be a complete waste of time. But are you correct that everyone is feeling your meeting is a waste of time? Are you correct that the meeting is doomed? Let’s SCAN the situation, suspend judgment that it’s a disaster, and be more descriptive of what you are reading from that one individual who is sparking your fear.
Key signals give you the impression this person wants to speak—to bring in the power of their voice: Their eyebrows flash up, their mouth opens, they sit up straight and lean in. The eyebrow flash can mean a variety of things, depending on context. German ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt researched the eyebrow flash extensively throughout different cultures, and his and other research indicate it is accepted in many cultures (but not all) as a way to recognize and greet someone, a signal we share with other primates.1 In our scenario, the eyebrow raise draws your attention, and it is accompanied by a forward lean and an open mouth. These signs together can look like regulatory gestures—that is, gestures showing that the person is listening, or encouraging the other person to keep speaking, or in your case, signaling that they would like to take a turn speaking. A gaping mouth (so long as it is not a yawn) could be a regulatory gesture indicating they want to jump into the conversation.
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
Yawning Means You Are Tired
Yawning is typically thought of as an indicator of fatigue, but in reality the causes of yawning remain a mystery even after continued scientific scrutiny of yawning. One theory is that yawning brings more oxygen to the lungs, but this has largely been discredited after observations of fetal yawning (there’s no oxygen in the womb). Another mystery of yawning is its contagiousness. Studies have shown that yawning can trigger a contagious response in up to 60 percent of people who are exposed. It even affects dogs!2 Some scientists propose that contagious yawning may have helped our ancestors coordinate times of activity and rest. Another recent experiment suggests yawning may be an attempt to cool down the brain.
However, when you invite this person to speak, they lean back, drop their eyebrows, lower their gaze and verbally let you know they will not be adding their two cents right now. What else do those body language signs communicate? Looking down and lowering their eyebrows could signal they are concealing something or disapprove of something; both keeping the eyebrows lowered for a long time and lowering their gaze may also show that they feel insecure. Additionally, lowering the gaze could signal guilt or submission to power. All in all, you are getting mixed messages or an incongruity in their nonverbal messages. The person looks like they need to speak but then say they don’t. Is it you, or them, or you and them?
Rules and Regulations
In this book, the term regulators describes a collection of nonverbal expressions and gestures that in live settings help us control, cue and understand conversations better. We all use regulators, in every country and culture, but there are certainly variations in use depending on the geographical and cultural context. Regulators include many aspects of body language, such as eye contact, touch, hand gestures, head nods or head shakes, facial expressions and vocal cues.
Regulators communicate many things to us during conversation: that we should keep talking, stop talking so someone else can speak, speed up, slow down, change the subject or end the conversation, and even that we are not listening and we’re out of there! More symbolic regulators are a result of cultural or social norms, and again the interpretation of these largely depends on context. For example, a badge of office that someone wears in one country may nonverbally indicate to people how to behave in that person’s presence, perhaps a sign not to speak unless asked or allowed. An action that may seem innocuous to some, like handing someone who is crying a box of tissues, in some contexts could be a strong signal or warning that it is time they stop crying, or alternatively in another context, an invitation to let emotions fly.
Looking at the context, you invited this group of individuals to join you in your brainstorming session, a creative endeavor, and you do not know what the end product is going to be. Though cognitively you know your process and may feel confident and excited, unconsciously, you’re very much on the lookout for problems. You are in uncharted territory, after all, uncertain of what is going to happen. And stress could be adding to the underlying feeling of uncertainty, as you likely need to produce something of value from this session. Other people and the organization are likely counting on you. You are under pressure, though you may not feel or be aware of it. Just because we don’t know what our biases are doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In the spirit of conducting a useful facilitation, you may be overlooking or overriding the negative backdrop of anxiety, stress and uncertainty to achieve your goal. And though the majority of the group is creating a positive atmosphere through supportive signals, you cannot stop your primitive brain from focusing outside of that majority and on the one person giving off confusing and therefore negative signals.
By prioritizing that negative data point of one, ask what else is happening. You are getting rattled and confused and creating a theory of mind about the entire group. The confusing signals are moving you to default to negatives—when the primitive brain lacks information, it defaults to negatives, an evolutionary survival mechanism. In this situation we could also call this a “squeaky wheel” bias. Your focus goes to that one person not joining in. The majority are complying with your situation, but a minority is not, and so you make rules about the entire event around their activities. Ask yourself, is this really fair?
