'Digital Body Language' with Erica Dhawan

Humans rely on body language to connect and build trust, but with most of our communication happening from behind a screen, traditional body language signals are no longer visible - or are they? Erica Dhawan, the world's leading authority on 21st century Collaboration and Connectional Intelligence, joined the Way Forward webcasts to bring key insights to our PEO audience. 

In her new book,Digital Body Language, she combines cutting edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language across genders, generations, and culture. In real life, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod and make eye contact to show we listen and care.
 
Dhawan investigates a wide array of exchanges-from large conferences and video meetings to daily emails, texts, IMs, and conference calls-and offers insights and solutions to build trust and clarity to anyone in our ever-changing world. Digital Body Language will turn your daily misunderstandings into a set of collectively understood laws that foster connection, no matter the distance.

Transcript

Leon Goren: 0:00

Hi, I'm Leon Goren, president of PEO leadership a eer to peer leadership advisory irm. We're an amazing community f CEOs, presidents and senior xecutives. Ask yourself are you earning as fast as the world is hanging? It's time for Ontario usiness leaders to band ogether for counseling support. t's time for you to tap into he business with some of our eer groups and unlock new ways o grow. I want you to come out f this COVID crisis a better eader and your organization eady for what's next, take the irst step at po dash eadership.com Special thanks to leveland Clinic for helping us or you today's po leadership's ave forward podcast. We're hrilled to have Erica Dhawan ith us today. Erica is the orld's leading authority on the 1st century collaboration and onnectional intelligence. As he founder and CEO of ontention a global rganization. Erica helps ompanies leaders and managers everage collaboration skills to nnovate further and faster ogether. She was named by hinkers 50s as the Oprah of anagement ideas and featured as ne of the top 20 management xperts around the world by lobal gurus. her newest book, hich we're going to talk about oday, digital body language eleased this month and now umber three on the Wall Street ournal decodes the new signals nd cues of effective ollaboration and teamwork in a igital first human workplace. e is also the co author of the est selling book, get big hings done the power of onnectional intelligence named umber one on what corporate merica's reading. Eric is well nown for talks and presentation n stages ranging from the World conomic Forum at Davos, and Ted o companies such as Coca Cola, edEx, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, cid, SAP and Cisco. She writes or the Harvard Business Review orbes Fast Company. She has egrees from Harvard University, IT Sloan and the Wharton chool. And for those of you on inkedIn, you probably have seen ome of our other Erica's haracteristic. She's a antastic dancer. I've seen her ancing in bookstores. And I've lso seen her dancing with their ids. Totally engaging, nspiring. Erica, welcome to our eries to be here. Thank you so uch for having me and welcome veryone. Erica. Great book and asy to read book. I actually oved it. I put it down a couple f days ago is finished. Tell us hat sort of got you going on riting this book. I know it's een a long journey. And as I ead it, I almost like I get to now Erica really well through er entire life.

Unknown: 2:35

I grew up as a shy and introverted kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My parents were Indian immigrants. So at home, we spoke Hindi and Punjabi, which meant at school I had accented English. And I really struggled. I got teased. But one of the things that became my superpower, because I was so shy was deciphering other people's body language, I would watch the popular girls with their heads high, the cool kids slouching during school assemblies. And it really helped me understand that it's not what people say it's how they say it. And then at home, I would watch bollywood movies, and not know exactly what the actors and actresses were saying in Hindi, but I couldn't read the entire storyline, their body language. So fast forward 30 years, I ended up as a communications and collaboration expert for global companies. And in many ways, about five or six years ago, I started hearing the same questions from my clients questions like, why is there so much misunderstanding at work? Or how do we better connect with different ages and working styles? And what I realized was that there was no rulebook for the body of our language in a digital world, just like I was an immigrant to traditional body language as a kid. Today, we are all immigrants to digital body language. And that's why I wrote this book.

Leon Goren: 3:52

That's awesome. So tell us your traditional when I when I picked up the book, I was thinking, Okay, maybe because I'm in COVID, I'm in zoom mode, I was thinking it's digital. It's the whole zoom thing. But it's way bigger than that. It's any type of communication, that whether it's email text, maybe give us some examples, traditional body language, versus the digital body language, so you can frame it for people.

Unknown: 4:17

So digital body language first and foremost, is much more than just how we show up on a video screen. It's about how we make others feel, in a modern marketplace, everything from our punctuation to our response times to how we greet and sign off an email to our virtual video call backgrounds, our signals and cues, whether we know it or not, that either build or erode trust in today's workplace. I'll give you an example. One of my clients sent a message to his boss that said, Do you want to speak Wednesday or Thursday, and his boss responded? Yes. And I like to share that example because in today's world reading messages carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy and in many ways, I often like to say a phone or video Call is worth 1000 emails. I'll give you another example. A chief marketing officer was on a call with her team reviewing a board deck. And she was reviewing slides that her team had worked on for her. And she said something of the legs up, you know, let's iterate on this topic a bit more. She thought she said, let's add two more bullet points. One week later, her team comes back with 10 new slides probably spent 40 hours on those slides, she just wanted two bullet points. Imagine how de motivated her team felt when it whittled down to two bullet points. So digital body language is a critical skill today, if you're a leader, if you are an executive, you need to not only be conscious of the signals you're sending, even if you don't intend to, it's critical to be thinking about the digital body language of your culture, are you creating cultures of clarity and understanding or confusion and passive aggressiveness, and also, digital body language can be an enabler of inclusion, it can actually allow us to be more inclusive than we ever were in the office, I'll never forget pre pandemic, I was on a conference call three of us were remote, and three people were in the office. And it wasn't until the 26th minute of a 30 minute meeting that someone in the office said, Does anyone on the phone have something to share, we have been excluded the entire time. Now I'm seeing you know, many of my executive clients actually run meetings entirely differently. They're actually sending agendas before the meeting. This allows introverts to actually have time to think about the topics before instead of being rushed to speak, they need time to digest and they were already struggling with airtime. They're using the chat tool to avoid turn taking. Again, this allows everyone to have a voice versus typical over talkers in a meeting, I always recommend never starting with who wants to share, actually, you know, guiding everyone to share in the chat. And then maybe calling them people that have different or diverse perspectives is very helpful. And the other thing that's very helpful is even having a meeting notetaker, who's sending a quick email recap of that meeting within 30 minutes. It's like the new virtual handshake and make sure that everyone is truly aligned. And those are the types of examples of what digital body language is it's bringing thoughtfulness back, because our body language hasn't disappeared, it's actually just transformed in a digital world.

