Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break
leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals
through other people.
Technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an
outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional
interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
A leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different
competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results. But
there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter
more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level
executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of
influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got
to motivate, guide and inspire them.
Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the
abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing
competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.
You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or
strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships
or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere.
Social
intelligence is the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.
Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of
competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths
they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.
So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long
track record of satisfactory hires told us how his organisation assessed social
intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions,
meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.
"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone
at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to
her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a
getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person
or engage in a self-centred monologue? At the same time, does she talk about
herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you
know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.
