Category: Communication

Effective leaders can ‘read the room’ and ‘take the emotional temperature’ of a group interaction. They can figure out when to enthuse and how to diffuse.

Their social awareness skills make it possible for all voices to be heard and everyone’s contributions to be noticed.

Being attuned to the team dynamics amplifies their trust factor and therefore other people’s willingness to follow their guidance.

Social awareness is about understanding others’ behaviours, motivations, thinking processes and emotions.

It’s also about knowing how your words and actions affect others.

Social awareness is a leadership ‘must-have’ in the emotional intelligence (EI) skillset.

Whether you aspire to the 4, 5 or 12 elements of EI, social awareness always appears in the top 3 of every list.

And it’s a key step in the transformation to team effectiveness.

Daniel Goleman describes socially aware leaders like this:

“They’re the ones who understood what was going on with their teams, not just on the ‘what work is getting done’ level but on the ‘how is the team working together’ level. Those same leaders likely were skilled at interactions with others, able to present themselves well and powerfully influence their team.”

He also suggests 4 ways that socially aware leaders ‘get’ others:

1. Primal empathy – sensing nonverbal emotional signals like the facial expressions and gestures that say more than the words.
2. Attunement – listening attentively and being receptive to what the other person is saying or suggesting.
3. Empathic accuracy – clearly understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
4. Social cognition – understanding how the social world works beyond individual interactions.

Could you say that you practise these often?

How about the 4 components of social awareness that sports psychologist Eli Straw offers:

1. Empathy – being sensitive to and showing concern for the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of others.
2. Perspective – looking through the lenses of other people and seeing that what’s happening is not the same as it is for you.
3. Respect – for opinions, beliefs, motivations and values that are different to yours and therefore prompt different responses to yours in the same situations.
4. Compassion – taking action, putting yourself out so that others can benefit.

If you don’t, then add developing them to your next professional performance plan.

The Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley University studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being. It promotes social-emotional learning (SEL) and lists these as social awareness skills:

• Identifying social cues to determine how others feel
• Understanding and expressing gratitude
• Recognising others’ strengths
• Identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones
• Recognising situational demands and opportunities
• Caring about and being motivated to contribute to the well-being of the group

But even when you already have these skills, it can take many months to learn about someone and reveal yourself to them when you just take turns in the ‘walk a mile in my moccasins’ approach.

Especially when each person has a different style (glittery gold high heels aren’t for everyone!).

What are the cues to look for? How can you show care for the group’s well-being when empathy doesn’t come naturally to you?

You may not be able to fully understand or share the same feelings as others but you can acknowledge that something is important to the other person and make choices about how you respond.

Here are some tips for tuning in:

Verbal Cues

1. Tone of Voice: A change in tone, such as a rise in pitch or volume, can tell you when someone is feeling excited, frustrated, or concerned. You can communicate your understanding by matching it or by deliberately using a different tone if, for example, you need them to express themselves more calmly.

2. Word Choice: Take a moment to really consider what words are spoken or written. Is the other person saying what they think, or what they feel, or what they want to do? If they’re sharing their thoughts they’re probably seeking yours about the same topic, not your feelings (we cover this in True Colors training).

3. Pacing and Speech Patterns: Rapid speech may convey excitement or anxiety, while slow, measured speech could signal thoughtfulness or deliberation. Like with tone, you could match it or encourage a change with the patterns and tempo of your own responses.

Nonverbal Cues

4. Facial Expressions: Subtle changes in facial expressions, such as furrowed brows, smiles, or narrowed eyes, can convey a range of emotions from happiness and surprise to confusion or distress (check out this course).

5. Body Language: Open and relaxed gestures, posture, and body movements usually indicate comfort and confidence. Closed-off postures, such as crossed arms or fidgeting, may suggest discomfort or defensiveness. How do you want the other person to feel in your presence? Your body language will influence theirs.

6. Eye Contact: A person’s level and duration of eye contact can offer clues about their engagement and emotional state. Direct eye contact may convey confidence and attentiveness, while avoiding eye contact could signal discomfort or disinterest. Cultural habits can also influence eye contact, so don’t assume disrespect or disregard.

7. Gestures and Hand Movements: These provide extra context to spoken words. For example, waving arms enthusiastically may convey excitement or passion, while clenched hands might indicate nervousness or anger.

8. Stress Signals: Often our colleagues’ SOS (signs of stress) look, sound and feel nothing like our own. When you recognise an SOS, you can stop adding to the burden and offer help. Stress can be headaches and neck pain. It can also be erratic behaviour, non-compliance, disappearance and energy drops.

Contextual Cues

9. Environmental Factors: Consider where the interaction is taking place. Noise levels, lighting, airflow, temperature and proximity to others can influence people’s comfort and consequently their behaviour.

