Want to make a good first impression on your team? Here are five key steps to follow

The science is clear. A strangers’ brain is hard-wired to assess your leadership potential faster than you blink your eyes. The result will affect their willingness to engage with you, and whether to trust your leadership.

I’ve combined 35 years of experience assessing and developing executives, with compelling scientific research, to help leaders learn how to show up more effectively. Here are five key ideas that can help.

1. Show warmth first

Scientists at Princeton University found that assessments of your intentions towards other people are made within one tenth of a second. Using limited visual and auditory data such as body language, facial expressions and vocal tone, their brain will quickly determine if your intentions appear warm or hostile. A mildly negative assessment can produce caution and wariness. A strong one can induce a full-blown fight-flight-freeze response – hardly ideal conditions for generating support and engagement.

With negative warmth assessments being difficult to reverse, it pays to show up as welcoming and friendly, even if you’re not feeling that way. Give special attention to adopting open body language, maintaining relaxed eye contact, and most importantly, wearing a warm smile. 

2. Then show strength

To trust your leadership, people also need to believe you can make things happen. Referred to as strength by psychologists, this characteristic is assessed within 300 milliseconds, just a short moment after the warmth assessment. A positive strength assessment cultivates trust in your leadership competence, promoting engagement and support. A negative assessment generates unhelpful outcomes according to the research of social psychologist and TEDx sensation Amy Cuddy, and her colleagues. They showed that low strength assessments induce feelings of pity, or even contempt. 

The good news is that positive impressions of strength can be cultivated by adopting confident and expansive body language – think level chin, straight back and avoiding a stooped or contracted posture. Speaking at a measured pace with a lower tone and pitch also signals strength.   

3. Seek the and

Whilst strength and warmth are each important in their own right, it’s the combination of the two that produces the very best leadership. We especially like and trust leaders who can make things happen and who care about us, not just themselves. It’s a throwback to hunter-gatherer times when we needed our leaders to get the best outcomes for the entire tribe.

Unfortunately, body chemistry, neural wiring, and social conditioning make it difficult for approximately 70% of leaders to consistently demonstrate both warmth and strength, instead preferencing one over the other. It’s helpful for these leaders to identify which characteristic they’re weaker in, and then make it the focus of deliberate personal development.      

4. Avoid mixed signals

When it comes to first impressions, the human brain is like a sensitive smoke detector. To keep us safe, it’s designed to pick up on the weakest of signals and err on the side of caution. Should your body language, facial expressions, words, or verbal cues send conflicting signals about your warmth or strength, a strangers’ brain is biased towards making a negative assessment of your intentions or your competence. For example, an otherwise warm and confident welcome accompanied by fidgeting suggests nervousness, which is either a result of low confidence (low strength) or something worrying you that you are not declaring openly (low warmth).

My advice to leaders is to record themselves when presenting, or in virtual meetings, and then examine their behaviours to identify any mixed signals they may be sending. 

5. Beware distraction

Leaders are typically busy, moving rapidly between tasks and meetings, and filling up the gaps with messages, emails and phone calls. You may have even seen a leader fail to acknowledge others arriving in the office, meeting room or Zoom call, because they were busy finishing off something else. Unfortunately, it also says “I care less about you than what I am currently doing”. It’s also a sure-fire way to create a low-warmth impression.

My advice to leaders is this: if you are there, be fully there. Give others your full attention. If you’re not yet able to do that, don’t enter the meeting room or activate the Zoom call. Finish your task, then bring your attention fully to the people you’re there to engage with.  

We are wired to judge leadership worthiness instantly. Help cultivate the right impressions of your leadership by paying attention to how you show up in those first few moments. Remember: you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression, so make it count.