Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success - Softcover

Albrecht, Karl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0470444347 ISBN 13: 9780470444344

Verlag: Pfeiffer, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Karl Albrecht defines social intelligence (SI) as the ability to get along well with others while winning their cooperation. SI is a combination of sensitivity to the needs and interests of others, sometimes called your “social radar,” an attitude of generosity and consideration, and a set of practical skills for interacting successfully with people in any setting. Social Intelligence provides a highly accessible and comprehensive model for describing, assessing, and developing social intelligence at a personal level. This book is filled with intriguing concepts, enlightening examples, stories, cases, situational strategies, and a self-assessment tool – all designed to help you learn to navigate social situations more successfully.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Karl Albrecht is a management consultant, executive advisor, futurist, researcher, speaker, and prolific author. In his twenty-five-year career he has worked with many kinds of businesses, government, and nonprofit organizations in a wide range of industries world-wide. He has consulted with senior executives and lectured to conferences on all inhabited continents. He is the author of more than twenty books on various aspects of individual and business performance, including Brain Power: Learn to Improve Your Thinking Skills; The Northbound Train: Finding the Purpose, Setting the Direction, Shaping the Destiny of Your Organization; The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational Intelligence in Action; and co-author of the best-selling Service America!: Doing Business in the New Economy, widely credited with launching the “customer revolution” in the U.S. and abroad, which has sold over a half-million copies in seven languages.

He devotes much of his effort to finding and developing promising new concepts for both organizational and individual effectiveness. His research and development activities have spanned a wide range of issues, from individual creativity all the way to corporate strategic vision. He is widely regarded as a key thought leader in the field of emerging strategic business issues. He can be contacted at www.KarlAlbrecht.com.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

What is Your Social I.Q.?

"Every day I meet leaders with very high mental IQ's and very low social IQ's. Social Intelligence shows why it is important to have both! It is filled with wonderful stories and examples that show what social intelligence is and, more important, how to develop yours. This book is recommended reading for any leader and any coach."
―Marshall Goldsmith, co-editor, The Leader of the Future and Global Leadership

"In Social Intelligence Karl Albrecht engages us in a lively, insightful, and compelling exploration of the most crucial of human competencies. Full of real-life examples, a memorable framework, and practical tools and skills, Social Intelligence is a must-have guide for navigating our way through the sometimes mystifying, sometimes hilarious, and always stimulating world of person-to-person interactions. You will laugh, nod, go 'hmmm,' and just plain enjoy yourself. Hurry up and buy this book. You'll want to read it before your next encounter with a fellow human."
―Jim Kouzes, co-author, The Leadership Challenge

"The constant interaction between human beings is a complex, dynamic phenomenon. Powerfully convincing, Albrecht's Social Intelligence brilliantly adds another facet of understanding to why some succeed with people and others don't. His S.P.A.C.E. interaction theory was especially fascinating. What a remarkable contribution!"
―Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

"Karl Albrecht pulls from a lifetime of experience to make his model come to life. He is a master storyteller, and pulls on his eclectic knowledge of films, politics, and even Popeye to get his points across. You will dog-ear and highlight every other page!"
―Beverly L. Kaye, co-author, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay and Love It, Don't Leave It: 26 Ways to Get What You Want at Work

"Every day I meet leaders with very high mental IQ's and very low social IQ's. Social Intelligence shows why it is important to have both! It is filled with wonderful stories and examples that show what social intelligence is and, more important, how to develop yours. This book is recommended reading for any leader and any coach."
—Marshall Goldsmith, co-editor, The Leader of the Future and Global Leadership

"In Social Intelligence Karl Albrecht engages us in a lively, insightful, and compelling exploration of the most crucial of human competencies. Full of real-life examples, a memorable framework, and practical tools and skills, Social Intelligence is a must-have guide for navigating our way through the sometimes mystifying, sometimes hilarious, and always stimulating world of person-to-person interactions. You will laugh, nod, go 'hmmm,' and just plain enjoy yourself. Hurry up and buy this book. You'll want to read it before your next encounter with a fellow human."
—Jim Kouzes, co-author, The Leadership Challenge

"The constant interaction between human beings is a complex, dynamic phenomenon. Powerfully convincing, Albrecht's Social Intelligence brilliantly adds another facet of understanding to why some succeed with people and others don't. His S.P.A.C.E. interaction theory was especially fascinating. What a remarkable contribution!"
—Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

"Karl Albrecht pulls from a lifetime of experience to make his model come to life. He is a master storyteller, and pulls on his eclectic knowledge of films, politics, and even Popeye to get his points across. You will dog-ear and highlight every other page!"
—Beverly L. Kaye, co-author, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good People to Stay and Love It, Don't Leave It: 26 Ways to Get What You Want at Work

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Social Intelligence

The New Science of SuccessBy Karl Albrecht

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2006 Karl Albrecht
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-44434-4

Chapter One

A DIFFERENT KIND OF "SMART"

"There is one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." -Victor Hugo

Surely, each of us knows at least one person, and probably several, whose company we do not enjoy. Not rarely do we hear people say things like:

"I dread having to visit my parents this weekend; I just know my mother will pick a big fight with my father, and she'll criticize me the whole time I'm there. I don't even know why I still go to visit them. Guilt, I suppose."