10. Social Dynamics: Observe how individuals interact with each other and respond to social cues. Who seems comfortable with whom? Who seems to be dominating the conversation? Who is quiet? Who is laughing and what makes them chuckle? Where are people sitting/standing/hovering/ in aspect to each other? How does this scenario compare with previous ones – do you see patterns emerging?

Consistency and Inconsistency

11. Consistency: Because it’s interpreted as certainty and predictability, you need this to build and maintain trust. You want trust in your leadership.

Sometimes a person’s words may not align with their body language or tone, indicating other emotions or intentions under the surface. This inconsistency can trigger your ‘spidey senses’ and prompt you to question further, be on your guard, rethink your initial impression or change your response.

If your verbal and nonverbal cues are inconsistent, you’ll stir the same wariness in others.

Social awareness is critical for the transformation to team effectiveness.

That’s why True Colors goes beyond the self-awareness that is the focus of many other personality profiling and temperament typing systems.

After self-identifying values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs, these insights are shared to help teammates become more socially aware of each other.

In my True Colors workshops we also look at recognising the stress signals that others send out.

If you would like help exploring the effects felt in your team when some people are not very socially aware…

And what you can do to improve how differences are valued…

Plus get better at recognising and responding to different stress signals…

Tap the button below to book a complimentary and unconditional Tell Me More call.

Tap back to Communisence for more practical tips

 

 

A sense of belonging is a fundamental human need. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid?

IRI Consultants’ Director of Business Development Jennifer Orechwa says,

“Belonging is right in the middle of Maslow’s list. Belonging is a powerful human need that drives behaviors, leading people to form connections with friends and co-workers. Belonging in the workplace means feeling valued through positive connections with others and able to bring the authentic self to work. People are always looking to develop a sense of connection in their personal and work lives because that is how they validate their feelings and fulfill the need of belonging.”

It’s a pretty important need to be met when so many hours of a day, your week and the year are spent together.

Especially if your self-identity is tied to your job, how you define yourself, why you get out of bed every day.

And if you moved far away from family and existing support networks to make money and your career dreams come true.

It’s not like you all have to be friends, but it helps a lot if you feel recognised for the unique value you bring and you can understand the nuanced language.

And you shouldn’t have to modify your behaviour and views to the point of discomfort or diminished self-esteem.

What is belonging and why does it matter so much?

Workplace belonging, according to QUT psychology researchers Wendall Cockshaw and Ian Shochet, is about how much a person feels accepted, respected, included and supported in an organisation.

Great Places to Work research revealed that employees who feel a sense of belonging at work are:

• 3 x more likely to look forward to being at work
• 3 x more likely to say their workplace is fun
• 9 x more likely to feel treated fairly regardless of their race
• 5 x more likely to want to stay

Belonging is confidence to share the aspects of your authentic self that you want to.

And yet, Better Up’s Value of Belonging at Work study found that 25% of employees feel they don’t belong at their workplace.

Belonging is about whether people want to stay on the team or if they feel alien, rejected, or isolated and want to leave. So they do.

And then you have recruitment and retention distractions.

How will you fill the vacancy and keep current productive people longer?

Employers of people who experience belonging at work have a 50% lower turnover risk.

What would that mean for your HR budget?

Rejection is the antithesis of belonging. University of Michigan neuroscience studies found that the brain processes rejection like it does physical pain.

What’s mental health recovery costing your team or company?

Tony Bond, executive vice president, chief diversity and innovation officer at Great Place to Work, describes belonging as “an accumulation of day-to-day experiences that enables a person to feel safe.”

And Harvard Business School researchers believe belonging is critical for psychological safety, which improves team dynamics, decision-making, innovation and creativity.

Can you afford not to consider the impact of belonging on your bottom line?

How can you tell if a team member feels like they don’t belong?

If your people are not telling you directly how much or how little they feel they belong, a sense of NOT belonging can look, sound and feel like this:

• Empty chairs – they don’t attend meetings or other activities
• When they do, they don’t say much and avoid eye-contact
• Low productive output, delays and missed deadlines
• Avoidance of collaborative tasks
• Starting early and leaving late to avoid all the greetings and goodbyes and having to walk with others to get away
• Audible sighing in response to requests, directions, and ideas
• Always questioning the purpose of ideas or actions – trying to figure out if the ‘why’ matches their own sense of what’s important

And this:

• Bugging you for feedback constantly (to check if they are on par with peers and have your approval)
• Overpleasing, overstepping and overdoing so they are obvious and not as invisible or insignificant as they feel
• Copying the exact habits and choices of coworkers, and discarding their individuality in a desperate bid to ‘fit in’ or ‘blend in’ (sometimes to the point of creepiness)

Hult Ashridge Executive Education found a sense of not belonging at work is:

“about feeling ‘different’ to others, lacking commonality with colleagues and feeling that we are not adding value in our roles and in our teams. When these factors collide in organisational cultures, which are hierarchical, political, and lacking in trust and psychological safety, they can become magnified and people struggle to know how to deal with them.”

