The First 3 Steps to Building Social Intelligence
Are you aware that your level of social intelligence will impact every aspect of your career and life?
You should be if you want to lead, level-up, grow, make more money, or get promoted. You will work with people at every stage of your career: peers, interns, managers, executives, stakeholders, direct reports, and job candidates.
Without social intelligence, you will fail at these relationships and fail to reach your goals.
How do we start building our social intelligence?
3 steps:
- Awareness
- Acceptance
- Action
Awareness
You can't build social intelligence if you don't know it exists.
Everything we do involves other people and we can get better in working with them. This ability is social intelligence in a nutshell. From working with stakeholders, to being on a Zoom meeting, to arguments with our spouse, to raising our kids—we are always interacting with another human.
Once you're realize that social interactions are everywhere, you see everything differently.
Acceptance
After becoming aware, you must accept that social intelligence is the key that unlocks the door to your goals.
When you enhance your social intelligence, you will accomplish your goals more easily. You will side-step bad actors, build a positive relationship with your boss, navigate conversations with stakeholders, or manage a diverse team. Doing these things well will result in:
- Pay raises
- Promotions
- Skill building
- Career growth
- Interesting projects
- Leadership opportunities
- Increased value in the job market
Without acceptance, you'll always be a couple steps behind.
Action
Awareness and acceptance don't matter unless you take action.
Building social intelligence may seem intangible but there are many tactics you can use to improve. Every social interaction is a game. In games, we can make moves. Try different moves and tactics to learn what work for you.
Here are a couple tangible actions you can take to start building social intelligence:
- Next time you're talking to your boss, ask yourself, "What do they value?"
- Ask a peer or stakeholder what their weekend plans are, then ask about it again on Monday.
- Have a conversation with someone and only ask questions for the first 10 minutes.
- When someone does something that rubs you the wrong way, ask yourself why it bothers you and what drove that person to do that thing.
The point of these actions is to get you to start understanding people better.
If you understand their motives and way of thinking, you'll learn how to change your approach to reach your objectives.
Don't leave your social life up to chance, be intelligent about it.