Mirroring body language is something I find myself doing on phone calls and when dealing with people in a business setting. Mirroring refers to how you adjust your body language, language, expressions, movements, etc based on what the person you’re dealing with is doing.
Sometimes you’ll deal with someone who is very soft spoken for example and if you’re loud, you might literally scare the quiet person off or at least leave them with a bad impression, that you’re too loud in this case. If you adjust your voice level to match theirs (ie. mirror them by speaking softer) you might find you’re able to build some rapport with them based on the fact that you’re speaking in a similar manner to them. We’re not talking about actually mimicking their voice, just the loudness of their voice in this case.
I find myself doing this on the phone when someone answers the phone and (to give a few examples) speaks very quickly/slowly, loud/soft, formally/informally and I find that I quickly adjust and start by trying to mimic how they opened the conversation.
Often you’ll find that the person keeps speaking in the same way but other times, you might find that they immediately change their tone or suddenly speak in a different way which might mean I adjust my tone as well and mirror them differently.
I was in a meeting last week with a guy who was very informal to the point he would throw a few swear words in here and there. As we spoke more, I found that the more informally I spoke, the more he spoke and the better the conversation went. I felt very comfortable speaking with him and the conversation was informal and to the point.
In many cases, you’ll find people who work in professional environments (ie. lawyers, accountants, etc) and perhaps a formal tone is required.
In other cases, I’ve found that some people want to cut to the case and just hear the facts.
In other cases still, I’ve met people who are happy to listen to a presentation and want to hear the whole story before making any decisions.
I think I’m a pretty good judge of quickly understanding what sort of person I’m dealing with and when you work in sales, you pretty much have to be. You need to figure out if the person you’re dealing with wants the long answers or the short ones, if they want details or they want to cut to the chase, etc.
We’re all salespeople when it comes to a job interview when you’re trying to sell yourself to a hiring manager so this is a skill that we all need at one point or another. Certainly, it’s best to go into any interview being professional and to avoid turning it informal since it’s normally expected that the interview remains a formal event. Sometimes though you have interviews where the person interviewing you is very informal – I’ve been in interviews where the hiring manager swore a few times during the conversation – so you’ll run into this situation too. Fortunately the interviewer wasn’t swearing at me…
The bottom line is that you’ll run into pretty much all sorts of personalities in your career and during job searches and you might find that you need to quickly adjust and that mirroring can be one way to help build rapport with that person depending on the situation.
