Team Development…

…We can characterize SI as a combination of a basic understanding of people - a kind of high level social awareness - and a set of skills for interacting successfully with them. A simple description of SI is: … the ability to get along well with others and to get them to cooperate with you…

Separate Page for Team Development Content:
Multiple Intelligences – Social Intelligence
‘"SI" is perhaps best understood as one of a whole range of interwoven competencies. For some years now, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner has been preaching the idea that human intelligence is not a single trait, as the devotees of the IQ cult have always claimed. According to Gardner, we humans have seven or eight distinct intelligences, or primary dimensions of competence. Even the public education establishment has come to accept Gardner's view, at least in principle. How well they apply the concept to educational design remains an open question.
With due regard to Professor Gardner's contributions, and also with an eye toward making the "MI" concept accessible beyond the academic realm, it's time for us to officially recognize it and bring it into our everyday consciousness.
The first step in understanding social intelligence is to place it into the context of Gardner's MI categories. While Gardner uses rather scientific sounding labels for his categories - verbal-logical, mathematical-symbolic, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and musical - we probably do little harm by recoding them into street language and simplifying them conceptually. Indeed, Gardner has recently been toying with additional categories which make his model a bit more arcane. For our purposes, we can settle on a distilled version of his admirable theory.
It is helpful to rearrange Gardner's "multiple smarts" into six primary categories:

 

 

Category

Description
 

A

Abstract Intelligence

Symbolic reasoning
 

S

Social Intelligence

Dealing with people
 

P

Practical Intelligence

Getting things done
 

E

Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness & self-management
 

A

Aethetic Intelligence

Sense of form, design, music, art, literature
 

K

Kinestheric Intelligence

Whole-body skills such as sports, dance, flying a plane

Next at Bat: Social Intelligence

If we can construct a model for describing, assessing and developing social intelligence, or "SI," then we can add another important piece to the MI model.
We can characterize SI as a combination of a basic understanding of people - a kind of strategic social awareness - and a set of skills for interacting successfully with them. A simple description of SI is:
… the ability to get along well with others and to get them to cooperate with you.”
Adapted fromDr. Karl Albrecht is a management consultant, executive advisor, futurist, speaker, and a prolific author. As chairman of Karl Albrecht International, he oversees the practical application of his concepts through a consulting firm, a training firm and a publishing company. He has written more than 20 books on organizational and personal effectiveness. He is the author of the best-selling book Brain Power: Learn to Develop Your Thinking Skills, as well as the creator of the popular "Third-Wave Thinking" course.
A careful review of social science research findings, ranging from Gardner and Goleman to Dale Carnegie, suggests five key dimensions as a descriptive framework for SI:
in practical terms it makes more sense to think of EI and SI as two distinct dimensions of competence. Social intelligence (Gardner's "interpersonal intelligence") is separate from, but complimentary to emotional intelligence (Gardner's "intrapersonal intelligence"); we need both models in order to understand ourselves and the way we interact with others. Some deficits in SI arise from inadequate development of EI; conversely, some deficits in SI may lead to unsuccessful social experiences which may undermine a person's sense of self-worth which is part of EI.
According to Karl Albrecht "I think of the six primary dimensions of intelligence - Abstract, Social, Practical, Emotional, Aesthetic and Kinesthetic - as analogous to the six faces of a cube. Each presents a distinct facet, or face, of one's total competence. We can think of them as separate for purposes of discussion and analysis, but actually they are intimately interwoven."

Social Intelligence

“The most fundamental discovery of this new science: We are wired to connect.
Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us impact the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.
Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming emotions in us, some desirable, others not. The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force. The most potent exchanges occur with those people with whom we spend the greatest amount of time day in and day out, year after year—particularly those we care about the most.
During these neural linkups, our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings. Our social interactions operate as modulators, something like interpersonal thermostats that continually reset key aspects of our brain function as they orchestrate our emotions.
The resulting feelings have far-reaching consequences, in turn rippling throughout our body, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate biological systems from our heart to immune cells. Perhaps most astonishing, science now tracks connections between the most stressful relationships and the very operation of specific genes that regulate the immune system.

To a surprising extent, then, our relationships mold not just our experience, but our biology. The brain-to-brain link allows our strongest relationships to shape us in ways as benign as whether we laugh at the same jokes or as profound as which genes are (or are not) activated in t-cells, the immune system’s foot soldiers in the constant battle against invading bacteria and viruses.
That represents a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on our health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.

Virtually all the major scientific discoveries I draw on in this volume have emerged since Emotional Intelligence appeared in 1995, and they continue to surface at a quickening pace. I intend this book to be a companion volume to Emotional Intelligence, exploring the same terrain of human life from a different vantage point, one that allows a wider swath of understanding of our personal world.
When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, my focus was on a crucial set of human capacities within an individual, the ability to manage our own emotions and our inner potential for positive relationships. Here the picture enlarges beyond a one-person psychology—those capacities an individual has within—to a two-person psychology: what transpires as we connect.

Take, for example, empathy, the sensing of another person’s feelings that allows rapport. Empathy is an individual ability, one that resides inside the person. But rapport only arises between people, as a property that emerges from their interaction. Here the spotlight shifts to those ephemeral moments that emerge as we interact. These take on deep consequence as we realize how, through their sum total, we create one another.”

From the prologue to Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

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