There’s a reason greetings feel harder than they used to. “People work remotely more and have less opportunities to practice the skills of interacting and having these first-time conversations,” says Jessica Goldberg, an executive coach who teaches leadership and communication skills at Columbia University and specializes in body language. Add in post-pandemic touch wariness, shifting workplace norms, and an expanded menu of options—fist bumps, cheek kisses, elbow taps, the dreaded too-close hug—and a basic hello can feel like a high-stakes negotiation. Here’s how experts say to navigate it.
First, the eyes. “Are they warm? Are they looking at you, or are their eyes darting across the room? Are they guarded?” she asks. “You can see a lot in the eyes.” Then check the other person’s feet and body orientation. Someone walking straight at you—body squared, feet pointed in your direction—is engaged. “They’re probably excited to have that conversation with you,” Goldberg says. Someone whose feet or torso are angled away, on the other hand, is signaling distraction or hesitation, even if they’re smiling.
If you’re still unsure after checking those cues, there’s a safe default: Let the other person lead. “No one’s going to be offended if you don’t initiate it,” says Dr. Tiffany Field, founder of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. Following the other person’s lead is almost always the safer call.
Match the greeting to the situation
The first is relationship warmth. How close are you to the person you’re greeting? Think of it like a spectrum: Best friend on one end, stranger on the other. Next, consider the formality of the setting. A boardroom meeting or work dinner sits high on the formality scale; a college reunion or team retreat sits lower. From there, the rule is straightforward. “The higher formality, the lower the warmth: Those are ones where we’re going to want to default to a wave or a handshake,” Goldberg says. “And then the higher the warmth and the lower the formality, we’re going to want to potentially give a hug.”
And when a workplace hug is unavoidable—like when someone comes barreling toward you with open arms—there’s a safer way to execute it. “Just think grandmother hug,” says Blanca Cobb, a body language and human behavior expert in Greensboro, N.C. In other words: two feet of space between bodies, lean from the hips, shoulders only. No chest-to-chest contact—regardless of who’s hugging whom. Side hugs can work, too. The goal is warmth without ambiguity. In early interactions, err formal—you can always warm things up later, but you can’t unhug someone.
“The easiest thing to do is to control your own cues,” Cobb says. “You don’t have to worry about milliseconds and microseconds and whether you’re reading this person right.” Instead of trying to become an amateur body-language analyst in the four seconds before contact, you can simply decide what you want to do—and make it clear enough that the other person can follow.
Goldberg has her own tips for controlling the moment. Lead with verbal warmth before anything physical happens, she suggests—a “Hi, so good to see you” paired with a wave is an easy on-ramp, and you can always escalate to a handshake or hug from there. (Backing down from a hug attempt, on the other hand, is much harder to do gracefully.) She also recommends slowing down slightly as you approach. Most people rush into greetings, she says—the fix is to “take the dial a half a notch down.”
Rethink the “I’m a hugger” announcement
A lot of people try to solve the greeting puzzle with a preemptive declaration: “I’m a hugger!” Cobb’s take is that this is a well-intentioned mistake.
Her fix is to add a question. Instead of “I’m a hugger,” try: “I’m a hugger. How do you feel about that?”
There’s a critical follow-up rule, though: If you ask, you have to accept the answer. “If you force yourself, you’re possibly going to close down the communication,” Cobb says. “You’re probably going to leave the other person with not the best impression of you because they’re feeling like they don’t have a choice.”
What to do when you both go in for different things
The most powerful way to recover is to address it head-on. “If you don’t make it a big deal, then it doesn’t become a big deal,” Cobb says. Something as simple as, “I misunderstood, let’s shake hands” tends to dissolve the awkwardness almost instantly. “That usually leads into some chuckling on both sides, and the other person’s like, ‘Don’t even worry about it,’” she says. “It humanizes it.”
Don’t take it personally if someone declines touch entirely. People have a thousand reasons for keeping their hands to themselves: germaphobia, their cultural background, a recent illness or injury, sweaty palms, past experiences with unwanted touch, or simply not being a physical-greeting person. “There’s just so many different things,” Glass says. “You cannot take this personally at all.”
The bottom line, Cobb says, is that you have more control over these moments than you might think. “We should take ownership of that first physical interaction, whether you want it or you don’t want it,” she says. “We don’t have to wait on the other person. We don’t have to let it be a guessing game.” Four seconds is enough to read someone—and, she says, it’s also enough to decide how you want to greet them.
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