Team building

Warren Lamb took the view that it is impossible to separate postures and gestures: they merge together in such a way that

1 44 you have to consider both simultaneously. He also believed that if people are to be welded together into effective teams, it helps considerably if their posture-gesture merging patterns match each other, or are at least complementary.

There is no doubt that patterns of non-verbal communication do affect how well a number of people develop into a team, but we really need to consider the influence of all aspects of body language rather than just two of them.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of many effective teams is that many of the members look alike. We tend to feel we can work better, and even generally interact more comfortably, with people who are similar in appearance to ourselves. There is more than a grain of truth in the old adage 'Birds of a feather flock together'. There will also be similarities in the use of all the other aspects of body language.

Sometimes, there may not be similarity so much as comple­ mentarity - that is, a dominant person and a submissive person will often get along very well together because their body language dovetails. Dominant people like to control and regulate interaction, submissive people will happily allow this and may actually welcome it because it removes the necessity for them to make active decisions when they would far rather be passive.

Exercises and experiments

1 What's my line?

If you can enlist the participation of a few other people, get them to take it in turns to portray an occupation by using body language alone. The others have to guess what the occupation is. Which kinds of job are easiest to portray non-verbally? Which are the easiest to guess? Are both categories made up of the same jobs?

2 The ideal workmate

Make a list of the non-verbal behaviours you would look for in an ideal workmate. Use the headings eye contact, facial expressions, head movements, gestures, postures, proximity and orientation, bodily contact, appearance and physique, timing and synchronization, and non-verbal aspects of speech.

3 Guess who's coming to work

I magine that a new worker at your own place of work was as opposite

in appearance to you and your workmates as possible (for instance, if you are all middle-aged and White, that he or she is young and Black). How would this affect the way in which the group or team you work with operates?

4 Haway the lads!

Study the members of your local football team and the way they play. Is the use of body language a factor which affects how well they play? Which players seem to operate best together? Is this purely because of footballing skill or does body language affect the situation?

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In this chapter you wili leam:

• the role of body language in

various situations encountered in everyday life

• a systematic approach to analyzing other people's body language during small talk.

In addition to work, there are all kinds of other places in which we meet people and all kinds of people that we meet. These encounters can range from the briefest passing and acknowledgement of someone in the street to an extremely formal and prolonged evening function at which we have to be on our best behaviour, conversing and acting according to quite rigid rules, perhaps for several hours. Consider the day of a fairly typical family. Mother gets up and the first people she meets are her husband and children. If she is

a housewife, she could during the day meet neighbours, friends,

the postman, the meter reader for the gas or electricity board, the person delivering mail orders, shopkeepers, other customers, other mothers meeting their children from school, the babysitter, members of the parent-teachers' committee, and people in the pub after the meeting. Father meets his wife and children, and then possibly the news agent, the station ticket inspector, fellow passengers, fellow office workers, restaurant staff, friends in the pub after work, and people in the pub when he finally catches up with his wife. The children meet their parents, friends, class­ mates, teachers, shopkeepers, members of a children's theatre group touring schools, and the babysitter.

In each of these encounters, our own body language and that of other people will be continuously supporting (or contradicting), regulating or controlling the interaction which takes place. It forms a constant stream of activity throughout every waking hour. It is particularly important at the beginnings of encounters, and how we behave then can more or less determine the eventual outcome of the entire meeting.

Exercise: age and sex

Tape record the voices of several people of various ages. Record males and females in roughly equal proportions. Have them talk about subjects which will not give their age away (for example, avoid having an older man talking about his war stories). Play the tapes to other people and see if they can identify the age and sex of the speakers from voice alone.

If you are unable to enlist the participation of other people, sit with your back to the television and see if you can guess the age and sex of several speakers. Note these down in your notebook. Then watch the picture as well as listening to the sound and see if this helps you to decide how accurate you were. If you can find out from a Who 's Who-type reference book of television personalities how old people actually are, so much the better.

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1 48 Exercise review

As you might expect, it is not too difficult in most cases to identify a person's sex from voice alone. It is often also quite easy, incidentally, to identify race or nationality. You will probably have found, which­ ever form of the experiment you tried, that children's voices can be spotted without difficulty. Very old people often have a voice quality that is relatively easy to distinguish. The real problem comes with people whose ages are approximately between 30 and 70.

There are some clues which can be used. Volume tends to be higher with younger people than with older ones. Tone tends to deepen with age, though it tends to sharpen and sound quite fragile with extreme age, and may develop a tremor. Younger voices have a more confident, even brash, sound to them in many cases. If more than two-thirds of the voices were correctly allocated to age and sex, this would be a good result (allow five years either side for age).