Friday, January 3, 2014

Communication - Non Verbal 2

In the last byte, we looked at paralanguage dimension of non-verbal communication. In today's byte, we discuss some study done on how accurately these nonverbal communication cues are decoded.

It has been observed that many people including judges with several years of experience have a greater confidence in their ability to decipher these non-verbal queues than their actual ability to do so! This generally happens due to incomplete or inaccurate interpretation of the non-verbal cues.

Expert trainer - Paul Ekman, who has trained judges, secret service agents, and polygraphists to detect lies; says that the best way to detect lies is to look for inconsistencies in the non-verbal cues. Disparities between the subject's words, body languages, voice etc are some cues that could help in this direction.

If one were to ask - Why is non-verbal communication important to managers? It is because it is important for the managers to understand the impact on the meaning of the message being communicated. Definitely the employees pick up various non-verbal cues in the following situation - when the managers looks away when the employee speaks with him, doesn't acknowledge any greetings, etc.

The Manager would therefore need to consider the total meaning of the message, in all media of communication. A message would have a greater meaning in specific context and the cues could be better and interpreted with an ease.

It would be interesting to have a quick table of common non-verbal communication cues from manager to employees and we shall provide that in the next byte.

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