Leon Goren: 7:14

It's so true. It's funny, I think about it, often we do 360s, for example, a lot of leaders that participate with us, and one of the learnings I have is every communication that you have with any individual and this was in the traditional mode, right? You have a conversation with them. The question you always ask yourself, at the end of the day, how did I engage or inspire them? When I turn my back and walked away? Did I leave them motivated? I leave them inspired. And it's no different every communication piece, you almost going to be asking yourself the same question. In terms of what this is, yeah,

Unknown: 7:47

I mean, I'll give you an example. You know, imagine a team member who stayed up all night to work on a slide deck for you. And when they saw you in the office, the next morning, they gave it to you they saw the relief in your face the smile, the sense of appreciation visibly through our body language. Now we have to remember that many of those cues are invisible. And if we just respond with a K period, or even a THX period, the THX period is not a thank you. It's like an acknowledgment, you got the email, take the time to value others, show your appreciation, give credit where it's due. And it's not just a trivial thing this can make or break inclusion, satisfaction of employees engagement and it can trickle into lost profits if your team members don't feel valued.

Leon Goren: 8:32

So you got you talk about the Four Laws of digital body language and I thought maybe we could dissect because I know we got a lot of executives and leaders on on the call here today. You got value visibly communicate carefully collaborate confidently and then you got trust totally no trust totally I you and I talked about I think it's almost an output of those three things working together. But let's break it down like value visibly. Let's talk a little bit about that law. And even some ideas around how do we actually make this happen?

Unknown: 9:03

Yeah, well prior to the pandemic many of the ways that we valued others visibly valued our clients and customers valued our employees valued our colleagues, our community members was through body language was through the eye contact the handshake the head nod the team dinner the off site. In today's world, I like to say valuing others visibly is about valuing their time, their inboxes their schedules. You know, think about this moment in time where we are seeing zoom fatigue, email overload. I recently ran a study that showed that the average employee is wasting four hours per week on unclear or poor digital communication. valuing visibly today is about valuing people's time. It's having thought from meeting starting on time ending on time, it's acknowledging individual differences introvert extrovert or those that are savvy and tech those that aren't and making sure you're creating spaces for individuals to share it. And last but not least, Showing radical recognition, giving credit where it's due asking for feedback starting the meeting with everyone sharing what's a win of the week? What's the challenge of the week? One thing that one of my clients does is she in one on one, she asked for bad news, and it's literally on the agenda, I want you to share one piece of bad news that I don't want to hear. It's much harder for those at a junior level to share and bring up red flags versus good things that are happening. And technology can create masks. And so especially when we're running virtual meetings as executives, we need to think less like office hosts where we could read the furrowed brows, or the stroking of a chin, and instead, ask for it think like a TV show hosts, they call on people they bring in individuals and different opinions. Don't assume everyone is ok. actually check in one one client I know, always has a practice at the end. She She says at the end, you know, I want everyone to share based on this meeting, who was doing what by when, and everyone gives the report out imagine how just as effective that is in Garner engagement and also avoiding multitasking?

Leon Goren: 10:59

Yeah, you know, it's funny, a lot of the I look, I hear what you're saying. And a lot of it also is in the traditional space, too. It's just reminding ourselves to actually do it in a digital space, when you got a million other things going through your head is the screen operating as the internet operating. But you know, you mentioned reward recognition. And I know recognition, even in a traditional sense is hard for some of these leaders, right? They forget about this, if they jump right into their meetings, it's not on their agenda. It means a lot. And I think in the digital sense, you definitely don't want to forget that. You want to be able to pull people out recognize them for what they're doing, especially during these times where burnout, people are exhausted.

Unknown: 11:40

That's right, I actually worked with a CEO this last year, who you know, prior to the pandemic used to come into his town halls, he has 1000s of employees, and meet face to face in a big headquarters Hall and, you know, read a script from corporate communications, use his gregarious body language, and it worked well. He excited everyone in the room, he got everyone engaged, and then he would just leave and get back to business. back last March and April, he tried to do that on a zoom call. He tried to read a script. Yeah, you know, and just, you know, you're engaging all of us right now. But he was just lecturing and his employees, they were insulted. They were disengaged, and they didn't feel appreciate it. So we did a whole makeover of his of his town halls. Now what we do is actually, before the meeting, he tapes, a business update a video recording, and he asked his employees to watch it. Then during the town halls, he's flipped the script. And he has an Ask me anything format, where his 1000s of employees can send in questions before can ask him questions in real time, he can't fake a response, he showing his own vulnerability, what he knows what he doesn't know, they celebrate birthdays, they give appreciation awards to employees who have done innovative things within the team during these times. And it's created an entirely different digital culture. And so remembering that what was implicit before in traditional body language now is to be explicit, and digital body language. And even as we go back to hybrid work, this is going to be more important than ever, we were often excluding many people in face to face meetings, introverts that never got time, just share, because we didn't have tools like the chat, so that they could avoid turn taking, we often were biased to who was in the room versus who was coming in on a conference call. So thinking about having a remote Team Hosts, and allied meeting host is actually important for a quality in meetings, and maybe making sure that that remote team host is leading parts of the agenda as well. And simple things like this, I think are going to allow us to drive much more innovation, if we think about digital body language thoughtfully than we even had in the past. That's great.