How do you help team members feel like they belong?

One of the reasons I love delivering the True Colors program for teams is because it’s all about creating unity from valuing differences.

Each workshop allows participants to explore and share what matters to them at work, to articulate their values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs to help bring out their best selves.

When we recognise the different values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs that matter to the people we work with, we can self-moderate our responses to their behaviours.

That’s the key to true self-awareness and emotional intelligence.

And a sense of belonging.

If you’d like your team to build a true sense of belonging, let’s talk about a True Colors workshop to get started. Tap the button below to book a complimentary and unconditional Tell Me More call.

Tap back to Communisence for more practical tips

 

 

You can have high internal self-awareness of your own values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll inherently have high external self-awareness, which is understanding how others shape their ideas about you and what matters to you.

High internal self-awareness correlates to elevated job and relationship satisfaction, happiness and social interaction enjoyment.

People with high external self-awareness are more empathetic, open to others’ perspectives, and attract more trust and confidence in their abilities.

So, why does having a high level of internal AND external self-awareness matter?

Feeling misunderstood, undervalued and unappreciated at work leads to frustration, disengagement and underperformance.

Tensions tighten. Paranoia pervades. Stress levels soar.

Mistakes and missed opportunities result from the poor decision-making of un-self-aware leaders and lemmings.

But…

When we know and can articulate the values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs that matter to us, our team leader and workmates can help bring out our best selves.

And…

When we recognise the different values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs that matter to the people we work with, we can self-moderate our responses to their behaviours.

This quote by clinical social worker Shelley Aronov-Jacoby sums it up beautifully:

“Having self-awareness gives us the power to influence outcomes; helps us become better decision-makers and gives us more self-confidence. We can communicate with clarity and intention, which allows us to understand things from multiple perspectives. It frees us from assumptions and biases.”

In Ray Dalio’s Principles, the billionaire hedge fund entrepreneur talks about the high level of self-awareness needed to make the best decisions; and that means embracing our realities, including our mistakes and weaknesses.

The #1 ‘must-have’ for leaders

Self-awareness – internal and external – is a key step towards recognising and valuing difference to achieve unity within a group of diverse personalities who are working together for a common purpose.

It’s one of the common domains of that leadership ‘must-have’: emotional intelligence (EI).

Whether you read about the 4, 5 or 12 elements of EI, self-awareness always appears on the top of the list (it’s still evolving since the Goleman and Johari models).

Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich’s multi-year study (involving more than 5000 participants) found that while 95% of people believe they are self-aware about how they’re perceived, only 10-15% truly are.

Her research also revealed that self-awareness is lower among people with more power. That’s a worry!

It’s been more than 50 years since social psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund theorised this psychological concept in A Theory of Objective Self-Awareness.

They described it as:

 “The ability to focus on yourself and how your actions, thoughts, or emotions do or don’t align with your internal standards. If you’re highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.”

Although, a few thousand centuries ago the ancient philosophers nailed it with “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” (Lao Tzu) and  “Know Thyself” (Socrates).

More recently, a Harvard Business Review study by professors Erich Dierdorff and Robert Rubin found that un-self-aware colleagues can halve a team’s success prospects. They collected data from 300 leaders and 58 teams at a Fortune 10 company.

“For teams to perform effectively, each member must possess a combination of technical and interpersonal skills and constantly adjust their contributions to meet the team’s needs. Correctly understanding one’s capabilities relative to others is therefore paramount,” the researchers said.

Self-awareness is where the transformation to team effectiveness begins.

That’s why True Colors is based on a method of self-identifying values, joys, strengths, stressors and needs, then sharing the insights with the people we need to understand us.

Tasha Eurich suggests ‘find their humanity’ as one way to work with un-self-aware colleagues:

“As easy as it can be to forget, even the most unaware among us are still human. If we remember this, instead of flying off the handle when they’re behaving badly, we can recognize that, at the core, their unaware behavior is a sign that they are struggling. We can adopt the mindset of compassion without judgment.”

In my True Colors workshops we also look at recognising the stress signals that others send out, because our colleagues’ SOS (signs of stress) often look, sound and feel nothing like our own.

If you would like help exploring the effects felt in YOUR team when some people are not very self-aware…

And what you can do to improve how differences are valued…

Plus get better at recognising and responding to different stress signals…

Tap the button below to book a complimentary and unconditional Tell Me More call.

Tap back to Communisence for more practical tips