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Social Awareness
In my model of emotional intelligence, the third part is social awareness, which in one sense means sensing how your organization works. It’s a kind of systems point of view. But I think as a leader, what matters more is empathy, how you tune into your people, the people around you, the people above you, to the side, below you. And tuning in has three parts. One is cognitive empathy, understanding how that person sees the situation, what their perspective is. It’s walking a mile in their shoes, as the proverb says. You’re able to sense the language or mental models a person uses as a frame on reality. What language do they use to explain what’s going on to themselves? If you have high cognitive empathy, you can message quite well. You can hit the target with what you say to the person because you know the language that they understand.
The second part is emotional empathy, and this has to do with the design of the social circuitry in the human brain. The brain is designed to lock into the brain of the person in front of us and to create a pathway that’s instantaneous, automatic, and unconscious for what that person is doing, intending, and feeling. This lets us know what the person feels because we feel it too. We get an inner signal that tells us what’s going on with the other person. And this helps us keep our interaction on the same page, on target emotionally.
The third part of empathy, which I think is really important for leadership and all too often just ignored, is caring. It’s called technically empathic concern, and it means I know what you think, I know what you feel, but I also care about you. And so leaders have to have this ability to communicate that they care about the person, they’re concerned about them. This, by the way, builds huge trust, huge rapport between a leader and the people they lead.
Listening
One of the common colds of emotional intelligence is poor listening. We think about what we want to say, and we don’t really listen to the other person. We cut them off. We interrupt. Let’s say you wanted to change that. This is a basic of empathy, listening well. So if you want to learn to be better at empathy, you might say, well, my habit, and I’ve done it thousands of times, is cutting people off and interrupting. I’m going to make the effort to do it differently. I’m going to listen to the person out, say what I think they mean, and then say what I think. What you’re doing is creating a feedback loop from the other person, which we usually don’t get. We just make assumptions about how they think or feel and act on those assumptions. What you’re doing, though, to strengthen empathy is testing out your assumptions. Was I right in how the person feels in what they’re, how they’re thinking about this or not? And if you keep doing that, it becomes a corrective. You get better and better and better.
That is a different behavioral sequence, and it comes down to the basics of what we call neuroplasticity, how the brain changes with repeated experience, and that’s what underlies habit change. It’s a little like, crossing your arms in a new way. Cross your arms in the old way, please. Now cross them with the other arm on top. That feels uncomfortable. That’s what it’s like to change a habit. But as you persist, it gets more and more comfortable, until finally, it’s an automatic habit that will stay with you for years.