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Chapter 3. The Neuroscience of Social Intelligence: Guiding Leaders and Managers to Effective Relationships

The mere mention of the word “connectedness” usually makes leaders shudder. Leaders are usually task oriented, and given their own degree of competence, they often prefer to control the variables that can impact productivity. As a result, they choose to work on their own. Relationships in life are challenging enough in general, so why bring them to work? But as businesses have evolved, and as large institutions have failed and small businesses are trying to rise, it has become clear that several crises could have been avoided if social variables were taken into consideration. Teamwork, for example, works well if the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is, there is a team effect independent of the additive effects of each individual component.

The definitions of “social intelligence” start to elucidate why social intelligence may be important in the workplace. The original definition is attributed to Edward Thorndike and is described as” the ability to understand and manage men and women, boys and girls, to act wisely in human relations.”
¹
Karl Albrecht defines social intelligence as the ability to get along well with others while winning their cooperation.
²
Furthermore, Albrecht described a five-part model of social intelligence that includes situational awareness, presence, authenticity, clarity, and empathy.
²
Daniel Goleman, a more recent
writer on the subject, and one who has researched the subject and been highly influential in the field, included the following in the definition of social intelligence: empathy, attunement, empathic accuracy, and social cognition and social facility (including synchrony, self-presentation, influence, and concern).
³
From these definitions, we can deduce that social intelligence is an intelligence that relates to a two-person situation. Therefore, any situation that involves two people (friendship, love, seller-buyer) would benefit from an understanding of social intelligence.

Goleman, in an article on the biology of leadership in the
Harvard Business Review
⁴
outlines some important implications of having higher social intelligence, such as less emotional exhaustion and a 6% increase in sales. Furthermore, he also describes how top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did mid-performing leaders, and that new C-level executives who had been hired for their self-discipline, drive, and intellect were sometimes later fired for lacking basic social skills.

This highlights the fact that social intelligence variables are of relevance to leaders in the following ways:

• Fostering positive feelings in employees to help retain them.

• Fostering positive feelings in employees to help increase productivity.

• Fostering positive feelings in employees to help increase cooperation.

• Fostering feelings of trust and decreasing anxiety in employees.

• Fostering feelings that support the leader’s cause and mission through a sharing of this mission.

• Fostering feelings of fairness, which has been shown to have dramatic consequences in economic decisions.

• Fostering hope and optimism and decreasing fear impacts productivity.

• Boosting morale and adding to the productivity through an increased sense of shared responsibility.

•
Taking the strain off of individuals and allowing for creativity through association.

In fact, this is precisely what another recent article in the
Harvard Business Review
outlined.
⁵
The authors argued that 20 years from now, Boomers, Generation Xers, and Millennials will still be around. They predicted that Millennials will be a teamwork-oriented group of people different from the more alienated Gen Xers and more focused on “teamwork, close family relationships, [and] job security....”

Cross-organization collaboration has also been stressed in another article in the
Harvard Business Review
, and teamwork training has been emphasized as a vital and important part of this.
⁶
McKinsey partners, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, have explained that the essence of optimal teamwork is shared commitment and that an effective team is always worth more than the sum of its parts.
⁷
In fact, nonrational processes have been deemed to be critical for top management decisions.
⁸