Non-verbal communication covers everything we convey besides words: tone of voice, facial movements, gaze, posture and gestures. In a business meeting it helps you understand the people around the table, but only if you treat each signal as a hypothesis to check rather than a verdict. The mistakes below are grounded in research indexed on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
Quick Overview
What you will learn:
- Where the 7-38-55 rule comes from and what it actually measured
- Why gestures are a poor lie detector
- Why the same expression can mean different things
- What is left of the power posing claim
- How to chair a meeting so that your words and behaviour agree
Who this is for:
- Managers and anyone who chairs meetings
- Salespeople and negotiators
- Specialists presenting results to a board or a client
Reading time: 7 minutes
A note on the title
The title talks about the mistakes that cost companies the most, yet the order below is not a cost ranking. None of the studies we cite measured company losses, so we give no figures. What the mistakes share is their effect: a meeting decision rests on guesses about people instead of on what they said and what can be verified. We describe the consequences in plain terms instead: a misread client, a needless clash inside the team, a counterpart who stops trusting you.
Mistake: treating Mehrabian’s rule as a law of every conversation
The popular 7-38-55 rule claims that words carry only a small share of a message while tone and body language carry the rest. It traces back to two experiments Albert Mehrabian published in 1967, both listed on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Their titles alone show how narrow they were: they dealt with how listeners infer a speaker’s attitude when the channels of a message contradict each other.
Applying those proportions to a results review, a negotiation or a contract discussion stretches the findings far beyond what was tested. In a business meeting the content matters. Figures, offer terms and agreed actions need to be heard and written down, not replaced by an impression of how confident someone looked.
Mistake: reading lies from gestures
Averted eyes, touching the face or folded arms are often taken as signs of lying. Bond and DePaulo’s 2006 meta-analysis on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov pooled studies in which people judged in real time, without aids or training, whether someone was telling the truth. They were right in 54% of cases on average, barely better than a coin toss, and they did better with lies they heard than with lies they only saw. An earlier review of cues to deception by DePaulo and colleagues, published in 2003, found that many behaviours showed no link, or only a weak link, to lying.
For a negotiator, that means asking for specifics you can verify and recording what was agreed, rather than grading sincerity by posture.
Mistake: reading an emotion from a single expression
The assumption that a frown always signals anger and a smile always signals approval was examined by Barrett and colleagues in 2019 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). People do smile more often when happy than chance would predict. Still, the way emotions are expressed varies across cultures, situations and even individuals in the same situation, and a given facial configuration often communicates something other than an emotional state.
With an international team or a client you have not met before, a furrowed brow may mean concentration rather than disagreement.
Mistake: a power pose instead of preparation
A 2010 study claimed that briefly holding an expansive posture shifts hormone levels and raises appetite for risk. A large replication by Ranehill and colleagues in 2015 (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) found no effect on hormones or on risk tolerance. Researchers still disagree about whether the pose changes even the subjective feeling of confidence, so we do not present power posing as a proven technique. Before an important meeting, your time is better invested in preparing your content, questions and fallback options.
Mistake: mixed signals from the chair
As their titles indicate, Mehrabian’s experiments dealt with inconsistent messages, where the channels say different things and the listener has to decide which signal to believe. Whoever chairs a meeting or facilitates a workshop creates that situation without noticing: inviting questions while checking a phone, or asking for feedback and then cutting off the first person who speaks.
How to avoid it:
- keep words and behaviour aligned: if you ask for comments, leave time for them;
- name what you notice: “It looks like this point raises doubts. Is that right?” beats guessing;
- test your reading with a question before it ends up in the meeting notes.
Read Also
- Active listening, the foundation of effective communication
- Empathetic communication in teams and how to build it
- Communication in distributed teams: tools and habits
Build Your Skills
Two courses take this further: Leadership presence and communication of influence and Interpersonal communication: the key to success in business. The first focuses on how a leader shows up and speaks, the second on combining verbal and non-verbal communication in everyday work. Get in touch and we will tailor the scope to your team.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What does non-verbal communication include?
Everything outside the words themselves: pitch and pace of voice, facial movements, gaze, posture, gestures and physical distance. It supports what we say and sometimes contradicts it. Research indexed on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov suggests that a single signal rarely has one fixed meaning, so it is worth checking with a question.
What makes a business meeting work well?
A clear purpose, an agenda and a chair who keeps time and gives people the floor. It should end with actions recorded together with an owner and a deadline. Body language can tell you that a topic needs a follow-up question, but decisions should be recorded from what participants actually said.
How should I prepare for a business meeting?
Start from the goal and invite only the people needed for the decision. Send the agenda and materials in advance, then prepare your questions and fallback options. That is a better use of the time than pre-meeting rituals such as power posing, whose claimed effects a large replication on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov did not confirm.
What meeting etiquette should I follow?
Be on time, introduce people who have not met, silence notifications and give your attention to whoever is speaking. With partners from other cultures, remember that gestures and expressions may carry a different meaning than you expect; when in doubt, ask rather than assume.