The awkward pause during a Zoom call. The vague, unambiguous email. The invitation to a meeting that is not contextual. Effective communication is crucial in an age when online interactions can be misinterpreted. Erica Dhawan (MBA 12), is the author of Digital Body Language. She trains corporate leaders to communicate fluently in the new age of remote work. Clients range from the US Army, Pepsi, and Deloitte.
Her mission is deeply personal and rooted in her childhood memories as a shy elementary schooler in Pittsburgh.
My parents were Indian immigrants. This meant that my family spoke Hindi at home. She recalls that I was the quietest child in class when I arrived at school. Because I was shy, one of my strengths was the ability to read body language and observe it. I used to watch popular girls with their heads tilted towards the side and the cool kids sitting down during school assemblies. I tried my best to adapt to American body language.
She has been in the digital-first age for 30 years and her intuition is helping her decode it. Visual and written cues are more important than ever. She has been delivering keynotes to Fortune 500 companies for the past five year at a rate between 40 and 70 talks annually.
She says that all of us were immigrants to the digital world of body language. I am committed to creating a network of knowledge and training that will allow me to develop the skills I believe are necessary for the new post-pandemic era.
These skills are based on what she calls "connectional intelligence". This concept prioritizes deep, meaningful interactions. It is quite different from other measures of virtual success such as the number of LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers.
She says that we are living in a digital communication crisis where people react to the situation by connecting more than they connect intelligently. Connectors with intelligence know which calls should be made and when to glance directly at the Zoom camera to indicate attention. They also know that clarity is better than brevity, that reading is the new listening and that writing clearly is the new empathy.
She believes that the pandemic has prompted new ways of working, which could make workplaces more geographically inclusive, less biased towards traditional body language and more creative in engaging everyone, wherever, to help solve problems.
Dhawan is a mother to two children, and she also enjoys Bollywood dancing in her spare time. She laughs and says that dancing taught me that everything is a performance when you connect with others.