Leon Goren: 13:52

And thank you for sharing that story. That's, that's an unbelievable, that's a great story. And it's something that we should all consider in town halls. I mean, you can imagine how that would work, turning it into a q&a and interactive with your audience. So that that's fantastic. What about the second one? communicate carefully?

Unknown: 14:09

Yeah. So communicate carefully, is really about creating a culture of unambiguous expectations and norms. People know what to do, why they're doing it when they're doing it. There is a culture where you know, which digital channels you're using for what, not endless reply all emails, not hour long zoom meetings with 30 people that really should be six people in only 25 minutes. You know, we live in a world where this can be exhausting. And many of you in the chat have been sharing some of your pet peeves, and a lot of them really tie into the importance of communicating carefully and you're feeling this. So simple practices I talked about in the book are remembering that all of our digital communication is actually visual. People read emails like they read websites. Did you have a good subject line? Were you to the point did you you know, use bold and underline head setting some norms with your team. I know a client who set email standards you always want to work with requests are being sent. You have a who, what when you don't, you know, you avoid all these niceties, you just get to the point because it's actually valuing people and creating clarity. I have another client who created acronyms with me where that would help create an understanding. So for example, in subject lines, for H men, I need this in four hours to D means I need this in two days, and MTR means no need to respond, which avoids a lot of unneeded communication. And my favorite was RM which meant respond on Monday, especially as a CEO, if you send an email on a Sunday, you could wait you know, and you expect maybe a response on Monday, it actually isn't clear. So take the time to give your team space to think and most importantly, remember that there's high levels of digital groupthink, the speed of communication is often causing us to reward the fastest person to respond, the quickest person who jumps in on a call, and communicating carefully is actually giving that space for team members to think and prioritize thoughtfulness over hastiness.

Leon Goren: 16:05

So let's talk about the mediums in there, because you mentioned a few, mostly, we talked to you about emails, but there's really a few mediums here in terms of how we communicate, there's text, there's emails, there's the zoom call that we're doing right now, when is it appropriate? When do you use? Which one? Yeah, are there any rules that we should be following here?

Unknown: 16:27

There are some rules, and I share them in my book, and I'm going to share them right now as well have some standards. And also caveat in with, there are different norms in different cultures in different industries as well around this there. I know businesses that are tech businesses that are pretty much email free internally and use slack and then only email their clients. There are other companies who are using zoom, especially in financial services, but more so on zoom audio, not as much on zoom video. So again, we're we're seeing an entire range, depending on the industry and the company culture. However, there are some factors that are important. And I think this is a moment to actually set some hybrid collaboration norms around these channels. So one general thing is, when you are deciding which channels to use and how your employees use these channels, not only internally, but with clients and customers, you need to analyze three factors, complexity, urgency and familiarity with the person. So first complexity, is this high complex. Do we need a video call to actually talk this out? Or a thoughtful email with a screenshot of exactly what you need? Or is it low complex a quick I am that's a yes or no. The second is urgency Do you need it in five minutes or five days, channels have different implied urgencies as well. So you don't want to be the serial texter. You know, and having a team member text you back around things that are urgent, when they're not prioritizing the bigger things that are urgent, as well. And so knowing that there may be standards, email may be 24 hours, I am maybe you know, within an hour in business hours, but if you email it in the evening, you'll get it the next day, you know, phone calls out of the blue, maybe normal for urgent things, but you'll schedule them otherwise. These are simple things that actually can avoid a lot of miscommunication I've seen, you know, if you look at digital natives, those that grew up with technology tend to skew younger, to the other end digital adapters, those that I like to call are immigrants to digital body language, they've had to adapt, especially in this last year, you know, a digital native will send a thoughtful email to his or her boss with questions. And the you know, adapter will say, let's get on the phone to discuss and the native will be like, why don't you just answer my email so I can get back to the work and the adapter will be like, why don't you just call me so I can get back to work. And we have to remember that even across generations, there are differences and in preferences and channels. So what is your job as an executive to actually set some standards not focused on your own preference, but on what is best for the task at hand,

Leon Goren: 19:00

is to talk about setting standards. And I know you're working with a lot of organizations, best practice other organizations that are actually setting standards across the board in terms of the entire organization in terms of the communication vehicle they should be using. has it come to that or I just wondering, through this COVID period through the rush on to zoom or Microsoft Teams, it became chaotic, or has people have people actually adjust to this now and people are sort of moving along freely and it seems to gel. You

