I’m researching nonverbal communication for a new book I’m writing. Came across this often (mis)quoted study:

Professor Albert Mehrabian at UCLA conducted the classic research on the impact of different channels of communication. His finding:

* 7% of meaning is communicated by spoken words
* 38% of meaning is communicated by voice tone
* 55% of meaning is communicated by nonverbal gestures

Mehrabian was studying the communication of feelings and attitudes. Obviously, you can’t watch people speaking in a foreign language and understand 93 percent of what is being communicated. But you can be assured that their nonverbal gestures reveal more about someone’s real motives and feelings than anything they might say.

Here’s why.

Manners and poise may be consciously learned, but facial expression, eye blinking, leg crossing and nervous tapping are difficult to consistently repress. Nonverbal gestures tend to reveal inner character and emotions – fear, honestly, joy, indecision, frustration, and much more. The tiniest gesture, like the way someone stands or enters the room, can speak volumes about their confidence, self-worth, and credibility.

I’d be interested in hearing about your experience with this topic.

In a recent television interview, Whoopie Goldberg described how she got her first one-woman show in New York: Whoopie was performing her nightclub act and (the director) Mike Nichols was in the audience. He came backstage and offered to create a show for her in a Broadway theater. Whoopie said she didn’t know if that was such a good idea. What if she were lousy? Mike asked if she’d ever been lousy before and Whoopie said “Sure!” His response was, “Then it’s no big deal. You’ll just be lousy on Broadway.”

To me, that reply was brilliant!

Fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to success. Yet every major achievement is preceded by many failures.

“Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is,” said Walter Wriston, the former chairman of CitiCorp. But it can be difficult for people in an organization to have a genuine discussion about failure that doesn’t include blame or rationalization. To facilitate this kind of productive conversation, the United States Army developed the After Action Reviews. AARs are now used by organizations around the world to help employees learn from their mistakes, prevent future errors, and find new solutions to problems.

Basically, the AAR process assembles people who were involved in a planned project or event and asks them to answer these questions:
1. What was the desired outcome?
2. What was the actual outcome?
3. Why were there differences between what we wanted and what we achieved?
4. What did we learn? (What would we do differently next time?)

What about your communication strategies? Had any good failures lately?

As part of my ‘giving back to the community’ activities, I am helping out the PR students at Deakin University in Australia by recording interviews with experienced internal communicators.

Why? Because I believe that the new PR young guns will potentially miss out on exposure to wisdom about a HUGE part of their publics and it behoves we business communicators to ‘wise them up’.

I am looking for seasoned (and only lightly salted) internal communicators who are willing to be interviewed (probably over Skype) for about 30 minutes.

The questions I would put to you are some/all of the following:

• Why do you think internal communications are an important part of the overall communication/PR mix?

• What method is the best for communicating to employees?

• There are some experienced business commentators who say that despite the focus on it, ‘engagement’ is worse now than, say, ten years ago. Do you find this? If it’s true, what are the reasons and what can be done about it?

• Does the size of the company make a difference in how you communicate with employees?

• In your experience is it possible for there to be too much communication?

• There is a saying that everyone sees themselves as being a ‘marketer’, or at least has an opinion; does the same mindset apply to ‘communication’ (i.e. everyone sees themselves as a brilliant communicator) and what is the most effective way of dealing with it?

• What was your biggest internal communication success?

• What was your biggest internal communication ‘learning experience’?

• Finally, any last words for students of communication/PR who may be considering adding internal communications into their skillset?

If you are able to help out and are willing to be ruthlessly grilled to the point of tears give of your wisdom, then please either email me: Lee at LeeHopkins dot com or else leave a comment on this post.

I feel it vitally important that we educate and promote our passion to others, especially those who are about to enter into the giddy world of PR/comms and who may not be aware of how vitally important good employee communication is.

Many thanks in advance,
Lee