Digital Body Language summary

Time for another story.

One day, Jack, a mid-level manager, received an email from his boss. It ended with a simple sentence: That’ll be fine. (period). But everything was not fine. That period haunted Jack. It was a microbomb: disapproving and deadly. Jack worried and worried. Why had his boss used a period? Why hadn’t she used an exclamation point?

A lack of respect in a relationship spells D-O-O-M. In the workplace, it can kill motivation, collaborative efforts, and job satisfaction. And yet over 50 percent of employees report that they don’t receive enough respect from their leaders. Are all bosses really inconsiderate jerks? Or are they just oblivious? 

But what if they’re just not showing respect in ways that employees can recognize?

A recent survey revealed that up to 80 percent of all projects are hurt by lack of clarity and detail – and 56 percent of strategic projects crumble because of poor communication. The result? $75 million lost for every $1 billion spent – and this is just in the US. 

This is why my second law of digital body language is communicating carefully. As the name suggests, it involves making a concerted effort to curb misunderstandings by always being as clear as possible. 

We may think of “deadlines” as the bane of our existence, but once upon a time, they truly were: during the American Civil War, prisoners who crossed these camp boundary lines would be shot. Today, luckily, the term holds a little less weight. But while overstepping deadlines in the modern workplace probably won’t get you killed, meeting them still poses its own challenges.

Take a Fortune study that recently reported that 60 percent of employees have to consult with at least ten colleagues per day just to get their jobs done. Traditionally, it was easy to pop by a colleague’s desk for a quick request: Do you have a minute? Today, with numerous colleagues spread across different departments and time zones, it’s a lot harder – and this makes the need for a consistent, realistic framework all the more necessary. 

In 2016, Microsoft released a chatterbot called Tay. It was poised to usher in new levels of human-AI interactions. Almost immediately, Twitter trolls hijacked it and taught it to tweet offensive, inappropriate words and images. Within 24 hours of its nascence, Tay was retired – forever.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella could have blown up at his team’s oversight. Instead, he wrote them an email: “Keep pushing, and know that I am with you . . . the key is to keep learning and improving.” He knew that creating an atmosphere of failure and fear would crush future innovation, so he chose to invest in trust.

Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer were having a tough time. They’d just launched Witchsy, an online marketplace for unusual art products, and were receiving more than a little condescending email correspondence from potential clients and collaborators. 

That’s when they brought in a male cofounder, Keith, who was put in charge of PR. Perhaps unsurprisingly, having a male cofounder immediately boosted the women’s business. The kicker? Keith was nothing more than a name on a screen.

Here’s a question for you: Is it Speak now, or forever hold your peace or The loudest duck gets shot? Here’s another: Say one person raised in the West and another raised in China are colleagues. Who’s more likely to brainstorm out loud? and who will think in silence?

We often don’t realize how childhood stories or cultural upbringing influence our communication styles. And so when someone else’s norms clash with our own, we judge them as too flashy or too formal without pausing to consider the circumstances. So what’s going on here?