There’s a moment in Erica Dhawan’s talk at this year’s Leadership Forum that stays with you long after she steps off the stage.

“We are all digital immigrants.” Not because we’re new to technology, but because we’re all learning, together, how to communicate in ways humanity has never experienced before. We wanted to understand what that means, not in theory, but in lived experience.

So we sat down with Erica for a conversation that felt less like an interview and more like a journey through the last three decades of how we read each other, trust each other, and work together. What follows is not just her story. It’s a guide for anyone trying to navigate cross-cultural communication, digital collaboration, or the invisible signals that shape modern work.

Erica begins not with credentials but with childhood. “I grew up in the US, the daughter of Indian immigrants,” she recalls. “At home we spoke Hindi. When I went to school, my English had a strong accent. Raising my hand or drawing attention to myself felt impossible. I was painfully shy.” Her story shifts from personal memory to a universal lesson:Shyness, and strangeness make you observant. Observation can make you fluent in signals others overlook. “That shyness was my first teacher,” she says. It taught her to read body language; the small, silent cues that often speak louder than anything we say aloud. Her sensitivity became a skill, then a field of study, and eventually a mission:helping leaders see what’s not being said yet shapes everything.

When communication moved online, something changed for all of us.

“It wasn’t just face-to-face anymore,” she explains. “Email, chat, and video calls brought new forms of ambiguity. Body language didn’t disappear, it evolved.” In her book Digital Body Language, Erica challenges a myth we often believe without questioning: digital communication is efficient. Yet every delay in answer, every punctuation choice, every emoji, every platform carries meaning.

A fast reply can signal urgency.

A short message can imply frustration.

A period at the end of a sentence can feel… cold.

We’re all learning to read these signals. Which is why Erica insists: “We are all immigrants in the world of digital body language.” We are beginners, navigating a new language together. And like any immigrant experience, success requires openness, patience, curiosity, and empathy.

Growing up between cultures gave Erica adaptability and an edge. “I can sense differences quickly,” she says. “Not just in words, but in context.” She advises people who work with people from different countries to “be proactive in understanding different cultures, don’t take anything for granted and ask questions.”

She shares an example from a client: An American manager emailed mid-level colleagues in India directly. He thought he was being efficient. They thought he was being disrespectful and bypassing hierarchy. Even the CC order mattered.

Another story: A Brazilian team, warm, emoji-loving, informal, found their German manager cold and distant. He wasn’t cold. He simply had a different digital accent.

These stories highlight a truth we rarely articulate: online, cultural differences don’t disappear, they amplify.

Understanding digital accents is now a critical soft skill for anyone working globally.

Erica’s term Connectional Intelligence captures something powerful: innovation doesn’t happen alone. It happens when diverse knowledge connects. She tells the story of a group of chemists stuck on a toothpaste formula problem.

Months of trial and error. No results. One of them then posted the challenge in an open scientific forum.

A physicist – not a chemist – solved it in a day.

“It wasn’t even a chemistry problem,” she says. “It was a physics problem.”

The lesson: To solve modern problems, we need to build bridges across skills, cultures, generations, and contexts.Connectional intelligence is the ability to create those bridges. Those connections.

When Erica speaks about generational gaps, the conversation becomes almost humorous because we’ve all lived these moments. Gen X looks at Gen Z and Gen Alpha texts with confusion, Gen Z looks at the Gen X texts with criticism and calls them “Boomers.”

Those who grew up with email communicate differently than those who grew up with TikTok, the differences in digital communication styles and meanings can create misunderstanding.

A period at the end of a sentence? To older generations: proper writing. To Gen Z: emotional distance.

A smiling emoji 🙂? To most: politeness. To younger workers: passive-aggressive.

Slack vs email.

Voice notes vs texts.

Formal vs. brevity.

Long single messages vs multiple short ones.

“Gen Z Communication style changes every few months,” Erica warns. “Staying current is nearly impossible.”

This is where team cohesion, or team friction, is born.

Global leadership today requires being a “bridge builder” learning to interpret these shifting signals without judgment.

Dhawan confirms that generational and cultural diversity need to be embraced not only ethically but as a motor for growth.

She cites research showing that in meetings, the first three people to speak take up 80 percent of the time. “And they are usually the most senior,” she notes. This silences younger voices, creative voices, foreign voices, diverse voices.

But digital spaces, if used intentionally, can change that. We can harness this diversity of voice as a strategic advantage.“The digital world gives us the chance to be more inclusive than ever,” she says.

If we are aware of it, design for it, listen for it. If we create space for more accents – digital, cultural, generational – to be heard. Perhaps this is what it means to be “digital immigrants”: making space for, and learning a language made of curiosity, empathy, and mutual understanding. Connectional Intelligence.

Our conversation with Erica Dhawan revealed a truth that feels especially relevant today: we are more interconnected than ever and that connection depends on how we communicate, not just what we say. It depends on our connectional intelligence and cross-cultural awareness.

At Maka, we support companies and professionals who face the world every day. We know language is only the first step to digital communication. Behind every word there is an unspoken world: there are cultures, generations, expectations, tools, emotions. And like any new language, you don’t learn it alone. We’re here to help you turn communication into connections – across cultures, across generations, and across the digital divide.