Unknown: 19:31

know, one of the things I recently published in Harvard Business Review and I shared it in the chat just now is a communication standard. I sat with one company and actually what the standard was. So if you're curious about it, you can check out the chat and see the article. There are some companies doing this because they're realizing that there is a lot of emotional waste happening inside their workplaces. And it's not just a productivity issue. It's a collaboration issue. It's a cross functional innovation. issue and it's causing lost profits, sales teams are wasting time in, you know, email overload instead of really being out there with customers and clients because of a lack of coordination and effective use of each channel. One of my general rules of thumb is, a lot of organizations tend to be adding new collaboration tools. Right now they're trying out Slack, they're adding Microsoft Teams, one of my general rules of thumb is you should never add a new tool unless it replaces another tool. And it has a very specific new purpose. So if you add slack set a rule, we will no longer email about these five topics. And it's only on slack and have some channel advocates in your employee base that are moderating that with the client I worked with, we actually had a hashtag, where if you sent an email about it, people would just respond with the hashtag, you know, we're not responding to this, go go to slack. And we'll respond there. And while that may seem, you know, a little cheeky at the end of the day, it actually does transform and change behavior quickly. And these tools are actually are better, but we have to use them and implement them carefully. And they also have to be modeled at the top. But you know, if you're a leader who doesn't want to engage in these ways, I think there's two things you need to think about. One is what may work for you may not work for your entire employee base. So make sure you have different types of digital mediums. And the more that you can role model, the importance of engaging thoughtfully in different channels, the more others will do the same. And I'll give you an example. I work with an executive at a gaming company. And they use slack as a as a channel. And he talks about how he has two direct reports. One is Allie, and her Slack channel with her team is like beautiful, there's bullet points, there's headings, there's perfect punctuation. And he has an executive feels at home, he knows exactly what's going on with the team. And then he goes to Brad's Slack channel, his other direct report, and so confusing its gifts and means and, you know, emojis. And he has no idea what was going on and is actually quite concerned. But then he realized that the output of both teams was the same. And if he were to make Brad more like Ali, and more like what was his comfort, it would actually cause a, you know, not as effective work product. So part of this is also as an executive, being comfortable being uncomfortable, and not focusing on you know, just the way you like to do things. But really what will serve the best product for your business?

Leon Goren: 22:32

Very true, but and difficult, right? Not as easy and intuitive, especially if you you know, you're running a business and organization. Now you got to think about something else around in terms of how you're communicating on that level. You touched on punctuation just now. And I know in your book, you really get into it. And some of the stuff I'm not even going to talk about. Because it was shot, not talking to me. It's like, Oh, I never knew this. But it's obviously extremely important. And you know, I think there's two sides to it. One is from the leadership perspective, because you're the one with the power, and you're sort of communicating down exclamation marks, 124 12 all mean different things. And then there's the recipient, right. In terms, you talked about MBA ambiguity, like I don't understand what this means. Can you give us a couple examples on both sides, maybe from a leaders perspective, and also from the receiver end to just so people can actually frame this in their mind?

Unknown: 23:24

Yeah. So let's take some practical examples, you know, an executive sending a teammate a question, in an email, why don't you finish this question, Mark, you know, from Jane. That's an actual example that I talked about in the book. And, you know, when you read an email like that, a lot of the ways that you read it are based on two other questions. The first is who has more or less power? And the second is, how much do you trust each other? So you know, if you have high trust with this person, maybe you may read it and think to yourself, oh, yeah, Jane Doe on a plane right now. And she's about to take off. And she just wanted to check, you know, why didn't you finish this just with genuine? Is there something wrong with it? Did we not get the slides from the client? But if you have low trust with Jane, and you get this, it can feel like shouting and passive aggressiveness? Why didn't you finish this with one question mark at the end? Or, you know, God forbid, if there were three question marks and there's low trust, you're going to feel like it's accusatory or passive aggressive. The second is the power dynamic. And, you know, I think if you, you said that over and you had less power dynamic, it could come off very differently or maybe friendly, or even sometimes sarcastic versus if you had a higher power dynamic. The other thing is that different punctuation marks can actually mean different things not only based on trust and power, but also other factors. In fact, let's take one example which is capitalization. So if one study showed that if a man in especially in text writes here we go in like all caps, it can feel more like urgency. If a woman says here we go in all caps and texts, it can feel more like excitement. Another study looked at the period at the end of text messages, while younger individuals that tend to be digital natives think that a period at the end of a text signals passive aggressiveness or frustration, those that are digital adapters that tend to skew older where digital communication is something they had to learn in the workplace themselves, it signals just good grammar and punctuation. So remember that we are in a brave new world, we have to assume good intent, remember that we're going to misinterpret other things and other individuals, and stay in the place of reason don't get emotionally hijacked role model, giving others the benefit of the doubt. And also just simply no one to pick up the phone. You know, picking up the phone is worth 1000 emails.

Leon Goren: 25:58

That's great. So I'm gonna ask you also under the communication, we've been talking really about it internally, right, from a boss to a staff to within an organization. Now, you and I live in a world we're sort of in the professional services industry, right? And we all have customers. Now, let's bring the timing element in here, you get a text from one of your customers, how long do you have to respond?

Unknown: 26:21

So again, I think a lot of it goes back to the power and trust here. And it also goes back to your digital body language style. And don't worry, I have an assessment in the book. So you can actually get your profile of your style and assess your team. Well, so general rule with text is texting should imply urgency, you know, within the hour, or, or within a few hours. Usually people text with that purpose, I recommend it, especially if it's a customer or client try to respond as quickly as possible. Of course, if it's a weekend, and there's high trust, know when not to respond as urgently when you're with your families. But also also know when to switch the medium as well, I have clients who say that sometimes their their customer will text them, but they quickly want to move to email because they want a record of the communication, they're about to send an invoice for her. And so actually knowing when when a customer may actually prefer text, but when it's important for you as a service provider to switch to email. And last but not least, if you're if you're dealing with a serial text, or someone that's abusing text and keeps texting you or or you're in a group chat, no one to sometimes respond and say got it, I'll get back to you Sunday, or got it, let's move to email or just respond by email, this also can help improve the norms within your own culture.

Leon Goren: 27:45

I yeah, and I remember you talking about that in the book. And that really stuck with me, because there are individuals who will text now. And you know, if you're in a leadership position, or customers, everyone's got everyone's mobile number today, it's not like it was 10 years ago where you phoned the office. But the idea of just texting back and saying, you know, what, I'm away from the desk, won't have a chance to respond till Sunday or Monday, or I need a couple of days is a good way to do this. The other thing I learned, and I think Kelly taught me this too quickly on the Apple phone turn off, because I can see when it was actually delivered, turn off the notification.