As the other members of the meeting seem to be happy, interested and contributing, it’s fair that you can form a new judgment that the meeting is going well and not a waste of time. To test this, simply check in with the majority of the group—do they look interested, energized, confident and motivated? If so, then let them carry on riding the wave of creativity, and something of value will come out of the session. If the person making the confusing signals is an equal member of the group and not the person who ultimately wields power over your group or the organization as a whole, then as the group facilitator, you need to serve the needs of the group and stay on course to achieve the desired outcomes for that session. There is every possibility that this person’s thinking aligns with the group and they are eager to pitch in, but the ideas keep coming out from others too thick and fast for them to catch up, and this in turn could be causing them to feel insecure about not contributing enough or fast enough. Maybe they feel there is a risk. Find a less socially risky place for them to contribute. You can get to the root of their behavior offline from the group.
Emojis as Our Digital Regulators?
When we are in conversations that lack regulators—nonverbal cues that help the flow of conversation—we sure can tell the difference in how those conversations play out. Think about being on a conference call. Often we are speaking to many people in different environments, and we cannot see or often hear them properly to be able to take their cues of when it is our turn to talk, or not, or to whom. We lose those helpful cues that also show how people rank, and we may easily talk right over the person with the power. Surely we’ve all been in a phone meeting with someone who just will not stop talking and we can’t get a word in, or with a person who keeps interrupting, or with a person who pauses awkwardly and we are never sure if they are finished speaking. And some people do not talk at all, often because they lack information about what others on the call are feeling, or who they are within the context. So long as we pay attention to them, regulators helpfully indicate to us the time to be active and the time to be passive while in conversation. A certain balance between the roles of the speaker and listener makes for a healthy and often useful conversation, one with good rapport.
How do regulators translate into the digital world? With e-mail, like its predecessor, snail mail—both within the domain of the written letter—punctuation serves as a regulator for letting the reader know the beginning, middle and end of our thoughts, as well as what we want to emphasize or question, and to what degree. With both types of mail we control when we are finished the message, and then it leaves us to travel geographically or digitally to the receiver. And though all written letters are subject to misinterpretation, still we have at our disposal the tool of punctuation and control over the timing of send and deliver as regulators of a sort.
Text chat becomes a little more tricky, as messages can quickly pile up on top of each other and it can be difficult to correctly follow the thread of the conversation. It is easy to muddle up the sequence of thoughts as texts pop up fast and furious, and we respond to one idea as the next one is already arriving. Punctuation is not as easy to use as a regulator in the quick-and-dirty world of texting. Fortunately, people can create clear nonverbal indicators with emojis, using them to signal the end of a unit of meaning and how they mean it to be received. We can end a unit of meaning by inserting an icon, such as a smiley face or a pile of rainbow poop, to finally say, Here is the feeling that underlines the text; there you go. In this respect, emojis and emoticons can be considered the regulators of computer communication.
However, studies on emoticon and emoji use reveal, perhaps unsurprisingly, that just as our facial cues or expressions may vary in usage and meaning from culture to culture, so too do our text-based and pictorial representations of these emotions.3 To maximize our clarity of message in our online world, we need to consider the cultural background of who we are communicating with, just as we would in person, in order to communicate effectively with emoticons or emojis. We need to bear in mind that the way we type an emoticon or which emoji we choose will not always mean to all people what it does to us and our community.4
QUICK SCAN
S: Imagine you were teaching someone else about reading body language and the SCAN system for thinking about the meanings of body language and behavior. How would you help them understand the importance of suspending judgment? How might you explain to them the use of regulators in triggering a judgment about how another wants to join a conversation or control it?
C: What, from watching people’s body language, do you now understand about the importance of context when it comes to knowing what people are really thinking? How might someone’s culture control the context that their regulators should be viewed in?
A: Ask yourself how your online conversations with others might get compromised in meaning. How might you help someone understand the importance of nonverbal communication by explaining what nonverbal meaning can get left out online?
N: What advantage would someone get from your teaching them your new understanding of body language so far? What new ideas do you think you have gained so far that you think would benefit others?