Ep 206. Erica Dhawan: Digital Body Language

Work and Life with Stew Friedman

Erica Dhawan is author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection No Matter the Distance. She is also the Founder and CEO of Cotential, a global organization that helps companies, leaders, and managers leverage 21st century collaboration skills and behaviors to improve performance. She’s also co-author of the bestselling Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence. She was named by Thinkers50 as “The Oprah of Management Ideas” and featured as one of the Top 20 Management Experts around the world by GlobalGurus. She has degrees from Harvard University, MIT Sloan, and The Wharton School, where she took Stew’s Total Leadership course. (And when he wasn’t able to receive in person the Thinkers50 award for distinguished achievement in the field of talent, he asked Erica to do so on his behalf -- they’ve been friends for a long time.)

In this episode, Stew talks with Erica about her latest book, written before the pandemic but even more important now that so many are working almost entirely in the virtual world. She shares lots of practical advice on such matters as when to write in all caps, with whom to use emojis, how to negotiate ambiguous time-to-respond issues, how to respond to passive aggressive emails, a method for analyzing your digital body language style, and more.

Here then, is an invitation, a challenge, for you, once you’ve listened to the conversation: Pause after drafting your next email, before you send it, and think for a moment about the emotional reaction you expect from the recipient. Does this suggest a change in what you wrote? Share your reactions to this idea, this episode, and suggestions for future episodes with Stew by writing to him at [e-mail] or via LinkedIn.

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