Unknown: 28:20

It gets nuts, especially in WhatsApp or group exchanges. I definitely recommend that. I think that the other thing that's happened and it's been precipitated in the last 15 months is just our impatience levels, we expect everyone to respond to us instantly. And I think this is a moment, especially as a CEO or an executive, take your power back, like bring sanity and clarity back have some norms around this. You know, maybe you tell your team, if it's really urgent and needed in the hour, you can text me but if not have a clear subject line. And we'll all respond, you know, by the next day. But make sure the subject line is clear on exactly what you need. It will save you time and it will save them time.

Leon Goren: 29:01

Yeah, and I reiterate the role modeling is important, especially everyone watches how you're responding, whether it's a customer, internally, they're watching how you respond to that customer if you're willing to to do in a way that's, you know, reasonable, I'm saying I'll come back to you, then your team, sort of you're building a culture within your own organization by role modeling that,

Unknown: 29:20

yeah, I'll get out I get texts from clients. And then I usually just respond by email sometimes because unless it's really urgent, and usually it's not. I think it's their way and we have good connections and there's difference between sort of a friendly relationship and chit chat versus work. But if it's work, I really try to move it to a recorded structure because you don't you don't want back and forth or deals being discussed in text. Or anything can get screenshotted or forwarded.

Leon Goren: 29:51

I didn't think about that. That's true. That's very true. I'm gonna ask the audience, make sure put your q&a into the questions like please start throwing some questions we're going to get to them. And as you're doing that, Eric, I'm going to come back. So the third law, collaborate confidently. I love that, but maybe explain to everyone what you mean by

Unknown: 30:14

collaborating competently is really about creating a culture that prioritizes thoughtfulness over groupthink, as I shared a bit earlier, it is much more likely, especially in a digital or hybrid workplace to opt in, reward those that are the fastest to respond to an email, the quickest person who jumps in on a zoom call. And that's not getting the best out of your employees, it's actually creating high levels of groupthink. I've been working with boards and actually observing board meetings and seeing very high levels of groupthink, certain people are over talking over others. This is a governance issue, frankly, now, if we don't think about digital body language and set some norms moving forward, especially as we go back to hybrid meetings as well. It A lot of it has to do with really thinking more thoughtfully about informing the right people at the right time not having 30 person meetings, when really six people need to be there. The other individuals just need an email summary, thereby not wasting their time causing them to multitask and be disengaged, versus in optimizing the right people to come together in the right ways. It's also about understanding that it is your job as a leader to effectively set priorities for your team. Remember, they could read their body, your body cues before the furrowed eyebrow, the pursed lips, the lean in when you are excited. Honestly, on a video call, it's much harder to read any of those cues, we're probably only seeing about 5% of traditional body language. And in screen freezes and echo delays, we're not seeing most of it, frankly. So when it comes to this, setting clear priorities, but even hierarchically organizing them, oftentimes team members can just respond to what's at the top of their inbox sets, you know, hierarchical priorities 123. And this will allow your team to really do what matters most. And lastly, pay attention to the details. Remember, if you tell a team member, I need a report by the end of the week, but then you make them rework it for two months, because you didn't really know what you wanted, you just shot off a hasty email. This has an impact on confidence. Or you you say, you know, I need this by tomorrow morning. But it's really not a fire drill. And you're, you know, ending up causing an all nighter for a team member. Again, there are fire drills, but when it's not this will quickly erode trust. So, you know, as we think about this, we have to be much more conscious that what was implicit before has to be explicit now.

Leon Goren: 32:34

That's great. And you know, so if I take those three things, and you've got a great diagram in your book, right, you got the three rings, and you got in that middle? What do we have trust? Totally. And it's every leaders desire, I mean, you want it's all about trust within an organization where there's a traditional means of communication, or through the digital stuff. Those three and you got, the fourth one you got is trust totally, I think about if I do those three things, well, the outcome is trust, we're going to create a trust environment and trust culture.

Unknown: 33:07

That's right, I think value visibly plus communicate carefully. Plus collaborate competently equals trust totally. And I actually within companies, we run this as an assessment where we actually have individuals measure themselves, but also their teams on these three indicators, and give individuals and teams a trust totally score in what is so really interesting is when you look at it by department, and what I often find is you'll see the variances, you'll see team members that are really good at valuing others visibly, but then they're terrible at communicating carefully or they know how to collaborate. But there's no recognition there's no sense of appreciation and and I think it is the power that all three of these combined to build trust is important.

Leon Goren: 33:53

That's great. Before we head into the q&a portion of this webcast, first a brief note about p OE leadership from one of our members, I was made president just before COVID-19 lockdown began Nelson fresco president Mila Canada, we pivoted by compressing our five year online strategy into the last five weeks surprised Don't be Nelson is a member of P OE leadership Canada's premier peer to peer advisory firm p OE leadership helped me develop my ability to lead with speed, we've seen a substantial increase in online sales and meal offices worldwide are following our Canadian example the time to step up and lead is now go to p e o dash leadership.com. Let's go to some of our questions here. We got a question here from Jenny, offend offend area. I hope I pronounced that correctly. What is your advice presenting to board of directors as CEO and speaking on annual general meetings as president?

