Nonverbal Reactions in Leadership
Most of us that work in innovation want to have a safe environment for failure. Failure is inevitable when you’re wading into the waters of uncertainty. We have a culture (we as Americans) where failure is something we spend a lot of time in school working hard to avoid. Also as Americans, we have a lot of identity tied to what we do at work. We tend to project iterative failures at work as personality traits. We can find ourselves starting to say things like “I failed” or even worse, “I’m a failure” or “I’m an imposter” after a project or activity goes wrong.
We have covered the topic of embracing failure in a previous article. The purpose here is not to rehash the experience of failure from the perspective of the worker. Instead, let’s talk about the impact of nonverbal reactions to things like failure impact your culture and your work experience.
Case Study
Imagine a real-world experience you and I probably shared at some point in your career. We will use this experience as a case study for multiple nonverbal reactions that are possible.
Jake (not from State Farm) is given a new task. For this task, Jake is taking on an independent effort. The effort is novel, this is not a standard operating procedure task. Jake is mid-career and ambitious. He has a goal of growing his worth to the company and sees this as an opportunity to show how he is super-duper ready for promotion, leadership, more responsibility. As a leader, you are hoping for Jake’s growth. He is doing quite well in his current role, you have noticed his ambition and heck you went through a similar track where confidence is not experiencing a shortage.
Jake takes on the effort with full gusto. He loves the idea of having more autonomy, the idea of choosing his own destiny and making his own decisions. You, as a leader, understand the risk of the activity you are giving to Jake. It is enough risk to make it a real test, and not enough risk to lose a customer or your business. You know how you would attack the problem, or multiple paths to resolution.
It is delivery day. Jake is going to present his solution to you just after lunch. You can see his nonverbal cues. He put a ton of effort into this solution. You take a seat in the conference room (or in front of your webcam if remote). The presentation is professional. Jake is visibly nervous as he looks to you for a reaction. You recognized something critically wrong with the product during the presentation. Jake’s product has no hope to succeed as delivered.
A Bad Reaction
What would you do if you just delivered a presentation and your boss immediately looks frustrated or disappointed?
In spite of all of the intent, of all of the solid advice that follows, Jake may be lost in disappointing his manager, mentor, company leader. Instead of listening to the feedback — learning and growing from the experience, Jake zeros in on the frustration and starts to cycle through his own set of emotions. In some cases Jake may be defensive and start to point to environmental issues and looking to shift the frustration away from his normally excellent work. In other cases, Jake will be introspective and cycling through all of the details involved in the situation rather than seeing the bigger picture you might intend to focus in on.
In this case, perhaps you are frustrated because you:
- Could have done it better, by now, by yourself — a dangerous game when dealing with the growth of teams.
- Are disappointed that Jake was not able to identify the problems on his own — it’s slapping him in the face!
- Did not identify a risk that has shortened your deadline and increased your risk matrix.
Whatever the case — as a leader your emotions and your nonverbal response have betrayed you. Jake is probably still going to (eventually) succeed at the task, but you (likely) lost ground for the opportunity to achieve real growth. Jake will focus on the particulars of the task rather than learning new behaviors and methods to attack the problem.
There are many other bad nonverbal reactions you may see in leadership. Watch for them when you’re engaging in feedback on a task gone wrong. For example:
- Threatening — you’re going to get one result, defensiveness.
- Celebratory — it’s insincere when something goes wrong.
- Apathetic— the worst reaction in most cases.
- Bored — almost as bad as apathy, can be as simple as crossed arms.
- Laughter — probably insensitive if something is going wrong.
- Impatient— got somewhere better to be? Probably sending the wrong message if you actually want your team to grow.
A Good Reaction
Imagine instead that you don’t know all of the answers for just a moment. As a leader you probably spent years growing through expression of talent, a bit of good timing, and a bit of luck. You probably also suffered from bad leaders and grew from the guidance of good ones.
Curiosity, thoughtfulness, and sincere engagement are all characteristics that are welcoming for feedback. Our friend Jake may hear the message if the environment feels psychologically safe. How do we achieve that outcome? One way is to be genuinely curious about the things that are actually important about what Jake has been up to during this task. Is the outcome of the task really the most important thing? Or, perhaps, the more important thing is the process Jake uses to work through a novel task. Messaging this through body language is nearly impossible to fake. Starting with questions and that do not threaten the person but seek understanding will help all parties facilitate a positive learning environment.
In order to express this body language, leaders need to have growth of their own focused on the development of others instead of selfish growth. Understanding that your solution is not the only possible option is also important. Accepting that your prior experience, your successful path may actually be wrong in this scenario is also critical. Coming in loaded with both experience guns firing stifles creativity.
Jake will likely learn a lot more from a thoughtful interaction where he can come to his own conclusion about what is wrong. Or, perhaps this is an opportunity for you as a leader to learn that Jake thinks things through more effectively than you, and that you are wrong!
Real Life
Personally, I am working on improving my own nonverbal responses. In previous careers, sheer willpower and ambition would often lead to a ceaseless drive forward. The consequences of those actions were blocked by a thirst for achievement. With better perspective, however, I am learning that there is much more to be gained by engaging sincerely in the process of understanding peers and coworker’s perspective. Where once was anger and frustration is now a greater learning and understanding of people and their often better solutions. The first step was to acknowledge the effect of bad nonverbals on the team. That was quickly followed by an attempt to be sincerely curious. As this growth continues, my focus is on better team enablement. We have a lot of talented people on our team. Telling them what to do would be a mistake. Not giving them the conditions to succeed is also a mistake. Figuring out how seemingly tiny changes in mood or posture cascades into undesired habits is the equivalent of figuring out how the magician saws the lady in half without killing her.
In observing the many other leaders within the military there are a lot of different types and styles expressed. Almost every experience seems sincere. However, there is a culture of command that can interfere with the intent to grow young leaders. The most commonly accepted poor reaction is impatience. Look — these jobs are nearly impossible. There is never enough people or money for a lot of the core missions, let alone innovation. There are pressures from every direction to be in this meeting, jump to that meeting, with no breaks in between. Perhaps the impatience comes from exhaustion. Perhaps it comes from perceived value and innovation suffers as existing status quo programs have more than their own fair share of headaches. Either way, the message that can be sent in these moments of weakness reinforces the status quo and can explain why work is done in Outlook and PowerPoint in 2021.
Have other positive nonverbal reactions to failure?
