About two years ago, I attended a free webinar on marketing and liked what the presenter had to say. I also liked his voice. So I called him and chatted about my marketing issues, and eventually I hired him.
He lives in New Hampshire; I live in New Jersey. We worked by phone, Go-To-Meeting, and e-mail on my newsletters, website, blog, corporate identity–the whole thing. And we never met.
When we had a misunderstanding about cost, it got way out of control–way more wacky than it should have been, and I think I know why. We never met face to face.
I have read for years about “flaming,” which is the tendency for e-mailers to pour unmitigated vitriol into their messages, unmodulated by the physical presence of the other person. Now I’ve had the experience. I was the one who was pissed.
E-mail is a great channel–the killer app–but we all know it has one major flaw: it does not offer the multi-level signals our brains need to calibrate emotion.
Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their voice tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.
Amazingly, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instanteously and out of our awareness.
Compared to real life, e-mail is emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words.
In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, as assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.
In the case of widely dispersed work groups, the potential conflict has been proven to be minimized by occasional face-to-face meetings which serve to augment the electronic communications.
And beware the tendency to e-mail the guy down the hall. You lose out on giving and getting friendly greetings, those innocuous interactions that slowly add up to rapport and trust.
My point? Presentations are different from e-mail. When presenting, you are speaking, in addition to English, several other languages. You are speaking the language of the body, which is emotional; the language of the voice, also emotional; and the language of clothing and grooming, which is the language of power and status.
Presentations give us the greatest chance we will ever have to move others to action, because they get us all together in one place, at one time, to think about one thing.
If you’re running a country, a company, a department, or a team, those are important moments.
Not the time to mail it in.