Whilst Zoom, Teams or Facetime have enabled many of us to continue to work collaboratively and to conduct business meetings during the Covid-19 lockdown, Concerto Associate, Russ Spargo reflects on what has been lost during these digital interactions from the way in which we communicated with each other before the Pandemic.

The advent of the internet has, in many ways, been a wonderful thing: the days of knowledge being trapped in books and hard to get hold of have gone. It is now possible to access huge amounts of information in a very short space of time, which is wonderful.

However, the readiness of availability to information presents other issues: when you read or hear something online, how do you know that it is true? How do you know that quotes on Twitter/online journals are authentic or correctly attributed? How do you know that the nuance is right; has something been missed out or oversimplified?

This is no different to information that we can access in relation to business wisdom. For instance, was it really Peter Drucker who first said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? Google it and you’ll see.

The same can be said when people quote research on the role of body language in communication.

Prof Albert Mehrabian from UCLA pioneered our understanding of communication in the 1960s. His work was hugely influential in establishing and building our understanding of the role of body language and non-verbal communications in communication. However, his research is frequently misquoted or over-simplified.

You have probably heard people say something along the lines of ”80% of communication is non-verbal”, which, while not entirely incorrect, is misleading. Imagine that I am presenting to you on a topic that you are new to – in Mandarin. For most Brits it would be incorrect to say that you would understand about 80% of what I was saying!  Mehrabian’s work and findings refer to the communications referring to feelings and attitudes. In other words, for one person to fully understand what another is saying and to have correctly communicated their feelings and attitudes, the process is affected by the following categories in different proportions:

• 55% facial expressions;
• 38% the way that the words are said; and
• 7% the words that are spoken.

What Mehrabian’s work says is that, in our interactions with each other, the content of the message that conveys feelings and attitudes is broken down into those three categories. Crucially these categories explain the components of whether one person likes or dislikes another person. It is not really based on what a person says, but on the way that they say it. Now that is something that we sort of already knew – and about which there’s even been a 1982 Bananarama hit!

Mehrabian did not intend for the statistic to be used or applied freely to all communications. Where communications are about providing information, these categories do not apply – if there is no need to communicate attitudes and feelings. For instance, if you hear someone yelling “Fire! Fire! Get out of the building! Get out! Now! Now!” the meaning is well conveyed by the words. Being yelled at, in those conditions, is much less of an issue than it would be in a team meeting. Likewise, they don’t apply in the context where communications are highly formalised or in the armed forces where people have to obey orders. However, whether direct reports like or dislike their superior will be affected by those categories, because that is about relationship.

In terms of like and dislike, a key area where the theory does apply is in relation to inconsistencies between the verbal and nonverbal messages. We are very quick to pick these up, which is the good news. The bad news is that dissonance is very destructive: it destroys trust. We overwhelmingly believe what we see above what we hear. The Mehrabian findings (55% / 38% / 7%) applied to situations where there was incongruence between words and expression.

So, there are significant implications for each of us as we interact in these strange times over Zoom, Teams and Facetime. As we need to communicate about important things involving attitudes and feelings, where is it that most of us put the most effort in? Many people tend to focus on getting the words on the slide, script or e-mail. However, if we take Mehrabian’s findings seriously, there is a lot to be said for thinking much more about the waywe deliver messages and how we choose to express our feelings and attitudes.

So, in summary, the essence of the theory is powerful and is generally useful, even when overly simplified: it is better to know that body language plays a big role in communications rather than to be unaware. It is helpful to end our undue reliance on words when communicating about things that contain emotional content. And it’s really valuable where communications have significant emotional content that you need people to understand. This is often applicable in management and business settings, where motivation and attitude have a crucial effect on business outcomes and where outcomes are determined by the quality of relationships.

Russ Spargo

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