Social Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence:

"In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the role emotions play in our lives. Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life…" John Gottman

Social intelligence, what some have called emotional intelligence (EQ) and others call social agility, is not a new idea; philosophers and psychologists have been studying the importance of relating interpersonally, being self aware, responding to emotions and maintaining composure for many centuries. What is new is the widespread recognition of its importance to today’s leaders. If you’ve been around business long enough, likely you’ve encountered managers like these: a manager with the best of technical skills and intellect, yet, lacking in interpersonal skills and, is struggling on the job, and, another manager whose technical skills are not at the zenith, yet relationship skills are outstanding and this manager is a soaring success.

Daniel Goleman has quantified the impact of the mix of technical, cognitive and emotional-based leadership competencies on overall success. Reviewing leadership competency profiles at nearly 200 organizations, Goleman found social intelligence competencies, things like teamwork, coaching employee, and influencing others, were twice as likely as other competencies—technical competence and cognitive capabilities—to account for leadership success. Further, the higher up in the organization one explored, the more important these competencies were to predicting overall success.

New research in social neuroscience extends the importance of this construct by demonstrating how followers are impacted by a leader’s behavior at the neural level. Mirror neurons--recently discovered, highly specialized neurons--work quietly and internally to actually mimic the actions and emotions of relevant others in our environment. There's even a specific sub set of these neurons devoted to detecting laughter and smiling in others and responding in kind. Studies confirm the importance of these leadership behaviors on a team: top performing leaders elicited laughter from their teams 3 times more often than average or lower performing leaders.

Despite its popularity and recognition of importance, there are few consistent ideas regarding how to effectively assess emotional/social intelligence and even fewer scientifically proven methods to improving social intelligence. Some researchers argue social intelligence is nothing more than an aspect of personality, and, imply it cannot be changed. Others suggest it is an ability or a skill, and, something that can be developed over time. At Summit, our experiences suggest that we can improve social intelligence and EQ.

Summit Discovery Institute is dedicated to research that further advances our understanding in these important areas of assessment and development of social and emotional intelligence. We seek to:

• Extend research that examines important organizational outcomes (e.g., business success indicators) and its relationship to existing metrics of social and emotional intelligence

• Develop new measures of social and emotional intelligence that further refine our understanding of the construct, and how to cultivate it

• Develop practical, proven methodologies and tools that improve one’s social and emotional intelligence

Areas of research include:

• Personality, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence: differences in definitions, measurement, overlap and similarities of constructs, uniqueness of predictability and correlates

• Development of tools to support understanding one’s emotional intelligence

• Research exploring the measurement of EQ with various methods and tools

• Exploring differences in EQ across cultures

• Exploring the critical factors most important to improvements in emotional and social intelligence

• Understanding how emotions are registered at the neural level and how leaders can use this knowledge to further their organizational and team successes