ONE Bodytalk at Work   You can observe a lot by watching. -Lawrence Peter ("Yogi") Berra   The workplace is a wordy place. Telephones, e-mails, keyboards, written reports, text messages, memos, and meetings. Hundreds, thousands, millions of words-printed, spoken, whispered, and shouted-greet you and compete for your undivided attention. Hear me, read me, heed me! Your Body at Work, however, is not about words but about what lies beneath them: unspoken feelings, emotions, and moods. It's about what is left unstated-the hidden agendas, concealed plans, and covert schemes. There's often a secret motivation, program, or design beneath corporate verbiage. Sherlock Holmes wisely taught us to watch for hidden meaning in commonplace items like shoelaces, thumbnails, and sleeves.

In Your Body at Work you will learn to decode and decipher hidden messages given off by nonverbal cues and body language in the workplace-from the crown of a head to the calcaneus of a heel. What do hands, shoulders, faces, and eyelids say in the boardroom that memos and words do not? How do business clothes make you look stronger or weaker, and more or less competent on the job? What secrets do corporate cupboards, cabinets, common areas, and cubicles hold? There is meaning to be found everywhere in every office, in dress, décor, and demeanor. In Your Body at Work's subtitle, I introduce "sight-reading" to mean "intelligent observation." English "sight" comes from the seven-thousand-year-old Indo-European root word sekw-, "to perceive." Important senses of the English word "read" are "to anticipate through examination," and "to determine intent or mood" (Soukhanov 1992, 1504). Thus, sight-reading is the act of anticipating intentions and moods through the perceptive examination of nonverbal cues. Learning to decode office signals will help you become not just a better listener but a better employee and supervisor. Watching body language as you listen will disclose the emotions behind words.

Through active watching you will become more empathic, persuasive, and collaborative on the job. Moreover, seeing beneath spoken words will help you gauge the level of trust, or mistrust, among colleagues. Trust can be affirmed by acts as simple as a level gaze and denied by the subtle wink of an eye. Perceptive listening, empathy, persuasion, collaboration, awareness, and trust are traits of a management style known as servant leadership. Servant leadership is the prescriptive notion that a boss should lead not just for the sake of amassing power but for the sake of employee well-being advanced toward a company's goals. Graduate students in my communication and leadership classes are often eager to apply servant leadership in their jobs. The goal is to lead less by edict than by example. By joining a last-minute envelope-stuffing session, for instance, a boss can show physical commitment to the project rather than simply dictating, "This mailing needs to get done right away.

" As an anthropologist who specializes in nonverbal communication, I study how humans communicate apart from spoken, manually signed, and written words. After teaching for five years at the University of Washington in Seattle, I moved to the other Washington, Washington, D.C. For twelve years there-in the city some have called the office capital of the world-I worked as an executive in association management. Upon returning to Washington State, I consulted professionally on matters of non-verbal communication for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and for corporations such as Masterfoods USA, Pfizer, Best Buy, Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, and Unilever. From fieldwork in diverse business habitats, I learned to decode the silent language of offices.

One of my favorite assignments was managing research for Unilever in the Language of Hands study. I knew that human hands had figured prominently in painting and sculpture, from ice age cave art to masterpieces by Michelangelo and Rodin, but I hadn't realized how critical hand messages could be in the board-room. As colleagues discuss business face-to-face, they unconsciously monitor hands with a fine, albeit unconscious, eye. What jumped out at me from the Unilever study was just how observant we are of each other's hands and their emotional signals. Like artists, we're acutely aware that wrists, palms, and digits have something important to say. Unlike artists, our own observations are often untutored, vague, and outside our conscious awareness. We get a feeling from a hand gesture, but can't easily put that feeling into words. Unlike Michelangelo, who studied human anatomy, most of us can't put a finger on the precise hand shape or position that made us notice that a mood shift had taken place.

There's an intellectual disconnect between the gesture and the feeling. To learn how ordinary people who are not artists decipher hands, my research team showed twelve high-resolution photographs of hand shapes and gestures to one hundred subjects in the greater Los Angeles, Kansas City (Missouri), Chicago, and Boston metropolitan areas. Photos ranged from the manicured hands of an education administrator to the rough-hewn hands of a working electrician. We asked, "What do these hands 'say' to you?" "What physical traits do you notice?" "What features do you like or dislike? Why?" "What hand would you least like to shake? Why?" And last, "What do you like best about your own hands? Why?" The nonrandom, nonprobability sample included 47 percent men and 53 percent women, aged eighteen to sixty-six (mean age was thirty-seven), whose occupations ranged from physician to donut cook. We were amazed by the quality and quantity of the verbal responses. Subjects noticed a lot and had more than a little to say about hands, their shapes, sizes, conditions, and gestures. Without any prompting from my team of trained field anthropologists, respondents volunteered a total of 4,025 descriptors (words and phrases) to describe the twelve hand photos. What did we learn about the silent language of business from the Unilever study? At a business meeting, the more unattractive a hand, the less likely a colleague will be to notice its gestures.

In the study, as a hand's negative-appearance rating increased, the attention paid to its gestures and shapes decreased. Unsightly features competed for visual attention and simply got in the gesture's-and thus in the gesturer's-way. Participants were less able to read, interpret, and decode gestures made by the physically distressed hands. These were hands, again in the observers' own words, that showed "lines," "scars," "spots," "calluses," "dirt," "roughness," "dryness," "stains," "dry cuticles," and "ragged nails." Conversely, the more attractive a hand, the more likely coworkers will notice and decode its signals. In the Language of Hands study we found that as a hand's positive-appearance rating increased, attention paid to its shape and gestures also increased. In short, participants were better able to see and decipher gestures produced by physically pleasant hands. Attractive hands were described as "clean," "groomed," "manicured," "cared for," "strong," "not dry," and "smooth.

" Who knew there could be so much significance in something we often don't even know we're perceiving? Perhaps anthropologist Edward Sapir put it best when he wrote, "We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all" (Sapir 1929, 137). On July 25, 2002, the Language of Hands findings were shared at a press conference on the rooftop garden of the Library Hotel in New York City. "Working with the Center for Nonverbal Studies"-the private research organization I founded in 1997 in Spokane, Washington-"we better understand how people feel about their hands and the hands around them," said Unilever's hand-cream brand manager, Pablo Gazzera (White 2002). Research from the University of Chicago shows that speaking gestures aid in verbal memory and enhance cognitive thought. Nonverbal hand cues thus augment the persuasive power of vocal words. They're key players in the silent language of business meetings, and your hands should be groomed for the parts they'll play above the boardroom table. But they're just one element in a whole language of nonverbal cues that you'll soon be introduced to. DECIPHERING BODYTALK IN THE BOARDROOM Think of a board meeting as you would a poker game.

As poker guru and former FBI profiler Joe Navarro explains: "The major purpose of observation at the poker table is intelligence gathering-you want to learn as much as you can about each of your opponents at the table" (Navarro 2006, 10 11). At a card table or a conference table, the stakes are high, and in both games the player who watches body language has an edge. From your swivel chair inside the boardroom, you watch as emotions flare above the tabletop. You see lips tighten, eyes roll, shoulders shrug, hands ball into fists. From these visible cues you're able to gauge.