Unknown: 34:47

Yes. So let's be honest, we are all as executives in the wild wild west of running board meetings and presenting in a digital age and so many of the ways that we were able to build that engagement face to face or pretty much disappeared with the lack of body language. So I have a couple of tips for you when you're presenting in board meetings. The first is, especially if you are a presenter, actually look into the camera. Even though research shows even though you can't see everyone else's body language, they feel a stronger connection to you, we tend to make eye contact about 30 to 60% of the time when we're face to face. So I recommend at least 60% of the time when you're presenting. Of course, when you're not, you want to be reading the cues of others and, and also make sure you're far away enough where people can see your face, but also some of your hand expressions, but not too far, where they you know, can't see your face as well. Even simple things like investing in a good webcam and lighting, again, are not trivial anymore, they signal executive presence. And last but not least, remember that to be a good presenter today, you have to think more like a TV show host than an office board meeting presenter. And that is different. You know, it could mean things like actively engaging your board members to use the chat to share questions with you calling out sending materials really thoughtfully and advanced with three or four questions. And using a virtual whiteboard to have them share some of their comments in a whiteboard in real time to create that discussion where we're not turn taking one person after another person, but really using these tools to actually speed up discussions and empower everyone to speak up at the same time. And you know, another thing that I think is important is in the discussion or portion is to actually call on people you haven't heard from like your job as a CEO, you can actually make sure you're hearing from different voices or say, you know, we're going to have ever made, it'd be great to have everyone share for about two minutes each and have a team member, you know, note taker or manage time. And again, this could feel awkward, but it's actually empowering and thoughtful, and it will allow others to feel more valued and more engaged in the meeting than in the past.

Leon Goren: 37:05

I have a question for you on that as well, just building on it. And your perspective on PowerPoint presentation. So I present to the board, I present strategic stuff, you know, you end up in this is actually just happened yesterday, I realize you're doing a presentation, you're in a small little box, talking about there's no very hard to get any body language from there or by visibility or anything. And it's overwhelming the presentation, our PowerPoints, toast in this type of environment. Like,

Unknown: 37:39

you know, I think that it depends, similar to the town hall story I shared earlier, there could be a lot more thoughtfulness to what happens before the board meeting, what is shared before what is asked to be reviewed, maybe not everyone will review it, but it can, if you start to set that behavior, it can actually change and make board meetings much more thoughtful versus one person lecturing and presenting. The other thing is, there are certain cases where PowerPoints are incredibly important, but you don't want to have tons of text on them. You know, people don't have them printed out, they're just looking at them on the screen and trying to listen to you as well. So knowing when to actually have a screenshare up and when to say okay, in about 10 minutes, I'm going to unshare and then getting you know, we'll get in gallery, gallery view mode and have a true discussion. And also knowing when to have the screen share and when not to is an important thing. And I think as we go back to hybrid meetings, this is going to be really important where we'll have board members in the room and then board members coming in on video screens, and also making sure we're not avoiding bias to those in the room versus those on screens. We even tend to be more biased to listen more deeply to those that we see on video versus those that are off video on on video channels. So making sure that you're creating space for everyone. Using breakout rooms calling on people is actually much more important than it ever was before. Kelly, do you want to share some more questions in the chat? Sure. I actually have one that's in the q&a if that's okay. And it's what are some unconscious mistakes that people make and communicating to others email. Some unconscious mistakes that we make communicating an email lol The first is we rush the email and don't answer the question. You know, like the story I shared you want to speak Wednesday or Thursday and answer with a yes, I find that a lot of people are either reading so fast, and they're just trying to get things done and make mistakes that way or they're reading into one line and they think that someone who wrote perm our last conversation is being passive aggressive when they're just you know, using the language that their boss uses or that they learned in business school. So don't rush and don't read in haste to or ruminate and get emotionally hijacked. The second thing is an email not answering with a clear you know what you need from the other person I have a client where we set a standard where every email has to start with an acronym called wind fee, which means what I need from you, then that simple acronym just gets to the point quickly, and then you can share more color. It avoids all these verbose messages that really get in the way of engagement.

Leon Goren: 40:16

All right, it's from James Macintosh. Seems like bad actors move poor behavior from in person to digital has the pandemic provided some opportunities for organizations with poor norms, rethink and overhaul their practices to drive real improvement? If so, please provide an example.

Unknown: 40:34

I think that what has happened is poor behaviors have become poor, and great behaviors have become better. And there are certain leaders who have taken action to create a reset in their cultures and others that are still struggling with this, were often oblivious to realizing that their team members are not okay. And I'm just kind of ignoring it. Without realizing the impact, it's having to lost profits. So you know, one of the things I really recommend is, at this moment, especially as some organizations or in the next year, you'll be thinking about hybrid, or going back to the office, doing a bit of a digital culture audit right now, starting with asking, and I have these questions in the book, you know, what have been the best experiences you've had, within teams and emails and conference calls and video meetings, and what have been the terrible experiences, what have been poor experiences, and what are what have been the great behaviors and poor behaviors you've seen, and then use that to actually set new standards within your company culture, this is a great time to do it, we're 15 months into this. And when I've done that exercise in leadership workshops I've run, you know, we'll see that many employees feel so much more geographically included, they are breaking silos, they're talking to team members in different locations in ways they never were before because of the power of video call meetings. And then I hear other team members that are more disengaged than ever, because one leader who, you know, is sending really terse, confusing emails and is not really engaged. And that team member may be struggling with kids at home or whatever it may be. And there's not the right communication structure. And so I think that at the end of the day, what is most important right now is to actually stop assuming that people are okay, if you haven't heard from them, ask, get some feedback, do a bit of a digital culture audit, understand how this is affecting employees at different levels and locations. Number two, set some standards not only for Team communication, but cross team communication. Research has shown that strong ties have gotten stronger, but weak ties have gotten weaker, in in, in the pandemic. So you want to be able to master that cross functional collaboration. But you need to create spaces for it. I recommend, you know, regular cross functional gatherings, virtual office hours that allow you to bring different team members and different functions together, or even regular peer to peer networks at different levels that can connect digitally to break down a lot of those traditional silos.