Others may say things like:

"I hate my job; my boss finds fault with everything I do. I guess I'll have to start looking around for something better."

Or:

"Maybe we should kind of 'forget' to invite him to go out with us. If he goes along, we'll argue all night."

Or:

"I feel like we should invite her to join us for lunch, but I can't bear to hear about her divorce one more time. She can't seem to talk about anything else."

Most of us can more adroitly spot deficits in social intelligence on the part of others than virtues-I know it when I don't see it. We may unconsciously gravitate toward people who have it, but we consciously steer away from those who don't. And those in between, at the middle of the scale of interpersonal competence? We can "take them or leave them."

How many people consider their parents or close family members a negative influence in their lives, rather than counting them among their best friends? How many people have parted company with their families, at least emotionally if not physically? How many parents complain that their children neglect them or seem to have no desire to visit them?

People who enjoy close and supportive family relationships often seem baffled by the difficulties others describe in dealing with their close kin. But even within so-called happy families, certain individuals may treat others in ways that alienate them.

Conversely, most of us have at least a few acquaintances we consider special-people with whom we feel comfortable, respected, affirmed, and cared about. Put two examples of the extremes side by side for a moment-compare a person you tend to avoid with a person whose company you eagerly seek out, and contrast their behaviors. It quickly becomes obvious, not only that one person simply behaves in a more positive, supportive way than the other, but you also get the sense that the positive person somehow knows more about people than the negative one. The positive ones seem to "get it"-they understand people and their interactions reflect that understanding, more than simply consisting of some set of "nice" behaviors.

What we will call social intelligence in this book consists of both insight and behavior. We seek to understand human social effectiveness at a level beyond simple formulas-beyond saying "please" and "thank you," beyond the normal social courtesies, beyond the so-called "people skills" supposedly valued in the workplace. We seek to understand how highly effective people navigate social situations so skillfully, and how they know-at least most of the time-how to engage others in ways appropriate to the context.

To begin with a working definition, we can think of social intelligence, or "SI," as:

The ability to get along well with others and to get them to cooperate with you.

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES?

I've often heard people I deal with every day-from teachers, trainers, personnel people, and conference organizers to business managers, consultants, publishers, editors, and journalists-express a kind of automatic, stereotyped reaction to the phrase "social intelligence." Frequently such a person will say, "Oh yeah-'people skills'-very important in today's world."

By slotting the concept of social intelligence into an old familiar category and recoding it with an old familiar name, they risk misperceiving its potential significance. This sense of the simple and familiar may have held back the perception and understanding of SI as a more deeply layered, more comprehensive view of human affairs. An expression from the ancient tradition of Zen philosophy advises:

"The biggest obstacle to learning something new is the belief that you already know it."

Academic researchers and theoreticians have chewed on the notion of social intelligence for decades, with mostly ambiguous results. As far back as 1920, eminent researchers such as E.L. Thorndike tried to identify a unique set of skills, separate from those associated with the traditional idea of intellectual intelligence, that could measure a person's social competence, and possibly predict his or her success in dealing with others. In the other camp, "IQ" pioneers like David Wechsler, as early as 1939, argued that "social intelligence is just general intelligence applied to social situations." Attempts to correlate measures of sociability with the early intelligence tests yielded inconclusive results. Academics have kept themselves profitably occupied ever since, trying to deconstruct the concept of social effectiveness into an acceptable set of dimensions, or categories, in hopes of designing scientifically rigorous ways to measure them.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and we ordinary civilians have struggled on our own to define the essence of social effectiveness. In the business world particularly, personnel experts, trainers, consultants, executives, and managers have sought to define practical social skills, presumably for the purpose of helping their employees develop or improve, or at least to select the ones who "have it" and place them in the right jobs. This search has also met with relatively limited success.

For many years, and particularly over the past few decades, business educators have talked often about "communication skills," "interpersonal skills" and "people skills," usually with very little in the way of working definitions to support their conversations. For example, many employee performance evaluation forms include a section on communication skills, but mostly leave it to the worker's boss to assess a dimension of performance based on subjective impressions and opinions. Lacking a comprehensive operating definition of these skills, managers and others have little to rely on other than a sense that "I know it when I see it."

Frequently, if I ask a manager who assesses an employee as having poor communication skills, "What particular skills do you see as lacking, or in need of development?" the manager may think for a moment and then begin to enumerate certain specific malfunctions he or she has observed. They can often identify certain behaviors and idiosyncrasies they consider ineffective or dysfunctional.

However, if I ask the same manager to enumerate a fairly complete set of skills that make up the package of "people skills," he or she will typically struggle with the challenge. After quickly listing the obvious and familiar skills such as listening and explaining things clearly, the inventory typically degenerates to a vague set of personality...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pfeiffer
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470444347
• ISBN 13: 9780470444344
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland