What is Social Awareness?

Our ability to perceive, adapt, intuit, and connect to ideas as a community is unique to the human species. Transforming ideas into reality takes innovation. The best performing companies of the 21st century are innovative. These companies require leaders high in the skill of social awareness to run them.

According to Daniel Goleman, Social Awareness is your ability to perceive the feelings of other people and how they see the world. AND for high performance leaders it is critical. The success of your career as a leader and your teams success is significantly impacted by your ability to connect to others emotionally.

But WHY?

Because leaders must deliver results for their companies. Results drive profit. People drive results. Emotions drive people.

By understanding the emotions of the people you manage, you can leverage it to better support, motivate and empower teams to deliver solutions that result in success.

Leaders with high social awareness can empathize with others by identify with that person’s feelings and how they may be perceiving themselves in a given situation.

LOVE NOTE: Wondering what type of leader you are? Check out my blog article https://catedalton.blog/2019/01/28/what-kind-of-leader-are-you/

Where to begin?

• Know Thyself. Social Awareness begins with Self Awareness. It is the third component of emotional intelligence for a reason. For a leader to empathize, they must have experienced and come to understand their own emotions. Only then can they recognize them in others. Check out my previous blogs for some tips on how to proceed!
• Identify Emotions. As you interact with others, try to identify the emotion that is impacting another’s perspective on a situation. They may be optimistic about an outcome because they are feeling joyful or content. They may be pessimistic because they are angry or afraid. OR somewhere in between.
• Empathize. As it was said among native american tribes many years ago, you don’t understand another until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. Can you remember a time when you were driven by the emotion you identified? How did it effect your own perception?
• Relate. Share your experience and relate it to the feeling that drove you. How did you overcome the difficulty? Or if it was a celebratory time, how can you congratulate or acknowledge the accomplishment?

Remember, you and those you are surrounded by are worth your time and attention. Give both freely as you strengthen your emotional intelligence!

Thoughts? Please share in the comments section. Be well!