This article mainly
discuss about the importance of being "social intelligent". Social
intelligence is, as the authors say, exhibit empathy and attuned to other's
moods. First I noticed that what they call "social intelligence" is
almost same as "kuukiwo-yomu(空気を読む)" in Japanese. In
Japanese society, people are expected to guess how others feel and take action
according to it. The ultimate of this is "ishin-denshin(以心伝心)"、in which people don't need
words to tell their feeling or situation, because they know each other well.
However what we need in leadership is not to shut their mouth and rely
connection based on nonverbal communication, but good and active communication.
To take the example of Janice, abilities to communicate with management and peers,
create moods that employee will enjoy their work and feel little frustration to
the work or boss. Thus, the Japanese style of communication goes too far from
becoming social intelligent. Now, the questions goes to can we apply social
intelligent to Asian culture or Japan. After some discussions with my
classmates we noticed two key features that successful leaders in Japan have in
common. One is the frequent use of complimentary words. Especially when you
have to provide give negative feedback to the employee, delivering with
positive moods or negative moods will make great difference on employee's
future performance. Harvard Business Review (HBR) also provided some techniques
to deliver this in positive moods. "Weigh the trade-offs, Keep your tone
collaborative and help her get in the right mindset" as the websites says
is what we need to be care of ( http://hbr.org/tip/2013/07/05/deliver-negative-feedback-with-care )
. These clearly show that leader needs to be socially intelligent in order to
manage their employee and that is not easy jobs. The other one is smile, as
this article shows smile will activate others' mirror neuron which will overall
create happy moods. Happy moods will create comfortable working environments
since workers have sympathy to each other and can achieve better productivity.
As
conclusion, leaders should be very careful on how they interact with their
employees and peers. Lack of ability on communication will dramatically reduce
the capabilities as leader.
I agree with you. In the last class we talked about if we can apply the social intelligence skills from the reading to our life in this Asian culture. I thought it's difficult to do it but as you said, generaly it is said that Japanese people already have those ability to empathize with others so what we need is a little bit of improvement rather than completely changing our styles.
ReplyDeleteHi Xiaotian,
ReplyDeleteThanks for two great posts. I appreciate knowing about your background and hometown, and it is interesting to me that it is close enough to Korea to be influenced by it foodwise, And I like your summary of the Social Intelligence article too and the additional link, which led me to other links and interesting readings.