1. How You Appear > What You Say
Dr. Albert Mehrabian at UCLA proposed the 93% rule – only 7% of an interaction consists of the actual content, while the rest of the message is communicated through facial expressions, nonverbal gestures, voice, eye gaze and even appearance.
This is no myth. In fact, in making judgments, we rely on nonverbal cues twice as much as verbal ones (Lieberman & Rosenthal, 2001). Furthermore, a study comparing the separate effects of dominant demeanor and dominant content found that demeanor played a bigger role in negative evaluations a speaker. In other words, when speakers acted dominant, they were disliked regardless of the tone of their message.
What’s that, you say? Isn’t dominance the essence of leadership? Well…