Expanding our observations

To all the new subscribers this week: thanks for joining us!

We’re on week four of our Emotional Intelligence Series. Check out the archives for the first, second, and third issues of the series.

We’re exploring social awareness this week. We discussed the beginnings of awareness in week two when we looked at self-awareness. Self-awareness helps you understand yourself more effectively, so you can alter your behaviors to be in control of your actions instead of being led by your emotions. Social awareness is similar, but it involves understanding others more effectively.

We’ve all been there. You’re sitting with a group of colleagues, and everyone is laughing and joking. Then, suddenly, a comment is made, and there’s complete silence. You hear someone mutter, “They really should read the room better.”

But what does that even mean? Social awareness is all about reading the room. Or understanding the emotions and feelings of the other people you’re interacting with. If someone is upset, they may not be in the mood for a playful story. Social awareness is your ability to identify and understand the emotions of others.

How social awareness helps you lead:

As the quote above by Theodore Roosevelt suggests, working with people is incredibly important for everyone, and I believe it is the most important ingredient for leadership success. Leadership is about achieving things through the collective efforts of everyone on the team. You can’t motivate, inspire, coach, train, and develop someone you don’t understand. The emotions, perspectives, and motivations of your employees will greatly impact your ability to lead them successfully.

Social awareness is the first step toward demonstrating empathy and understanding your employees and colleagues. Picking up on social cues can help you squash an argument between two employees before it even happens. Or it can allow you to speak candidly with an employee before they act on their frustrations and quit their job. Social awareness helps you manage and lead your people more effectively.

The Benefits of Social Awareness

• Stronger communication based on real-time awareness, which allows you to tailor your message to the emotions of your team.

• Better team dynamics created by proactive team building and conflict resolution tactics.

• Better decisions made by leaders who are in touch with the physical and emotional needs of their team.

• More influence & trust developed by leaders who show empathy and understanding when employees are struggling emotionally.

Enhancing your social awareness skills will help you to build stronger connections, become a more effective communicator, and foster stronger team dynamics. The ability to support and manage your team and their emotions is what distinguishes great leaders from those who are merely mediocre.

How to practice social awareness:

Your social awareness skills may be harder to identify and assess than your self-awareness skills. That’s because we often fail to look at our workplace relationships as more than transactions. Over the next week, I encourage you to focus on workplace relationships as a valuable means through which you can improve yourself and others. Practicing social awareness will help you connect with others and grow your influence in your organization.

I’ve included four tactics below to help you practice your social awareness skills. These can all be used together, and they work best when you choose a specific time, place, and interaction to devote toward practice. Practicing in a trivial meeting is better than a meaningful one at first. In fact, you can even schedule some ad-hoc conversations to really crank up the practice opportunities you have available.

1. Practice reading body language. This is where it all starts. Body language is the secret method supercommunicators use to navigate interactions with one another. If someone is nervous, you can see it in their actions. The same can be said for someone happy, upset, sad, or any other emotion. Some people are harder to read than others, but when you couple body language with the answers to your thoughtful questions, you can begin to build a picture of how someone is really feeling.

2. Practice active listening (shoutout to Mr. Hemingway above). This is something I’m sure you’ve heard before. But, hear me out. I struggled with this at first. What changed for me was scheduling meetings with the specific intent of not talking, but listening and asking questions. Rather than turn a regular meeting into a practice session, I would ask an employee to give me a 15-minute update on their progress. This allowed me to focus on listening or asking thoughtful questions. Do this intentionally a few times, and you’ll start incorporating the skill into all your interactions. All it takes is a little practice!

3. Develop empathy through curiosity for others. The best way to develop empathy is by asking questions and trying to truly understand someone, their emotions, and their perspective on the situation. Just because you wouldn’t get upset at someone throwing away your favorite coffee mug, doesn’t mean it isn’t the worst thing that could ever happen to someone else. Be curious and try to understand your people before you get furious and tell them how they should feel about a situation.

4. Practice in real-time or at the movies. We all love some good people watching. Next time you’re at the mall or out for dinner, try to imagine what conversations are happening around you based on the cues you pick up. Is the couple happy and celebrating something, or are they upset and dealing with an argument? Is that person stressed, tired, or upset with their meal? You don’t have to leave your home either. You can do the same thing with characters on TV.

As you can probably tell by now, each of these four tips is meant to work in concert with the rest. You read body language while speaking to others, practicing active listening, intending to empathize with the other person. You can practice these skills while out and about, or you can schedule deliberate meetings with colleagues to hone your skills. Scheduling 15-minute coffee chats to learn more about a person is one of the best ways to enhance your social awareness skills. It takes practice to master anything!

Next week, we’ll put your social awareness to use when we explore relationship management!

There is a wealth of fascinating information and interesting stories available regarding emotional intelligence. If you want to dive deep into the world of EQ, I recommend two books for you to check out:

• Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. (We’ll be revisiting this one next week!)

• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Dr. Travis Bradberry and Dr. Jean Greaves. This is still the best resource. (I hear 3.0 is coming out soon!)

Before you leave:

Good luck becoming more socially aware this week! I’m always here to help you out should you ever be in need. Just shoot a reply!

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel for more content like this and other leadership topics!

Get ready for the next issue of our emotional intelligence series, coming out next Tuesday. We’ll be moving outward from social awareness and putting our practice into action, managing our relationships.

And, one last thing to check out…

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

Sign up to start learning.