Top Five Body Language Tips to Earn Your Next Promotion

body languageContributed by Mark Bowden, Author of Winning Body Language

Body language and wining trust with our nonverbal signals are some of the most important gestures in business.

There are some fundamental pieces of nonverbal communication that you can use to better control a conversation, command attention and convey the right messages, because they are fundamentally about our cultural shared physicality – regardless of gender. Here are the top five tips body language tips from my new book Winning Body Language (McGraw-Hill 2010).

  1. Watch Your Hands. Don’t hang your hands down by your sides during important business communications – one-to-one, presentations, interviews and meetings etc. When you stand or sit still with your arms hanging by your sides, it causes you to initiate a “sleep” or “depression” reaction in the body and mind of both yourself and others around you. And if you are active with your arms by your side and presenting, it can cause you to sway from side to side, pace up and down and become quite aggressive in the feeling you give off.

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Gender parity in the workplace: Is it only a matter of CEOs believing the business case for change?

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Nicki HeadshotBy Nicki Gilmour, CEO and Founder of theglasshammer.com (New York City)

Yes and no. Yes we need all CEO’s to understand the bottom line impact of this productivity issue on their businesses. However that is only part of the solution as strategic plans must be designed and implemented with some sort of a target attached and consequences if targets are continually missed- like any other business function.

The 2010 Catalyst awards dinner showcased their latest research Pipeline’s Broken Promise, which is an excellent piece of work. The new study highlights that men have higher starting salaries in their first post-MBA job than women even after taking into account number of years of prior experience, time since MBA, first post-MBA job level, global region, and industry. These salary differences are not due to different aspirations or parenthood.

Career profiles were examined from 9,927 alumni who graduated between 1996 and 2007 from MBA programs at 26 leading business schools in Asia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. As the Catalyst report points out, the premise of the promise of gender parity occurring sooner rather than later is that the pipeline for women into senior leadership is robust. After all, over the past 15 years, women have been graduating with advanced professional degrees in record numbers – often equal to or even surpassing the rates for men, swelling women’s representation in managerial ranks. Concurrently, companies implemented diversity and inclusion programs to eliminate structural biases and foster women’s full participation in leadership. However the percentage growth of women in senior leadership positions would suggest otherwise. Hence the promise is broken that there is a pipeline of women coming up through the ranks.

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Movers and Shakers: Shamina Singh, Chief Operating Officer, Global Community Relations, Citi

singhBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“Courage, I think, is something that is cultivated,” said Shamina Singh, Chief Operating Officer, Global Community Relations at Citi.

After spending 15 years working in high profile public sector jobs – Senior Advisor to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives; President Clinton’s U.S. Department of Labor’s Congressional Liaison on health care issues, and Deputy Executive Director of America Votes to name just a few – Singh found the courage to take a dramatically different route.

She said, “I was ready for a change and wanted to explore new opportunities while leveraging the experience I had built in the public sector. …after learning about [Citi] and the potential to move the needle on global issues, I realized it was the right fit for me.” Singh was also recently named to the Young Global Leaders program of the World Economic Forum – another opportunity to expand her global outreach.

“We can’t afford not to be talking to each other across the world,” she said.

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