Leon Goren: 43:14

That's great. It's funny, it actually leads in a little bit and you've touched on a bit but the next question asks about the biggest cultural differences right between American, European, Asian South America and you talk about that in your book. And it's, it's an interesting topic to a lot of the leaders that I deal with here in Canada because we run multinational organizations, their fortune 500. And it's ongoing all the time. And it had to be over zoom. They used to get on planes and travel. And I actually believe they're actually going to get on as many planes anymore because the CFOs have cut back on travel expenses, they're not coming back. How do you deal with that? Because someone in South America is very different than someone in Toronto, very different than someone in the even within the US East Coast is very different than the West Coast.

Unknown: 43:59

Now, I am I have a client in the financial services industry. She's an executive, she runs a global steering committee, and she's based in New York. She has a team member in London, a team member in Sydney, Australia and a team member in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And her colleague Javier in Buenos Aires, was not engaging much on the zoom calls. You know, it was usually just a conversation between the three of them, not the four of them. And at first she thought maybe he's multitasking then she thought, you know, maybe he just isn't as interested. And then finally, she said, You know what, maybe I should just ask, and she sent him an eye out. And he finally wrote back he said, I'm having such a hard time translating three different English accents when English is not my native language and American of British and an Australian accent at the same time. And I think that really was an eye opening moment for her she had to check her bias. You know, we are not all the same. And we do have cultural differences. They actually started using closed captioning and meetings and recording calls, which actually does help with global differences, those that can join those that maybe English is not their first language, they always actively use the chat. Now to make sure there's different ways of learning and communicating. And this is especially important those with deep accents that maybe weren't ever getting heard much in phone calls and in person meetings, and actually can shine more through some of these different written communication channels. When it comes to, you know, thinking about these cross cultural differences, I have a lot of best practices, a whole chapter in my book that looks at high context cultures, those that really are very based on implicit, you know, cues and signals versus low context cultures, those that are much more comfortable with direct to the point, language, expect to read my email. And, you know, general rule of thumb, especially Asian countries, Korea, China, Japan, it's very common to the way that cross cultural communication differences were in person. You know, if you ask a Japanese colleague to do something on a zoom call, they may say yes, but yes, may mean, yes, I acknowledge your request, not I will do it in order to save face. But you might want to have that one on one phone call with them. Similarly, in Western culture, you know, it's very normal to just send a peer a work request. But if you do that, in India, which tends to be more hierarchical, depending on the company culture, if you don't loop in the boss, it can actually sometimes insult the boss of that team with that of that team. So again, I think having some standards and actually talking about the differences in the similarities is important. One of my clients in the UK, he would always end his emails with Best regards and use words like, you know, I regret to inform you in his email language. And his Brazilian colleagues thought he was so rude and off putting because he didn't use emojis or exclamation points, which is common for that. So again, we are not all the same, but it's important to recognize it.

Leon Goren: 46:56

You know, in this throughout your whole book, it's the one thing that six know your audience. I mean, in traditional ways, we had to know our audience, when I was addressing a town hall, I'd want to understand what means something to them, what's important to them. Same thing with the digital communication, know your audience, here, we're talking about communication to make sure they understand what's important, what's not important, how it resonates with them.

Unknown: 47:18

Yeah, I actually know a CEO that used to who told me, he said, You know, my meetings used to be, especially the global team would come together on calls. And you know, there was headquarters, people in the room, and then those coming in by phone. And there was such a bias to the headquarters audience, they were heard for, like 80 to 85% of the meeting. And now what he does is he makes sure there's equal voices from every country on the call. They hear just as much from the Amsterdam team and the, you know, the loggos office as they do the New York office. And this really creates much more inclusion and also cross global cross team sharing in a way that wasn't happening before.

Leon Goren: 48:00

And it improved performance. Yeah, you everybody's engaged. It's really, really important.

Unknown: 48:06

Exactly, exactly. I think the answer is not just saying that you can't wait to go back to the office because the future of work is here. And and you were, we were all actually quite biased while we were in the office, who was in the room versus who wasn't. So this is an opportunity not to go back to work, but actually transform and improve company cultures again, to drive more profits moving forward.

Leon Goren: 48:29

That's great. So I'm gonna keep pushing. Here's an intro. How do you recover from a communication mishap? And I guess, it depends what that communication mishap is.

Unknown: 48:39

Yeah, I mean, again, I have I have a lot of stories of communication mishaps that I've I have done and experience and others have done from an employee sending a reply all email to an entirely computer company into an entire company server and getting fire to some of you may remember Oscar immunise from United after an employee or passenger got dragged off a plane, some of you may remember the video a few years ago, he responded with like a tone deaf tweet saying, you know, we he didn't apologize. He just said, you know, this person was bumped because over bookings and the United stock price dropped by a billion dollars in value that day, and it didn't drop. After the video went viral, it dropped after the CEO sent a tone deaf tweet. So again, we have to be conscious that our digital body language matters, not only internally, but with our customers. And if you create a mishap, you know, respond quickly. Speed matters more than substance, especially when you're trying to apologize and also no one to just pick up the phone. don't respond by email.

Leon Goren: 49:44

Yeah, I think people forget that. Right. I still, like the last part of the phone section we forgot. Like there's a phone usage, no interpretation necessary when you pick up a phone call and you start speaking to someone

Unknown: 49:58

Yeah. And if you want your team's to better on Understand you tell them what your preferences are, as well.

