As a professor at the MIT Media Lab and author of "Honest Signals," Alex "Sandy" Pentland began applying technological tools to question human behavior--how people use nonverbal communication cues; the results were startling and powerfully instructive for executives.
Many of Dr. Pentland's finding based on data from a device he calls a "sociometer," a wearable, badgelike contraption that can continuously measure various nonverbal aspects of people's interactions--have implications for both how executives communicate and how they understand what is being communicated to them.
These signals are really qualitative readings of brain state. Take activity. Everyone has an autonomic nervous system; it's the oldest part of your nervous system, the fight-or-flight part. When you get excited about something, it gets aroused.
Similarly, as a measure of interest, people pay attention to each other, and you can read that from the timing between people who are in conversation. Humans also have a system called a mirror neuron system. Strangely enough, when you watch someone move, a part of your brain that corresponds to the same movement lights up. And when people mimic each other's gestures when in conversation, research has shown that it's very definitely correlated with feelings of trust and empathy.
And the final one he focused on was fluency, or consistency. Consistency in tone or motion tells you who really knows what they're doing, or is really practiced at it, at least. And that's another sort of honest signal; it's very hard to fake.
The experiment that Dr. Pentland likes the best is one where he looked at people who were pitching business plans.
These were midcareer executives who were presenting real business plans for a business plan competition and then rating each other. It turns out you can estimate their ratings of each other...just by listening to their tone of voice. You didn't have to know anything about the business plan; you didn't have to know anything about the executives. It was how they delivered the plan that determined how it was rated. That's pretty amazing. Because these were not fools. These were executives in their mid-30s--very successful. And yet, they were listening to how excited the presenter was about the plan; they were not listening to the facts.
It turns out that those sort of unconscious signaling behaviors are enormously important in determining the functioning of an organization. In organizations, most of the communication that's complicated, that's really important, still happens face-to-face. Some of it happens over the telephone, but it's person-to-person; it's not by email, it's not by memo.