Sophisticated Social Skills and Leadership
These are the skills underlying social intelligence.
The basic emotional skills that we just looked at have verbal/social skill counterparts:
Social Expressiveness, Social Sensitivity, and Social Control. Social Expressiveness is verbal speaking skill and ability to engage others in social interaction.
Social Sensitivity. This skill is complex and includes listening ability (verbal decoding skill), knowledge of social rules and an awareness of how one’s behavior impacts others.
Social Control is sophisticated social role-playing skill. It is related to being tactful in social situations and is what we think about when we say that someone is “socially competent.”
As mentioned earlier, these three skills are some of the basic elements of social intelligence. Social expressiveness (SE) and social control (SC) are the two skills that our research has shown are most predictive of leadership emergence (attaining a leadership position) and leader effectiveness. On a future day, we will consider these two skills in combination and look at them in depth.
Social sensitivity is tricky because it includes ability to “read” and understand social situations. In extremes, however, it can lead to an over-concern with one’s own social behaviour and can lead to a sort of self-consciousness. Again, when it comes to possession of these sophisticated social skills, high levels are important, but the skills should be “in balance.”
For Development: At this point, reflect on how you perform in leadership situations and in other sorts of social settings. What do you think your social skill strengths are? Which areas are ripe for improvement? We will look at strategies to develop all of these basic skills later.
