Body English speaks volumes

Actions speak louder than words - and yours might be giving you career-limiting labels. JULIE MIDDLETON reports.

Judi James used to have a boss who was ... well, a baby.

"He behaved like a big baby," says the chatty, 42-year-old Ms James, down the line from her North London home.

"Because he had on his clueless act - it's highly manipulative - all the secretaries were acting like his mother.

"You found yourself talking like his mother, wanting to ask if he had a vest on."

Epiphany came the day James found herself filling a plate for her boss: "I felt like tipping it over his head."

Former model James - chatty, funny, self-deprecating and impressively switched-on - is the author of BodyTalk at Work: How to use effective body language to boost your career (Piatkus, $69.95), a new book explaining in short bites how your behaviour at work can help or hinder.

Readers are helped to assess their current image and common poses, postures and signals, develop body-reading skills and strategies, and deal with specific situations such as meetings, presentations and potentially dangerous away-from-work activities. It's Ms James' latest in a long line of best-selling self-help books and "sweeping sagas - bonkbusters."

Tempering a serious message in BodyTalk at Work is Ms James' trademark wit. The book - free of the irritating exclamation marks and fake case studies of American self-help tomes - points out that many people fall into career-limiting stereotypes in the office unconsciously, or because they are unwittingly pushed.

Call it pack dynamics, she says, but being aware of what your "sight bite" conveys is crucial to career success.

Some of the image stereotypes to avoid at work are obvious: take the care-bear stance too far and you become the office surrogate mum, destined to wear cardies for all time.

Writes Ms James: "Nurturing is supposed to be high on every working girl's list of 'admirable qualities I bring to the job.'

"Although this is patently utter tosh, the stereotype survives and should not be encouraged."

The "nanny" is invariably female, but the company card - the joker in every pack - is usually male.

Writes Ms James: "Being labelled as the company joker is a bad career move, unless you happen to work for Billy Smart's Circus.

"If the sound of laughter means more to your ears than the sound of money going into your bank account, then crack on with the image, but remember that people at work will often only laugh out of politeness or sheer exhaustion."

The terminally professional - the cold fish - know who they are, and, she writes, "there are legions of you."

"Being professional is one thing, but now and again you do need to prove you are not a hologram."

The Lurker is silent but violent, becoming irritatingly and highly visible for trying to do the opposite.

Everyone can think of an office Dumb and Dumber - the people who like to seem winsomely helpless so they don't upstage the boss.

Warns Ms James: "Once you have dumbed-down, you have dug yourself a pit that you will never climb out of. You will never be seen as an intellectual sophisticate again."

Closely related to the dummies are the genuinely stupid. They don't need to dumb-down.

You'll have a problem here only if the genuinely stupid think they are business geniuses.

Stress junkies are easy to spot - and if you tell the world more than once a day how stressed you are, shame on you, drama queen.

Cool is good in modern business. Flash and dash, stress and mess is very last century.

The complete opposite are the pikes - the world-weary, seen-it-all-before, cynical types who can drag the morale of an office right down.

Isn't this just pop psychology? How can James be so sure these types exist?

"By going out five days a week and working in offices," she says. "They're in virtually every office. "Because I've been training [others] for 20 years, I keep getting this deja vu that I've seen certain people before - but it's the stereotype."

But what's happened to just being yourself?

"That's appalling advice," says Ms James, "given that 55 per cent of perceived character comes from non-verbal communication.

"That's an absolutely set figure. Seven per cent comes from words."

And there's nothing wrong, she adds, with polishing your image.

So into which category would we place James? "Mad," she laughs. "Most trainers crack at some age.

"I've got the attention span of a gnat and I work quickly. I've been asked many times, when I have been doing training, if I have ever been a stand-up comedian."

Never a comedian. But she did start life in the public eye as a 17-year-old catwalk clothes-horse. She later opened a successful modelling school.

Frequently asked to give advice to companies on personal presentation, she also started to study body language and workplace issues. Success stemmed from a command of non-verbal communication, she says - "models have to be quite good at it."

James works for various British corporates from her north London home.