Leon Goren: 50:04

So I'm also I'm following the chat. Here's the fun part of a meeting. Right, we got Chaco, and with a whole bunch of questions, we got the q&a got, but in the chat we got one talking about. And I know it's an issue. I've heard this in meetings coming how you appear on the zoom or the Microsoft team meetings, casual uncap, you know, versus you typically didn't go to the office that way? Is this thing? Is it going to be a reality going forward that this is what happens? Or do we need to really think about that, or is that the organization's got to put in some policies now going forward around

Unknown: 50:38

what was implicit before has to be explicit. Now, I mean, some of it's obvious, but if you have a big company, and you're seeing employees, wear t shirts on sales meetings, wear a baseball cap, maybe set some standards, this is your opportunity. And if you want everyone wearing collared shirts, just let them know, if you want everyone on video, send it in the meeting agenda, make it a standard, if you don't want to create video call for key maybe hat do what city group did, which was audio only Fridays, like casual Fridays, and and you know, you can be authentic to yourself around this in your company culture. But setting standards is actually effective. Now, it will avoid a lot of wasted time, or, you know, how dare they eat their sandwich during this meeting, and instead just create clarity.

Leon Goren: 51:26

That's great. So I'm gonna ask you, you know, I know we're coming close to two to noon here. You're involved in a lot of different organizations, and you've sort of experienced that whole COVID thing us is a little different than Canada. It's different everywhere in the world. But I'm curious your perspective, whether this hybrid model is really going to work. And the reason I'm asking is because right now the big conversations everywhere is around how to bring people back to the office, right? And whether we're going to bring people back full time, or they're going to bring them in for two or three days. You bring them in for two or three days, and we really are going to be running a hybrid model. Yeah, anyways. It's not easy changes difficult. You're in there with a lot of these larger organizations. What's your thought on? Is it really going to pull through? Am I gonna see something different in three years in terms of how we operate?

Unknown: 52:20

Yeah, you know, I, I'm working with a lot of different executive teams right now around setting hybrid collaboration, norms and standards. And I have to be honest, it's messy. It is not perfect. If you are a leader who says, oh, we'll just be flexible. And we'll keep this going forever. I think, you know, remember, not everyone is the same and don't assume everyone is the same. And and what you really need to ask yourself is not just how will we keep this going? But ask a deeper, smarter question, which is, what are the places in spaces, whether physical, you know, face to face, hybrid or remote, that will allow us to grow our business in scale our business, and really defining the places and spaces where we need to come together, where we need to where hybrid is fine. And where remote is fine is incredibly important. Right? Now, some some organizations I work with are doing the three days a week, but setting standards around, okay, what are those three days and are there setting meetings on those three days for those meaningful touchpoints and what happens in between, to create that clarity and norms so that because certain people actually thrive much more in the office, especially working parents, then those that really loved working from home, and we're much less distracted, or perhaps introverts, and and without some real definitions around this, it can get really messy and really confusing, and it can cause certain people to suffer immensely, and others to thrive. The last thing I'll say there is, it's easy for CEOs to say we're going to be hybrid and flexible. But if someone's individual boss as a FaceTime person, then think about how they'll be impacted in performance reviews. This is going to create a lot of bias. So unless you figured out how to remove the bias in performance management, as you're doing this hybrid thing, you are going to create a bifurcation within your culture that's going to cause you to lose high performing talent. So those are a few things I would share and Leanne. I'm so honored to get the opportunity to connect with all of you today. I want to thank everyone for joining, I do have a gift for everyone. I hope that they'll all check out the book. But in the chat, I also shared a free digital body language toolkit, which is a toolkit that will it's a four page download of some of the best practices we talked about today. And I'm also sharing the link to my book and to my new online course. If you have an HR leader or trainer in your company, it's a great course to think about how to bring these skills in or just reach out to me if you want to run a workshop for your leadership team or do a town hall on the topic.

Leon Goren: 55:00

Eric, I want to thank you a fantastic hour with us. Thank you so much. If you haven't picked up Erica's book you got to pick it up before it actually sells out. I know she's out there in every year on Barnes noble in the window this morning. I know you posted that on LinkedIn as well. Absolutely fantastic book, easy to read, easy to turn the pages and get through so Erica, thank you once again for sharing some of those insights with us. It was fantastic. Thank you so much again. Enjoy. Enjoy. If you're interested in our the way forward live webcast, please visit us at po dash leadership comm you'll find a number of recorded past webcasts I've included Kim Scott and traer Brian when we focused on getting shit done fast and fair, Morgan housel was on a couple of weeks ago we had Joe Jackman, Harry Kramer, Dr. Greg wells, Dr. Jason Cech, Mitchell gold are and the list goes on. Later this month, or actually next month, June 17. We welcome Zach mcherry to purposeful leadership expert and author of the invisible leader. he'll speak to us about transforming your life work and organization with the power of authentic purpose. You really don't want to miss that session. And please spread the word. Again, if you're interested in po dash leadership. Sign up for that eight week executive trial program. Honestly, time is an excuse. I know if you participate, I'll make a big difference connections are more important than ever these days. Until we meet again, I'd like to wish you all a fantastic day end of the week, and we'll see in a few weeks Take care everyone.

Unknown: 56:38

Founded in 1921 Cleveland Clinic is one of the largest and most respected academic medical centers in the world. With a guiding principle of patients first, our global network of caregivers helped millions of patients each year. That's peace of mind you just can't get anywhere else. at Cleveland Clinic Canada, we help Canadians live healthier, more active lives. We help companies protect the health of their employees and their overall organizations by providing innovative employee health benefits. Whether that means comprehensive medical assessments, access to virtual care or strategic advice to support a healthy and high performing workforce. We can help with two locations in Toronto and a variety of virtual services. We help patients across Canada Welcome to Cleveland Clinic Canada. Welcome to World Class care