How to Establish each person's nonverbal baseline

In low-stakes check-ins, pay attention to how each direct report normally sits, speaks, gestures, and uses eye contact. Write one plain sentence after the meeting. You have a baseline when you can describe their normal without adding a judgment.

For each person, note which behaviors seem habitual, such as frequent fidgeting, quiet delivery, or limited eye contact. Before reading into a cue, ask whether they do this all the time. The practice works when stable habits stop triggering false alarms.

Build separate baselines for one-on-one, group, and video settings. Compare like with like when someone seems off. You are doing this well when you stop reading a quieter group presence as a problem just because the person is more animated one-on-one.

When someone's role, workload, team, or personal situation changes, reset your baseline instead of treating every difference as a warning. Revisit your notes after a few routine conversations. The signal is that your read matches who they are now, not who they were months ago.

Before a skip-level, panel interview, or shared review, brief the other manager on observable habits that could be misread. Keep it fair and specific, such as a person taking long pauses before answering. It worked when the colleague avoids a wrong read they would otherwise have made.