BUILD-OUT 2: SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Social Intelligence, as with the other MI dimensions, has been knocking about the academic community for many years. Early researchers debated whether they should consider it simply a sub-skill, or a talent, under the broad umbrella of IQ-type intelligence, or whether it deserved a separate identity. (Questions like this, by the way, are exceedingly important to researchers, some of whom get considerably worked up about these theoretical distinctions.) Several books dealing with SI, either directly or tangentially, have appeared in the academic press and the popular press over several decades, but none seems to have captured the attention of a very large readership. My book, Social Intelligence:The New Science of Success,3 arrived on the planet in late 2005, as an attempt to clarify the body of knowledge, help people assess their own SI status, and prescribe some learning methods for increasing one’s SI. My hope was that Social Intelligence would serve as a bridge between the academic world and the worlds of business and private life. My intent was to present neither an academic work nor a breezy “self-help” book; I hoped to establish a credible conceptual foundation, and at the same time present a “how-to” approach that might be personally useful to readers. My particular interest in SI, according to my yellowed research notes, traces to about 1985, although I only recently began to apply that label explicitly. I was interested in developing new ways to help business people increase their personal effectiveness, and it seemed to me that the pop-science label of “people skills” tended to devalue the “wisdom” component I felt could be clarified and developed. By about 2000 I had finally evolved a descriptive model or framework (perhaps I’m a slow learner in some ways), which I believed could capture the “intelligence” aspect of human interaction, while incorporating the common sensical features of social skills we’ve always understood at a practical level. I evolved a model of SI with five components, embodied in the acronym “S.P.A.C.E.,” which means: The Possible Human 35 S = Situational Awareness; “reading” situations, people, interactions, and contexts.
P = Presence; also known as “bearing”; how one presents one’s self in situations.
A = Authenticity; behaving honestly, with integrity, and from a clear sense of self.
C = Clarity; skill at asking, telling, persuading, and getting one’s ideas into the minds of others.
E = Empathy; the skill of connecting with people, on a personal and meaningful
level; getting them to move with and toward you rather than away and against you.
I also developed a self-assessment questionnaire, the Social Intelligence Profile, for use by educators, trainers, coaches, and business leaders to understand their individual competencies and developmental needs.4 Curiously, about a year after the publication of my book, Social Intelligence:The New Science of Success, Daniel Goleman released his own book Social Intelligence:The New Science of Human Relationships.5 (The use of an identical title and a near-identical subtitle for a book following so closely on the heels of another is a rare practice in publishing, and somewhat mysterious in its reasoning.) Goleman had been thinking about social intelligence as possibly a separate dimension, on a par with emotional intelligence instead of included within it.This cleavage of the Goleman model into two distinct parts caused somewhat of a theoretical brain cramp, inasmuch as the EI build-out was more than ten years underway, and devotees of the Goleman theory had been working hard to keep EI and SI welded together in the same structure. As of this writing, it’s too early to anticipate the impact of Goleman’s change of position on his EI theory or to predict the development of EI and SI as a result of the conceptual realignment. My view is that the realignment will help clarify and simplify the study of both EI and SI, and possibly rather soon.