Yes, it does. You might even be surprised how much …

…  it actually matters in everyday business and corporate world. It matters in meetings, negotiations, presentations, public speaking, even in informal chats over cups of coffee or in elevators when you accidentally run into an executive or a secretary of state and decide to give a high-impact elevator speech. Indeed, body language is more important than your knowledge of the subject you’re talking about. Regrettably. What does this mean in practice?
It’s quite simple really. A confident speaker, either a civil servant working for a ministry or an executive, working for an international corporation with very little knowledge on the relevant subject will outperform a shy, but well-informed speaker, who has not been adequately trained or has not been trained at all in terms of communicating information effectively – public speaking.

When I say public speaking I do not have in mind only audiences of hundred people or more. Being aware of your body language applies also to very small informal audiences of, say, ten to fifteen people. This might be an in-company presentation or an in-company meeting. It might also be a presentation of a new service or a product for one of your accounts or a working group meeting in Brussels. And in all of these situations it is extremely important to know a great deal about the body posture, gestures, eye contact, the dress code and related do’s and dont’s.

Body language is an area I could write or speak about for days. For the purposes of this very specific article I’ve decided to stick to one of its more important features – the eye contact.

You have probably been to many presentations and have seen and heard many speakers. Has it ever happened to you that in one presentation you immediately liked the speaker and in another not at all? Are you aware of what bothered you? Let me give you an example …

I still remember clearly a presentation where topic, initially, raised a lot of interest in the audience. But when the speaker started speaking I just couldn’t be bothered. At the beginning she either kept hiding herself behind the lectern, constantly staring into her power point slides on the projection screen and when she finally moved onto the stage she nervously paced up and down the stage, avoiding any eye contact with the audience. I simply lost interest. It was her inadequate body language, which put me off, not the subject of her presentation.

Then, on another occasion, there was a speaker, who did maintain eye contact, but with very few people actually. To make matters worse, he did not have an audience of hundred people, but an audience of twelve. I still remember his eyes hardly met mine. Unless I asked a question.

Well, to get back to the topic, knowing how to maintain eye contact effectively with your audience is a top priority if you decide to give a speech or a presentation. By doing so you’ll be seen as more credible, honest, skilled, even more informed and experienced. And above all – more persuasive.

Avoiding eye contact is as dangerous as only looking at those you find friendly or perceive as your allies in the audience. This means you neglect the rest of the audience and thus lose most of your listeners.

So, what do you do? If you are using a power point presentation, make sure you’re not turning your back to the audience and you’re not continuously looking at the slides and reading from them. Rather turn your back to the screen, use a laser pointer if necessary and glance at a slide each time you move on with the presentation.

If you decide to walk around the room, it’s also important not to constantly look »at your feet«, but stop from time to time and distribute the eye contact evenly between all the participants.

In groups of up to fifty people it’s possible to meet the gaze of each individual. Just make sure your eye contact distribution is fair for everybody. What might happen is that you constantly maintain eye contact with a certain portion of the group (i. e. either left or right). This is more likely to happen if the seating is clearly divided with an aisle (similar to the plane seating).

If you speak to larger groups, say more than fifty, a different approach is needed. Imagine you’re standing of up to ten meters from the first row. What you do is divide the group into smaller ones and peg a real or imaginary point or person at each corner of the group plus one in the middle. This leads to an effect, where at least twenty people in a group of up to fifty will have a feeling you’re looking at them individually while you speak.

Another thing which is very important and must be mentioned is how to manage eye contact when answering questions. Quite naturally, you’ll be looking at an individual when he or she is stating the question. When you’re answering the question, however, remember you’re doing it for the whole group, not just for the person who’s asked it. If you keep on looking only at him or her, you’ll turn a presentation into a dialogue, the rest of the audience will become bored or disinterested and your presentation might go down the drain, which is quite unnecessary. At the end of the question you may, visually, refer back to the individual, who has raised the question.