Episode #362: Social Intelligence For Leaders In Covid-19

We admire people with very high IQs, as badges of intellectual prowess. Members of Mensa International are an elite group established in 1946, for people who scored in the ninety-eight percentile or higher in the standardised IQ test. We respect technical experts be they lawyers, medicos, engineers, architects, etc. The thing we desire most is that we be treated well by our boss, Mensa reject or otherwise. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman was a bestseller and we would all prefer that our employers be people who voraciously devoured the gospel according to Goleman, chapter and verse.

The obvious things for leaders are often subsumed by society’s devotion to brainpower. Having social intelligence means being able to get on well with all sorts of other people. It means being the boss the team would crawl across a mile of broken glass for. How do we up the ante on our social intelligence?

We need to invest time in relationships. Too obvious you cry. Really? Busy bosses can be consumed by email, meetings, reporting to the upper echelon and trying to juggle their family responsibilities. In this melee of desired outcomes, the time for the team gets siphoned off and consumed by other competing requirements. If you want a reality check, then just grab your diary and look at how much time you are spending with the individuals in your team. Zoom, WebEx, Teams, etc., based broadcasts to the whole team are absolutely counted as the bare minimum, but do not rate a high score of investing in relationships with individual members of the team.

We need to be having one on one online meetings or appropriately socially distant conversations with members of the team and showing our genuine interest in their well being. Imagining people are goofing off at home and calling them, to call them out on it, is ridiculous in this environment. Social intelligence means assuming everyone is hurting and carrying a heavy load, as they try to jam the square peg into the round hole offered up by Covid-19.

We have transplanted people into their home environments and tried to fool everyone into believing this is now a viable working pod. Kids spiralling out of control while cooped up at home, no proper place to work in the rabbit hutch, that is the urban existence for most Japanese members of staff and this group oriented tribe is now imprisoned in imposed isolation. A boss with a supremely high IQ isn’t much help in this situation. We need our boss to feel genuine care about us.

One of the ways to do this as the boss is to truly listen. Most of us breeze through life powered by the twin carburettors of the “ignore” and “selective” listening skill categories. “I don’t ignore my people”, you wail in the background. Really? When they are speaking and your brain suddenly populates a strong thought about something you need to say or a burning comment you must make, invariably you are now single tasking rather than multitasking and have lost the concentration on what your team member was saying. In effect you have ignored them to concentrate on yourself and your soon to be sallied forth brilliant intervention. Selective listening is slightly more human relations hygienic, but again we are searching for what we want to hear, rather than hearing our people in the entirety of what they want to say.

Respecting people’s opinions is another one of those motherhood statements we all solemnly overlook, because it is in plain sight and not even hiding. Busy bosses though are now working harder and longer than before. The Covid-19 work day is much harder, as we struggle to coordinate things amongst our team. We are baffled by the balance needed between delegation and anarchy.

We have to give people free rein in order to get things done, but they are adventurous and take things in directions we would never have imagined, let along anticipated. We can quickly find ourselves extinguishing the spark of originality and creativity, because they varied from what we expected. We tell them they are wrong, their idea is bad and we reject their opinion on how to get to the mountain top. We forget there may be better ways of doing things, but we jump on them when they freestyle.

Social intelligence trumps IQ intelligence every time when you are the boss. Your people want to know how much you care about them, much more than how much you know. Get on the case now and start talking to your people from a social intelligence frame. This is the magic formula for leading during Covid-19.