Hello Everyone!

Here is the direct link to my talk.  I spoke to about 100+ people at the Space Telescope Science Institute in September 2009 as part of their colloquium series.  www.stsci.edu is their website.

Click here to see my webcast and  learn more about social intelligence and working with difficult people.

CLICK HERE

Working with people is more challenging than ever.  Every day, we work with virtual teams--sometimes with people we never even see.  Our organizations are being battered by the economy.  There's more competition than ever--even public agencies have competition from companies that want to offer services that used to be 'strictly government'.  For example, we have new companies that want to build spaceships to take scientists and tourists to the Moon.  All of this stress means that we have to even better at working with the people in our organizations so that we can help the organization survive these tough times.

Does being smart help us get along better with people.  The answer is...not necessarily.  In fact, there is evidence that says the MORE traditional education we have, the HARDER it may be for us to develop and use our social smarts.  Think about people that know how to get things done in spite of the conflicts, politics and competition inside your organization.  These people often have high levels of SIQ--social smarts--that we call Social Intelligence..

What Social Intelligence? 

Social Intelligence is  the ability to use our awareness of how others are feeling, reacting and behaving AND to manage our own emotions so that we can create and sustain effective relationships.  People with high social intelligence have 4 critical abilities:

• Understand their own emotions--they know what they're feeling and what triggered it
• Get in tune with others-- they see and understand how others are feeling (empathy!)
• Use their own emotional energy--they feel them, but they don't let emotions take over
  
• Reach out and connect with others--honestly, humanly and directly
  

Working with All of our Brains!

We humans have a complex brain.  We have  the brain stem, the oldest part of our brain, that controls the automatic systems such as breathing and heart beat.  We usually pay no attention to this--unless something startles us or we train ourselves to regulate our body functions with biofeedback.

Our rational brain (neocortex) is the thinking, language processing part of our brain.  The rational brain is always busy planning, observing, solving problems and trying to generate new ideas.  But, it can't really do this without all the data pumping in from one other part of our brain.

A very important part of the brain, the limbic system,  helps us understand the world and make good choices about actions we're about to take.  The limbic system processes information much faster than our rational brain and is sending streams of emotional information.   If we didn't have this emotional information, we'd be lost in a world of information that we just wouldn't know what to do with.  Even worse, we'd lose our ability to have full human experiences.

Keeping a Clear Head Means Using Your Emotions

Without Social IQ, we actually lose the advantages from the other 'smarts' we have. That's because Social IQ helps our brain make good decisions about what's going on around us.  Emotions--even sadness, fear anger and grief--help us stay healthy and clear-headed.  We can learn to be more aware of what's going on inside us and around us. 

In future blogs and podcasts, we'll describe some of these skills.  You can also see a presentation by Carole Lyles Shaw, President of CRG,  about Social Intelligence by clicking on the link and scrolling down the page to recent webcasts.  Carole Shaw Seminar on Social Intelligence

Welcome to my blog.  I'll be publishing short articles and podcasts about working in today's complex organizations.  Check back often for new entries adn please give us your feedback.

Regards,
Carole

Carole Lyles Shaw
Columbia Resource Group