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Academic duo delves into gestures behind success
TWO academics from Leeds University Business School are to study how entrepreneurs use hand gestures to pitch for funding.
It is part of an interpersonal skills project in which Dr Jean Clarke and Professor Joep Cornelissen will look at how budding business people convince others of the value of an idea and the chances of success at the start of a venture.
High-achieving company bosses, such as Sir Richard Branson and Sir Alan Sugar, as well as politicians like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are well-known and even mocked for the way they move their hands to persuade people of the merits of an idea.
"There have been some studies looking at how entrepreneurs use metaphors and analogies to explain their ideas in terms of familiar concepts and thereby gain financial support for a new venture," Dr Clarke told Reporter, the University of Leeds' magazine.
"But no-one has yet looked at the visual aspects of how they communicate on a face-to-face basis through subtle cues such as hand or arm gestures, how they respond to their audience's gestures, and how quickly and effectively they can adapt their gestures to suit a particular audience."
Dr Clarke and Prof Cornelissen, who originally secured 85,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council for a pilot study, will now develop it and analyse a year of filming inside the workplaces of six technological and six management consultancies – with the locations yet to be finalised – by shadowing owner-managers as they meet employees, customers and prospective investors.
The academics also plan to run training workshops through business Yorkshire Forward, Business Link and Connect Yorkshire. These will consider how to convince others about the feasibility of a business with no proven track record.
Prof Cornelissen said: "These gestures are really important in communicating with people. (Business people] make metaphors and analogies with hand gestures."
He accepted that much of the listener's reaction was instinctive but said there were still ways to measure what was taking place.
"You can identify it and generalise across the population of entrepreneurs. The other question is whether you can train people to use gestures – they are done on a largely unconscious basis." Dr Clarke argues that physical gestures help entrepreneurs to overcome would-be investors' uncertainty about new products or technologies and the project builds on the work she did during her PhD, when she spent a month filming two entrepreneurs.
One example of this was a man who described a new Internet service as having "a few rough edges" but "quite well shaped". While doing this he made a two-handed gesture with the palms slightly cupped, as if he was forming a large round object in the air that could be turned into a product.
There is some evidence that using gestures helps speakers to bettery convey information and to help listeners remember it.
"Gestures can illustrate simply and effectively the core properties of a product or process, and gain a sense of legitimacy for the business itself."
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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