72 - Social Skills & Emotional Intelligence

The last pillar of emotional intelligence is social skills or what some refer to as relationship management. In my opinion, I don’t think you need to be a particularly social individual to be a great leader, but you do need to have strong social skills to be an effective leader. That’s also the opinion of many leadership experts and why we find social skills as the final and four pillar of emotional intelligence. But, what does it mean to have social skills?

I think sometimes we believe when thinking about social skills it means that we know how to make friends or how to get people to “like” us. We think of it in almost a superficial type of way. However, that is not really what having social skills means; it is a lot deeper than that. Once you have social awareness as a leader, then I believe that social skills are the application of your awareness.

For instance, leaders who have great social skills or relationship management skills excel with conflict management. They know how to use their skills to improve relationships despite conflict. Exceptional leaders even know how to improve relationships because of conflict as they learn how to negotiate flawlessly. Leaders with social skills know their teams are watching and learning from this as well.

In my opinion, conflict management is something most leaders struggle with at first and often, struggle with throughout their career. Whether you are in the conflict yourself or have team members in conflict, this can be a challenging aspect of leadership. The ability to settle these disputes and misunderstandings makes you an effective leader with strong social skills.

I find that we tend to avoid conflict as humans. Now, you may be reading this thinking, “well, I don’t.” That might be so now, but you never have? I know I have but I do not anymore. In fact, I went from one end of the spectrum to the other and now, I am in the middle.... where do you think you fall?

Join me on this episode as I share my evolution of social skills and wrap up this five episodes series on EQ and ask for your opinion.

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