Managers and Employees
To take the lead in promoting creative, collaborative, and productive work lives by changing the organizational culture.
Social intelligence has recently jumped onto the radar screen of HR departments. Research on social connections in the workplace shows, for instance, that a small increase in social cohesiveness in a work group leads to a significant jump in productivity, and greater capacity to think outside the box to solve complex problems. Social connection builds trust and energizes employees, to work hard and make wise choices on the job. A socially intelligent work force improves the bottom line through greater, job satisfaction, lower turn-over, and increased customer satisfaction.
Click here to read more about why organizations need social intelligence.
Google tackles unconscious bias
Google has developed its own unconscious bias training to help promote workplace diversity.
See the video below to learn more, or read this article.
Parents
To teach their children how to navigate their social worlds, find ways to love, and learn how to trust the love of others.
Social intelligence is an ability we are born with, but it must be nurtured by caring parental guidance from the start of life. During the first three years of life, a loving responsive parent is critical to the child developing a foundation of trust in close relations. New parents need to understand that they are essential to their child’s social development. Socially intelligent parents also that the teenage years are a critical time for social development. The adolescent brain is rapidly learning to make choices and often suffers from consequences the child did not anticipate. Parental guidance is needed, more than ever, during these years to help their child’s social development as they emerge into adulthood. There is no final time when parental attention is no longer needed, but to be sure, guidance during the first 26 years of brain/social development of their children is especially important.
Middle School, High School, and University Staff and Students
To help our youth enter adulthood with a clear understanding of the value of relating to others, the capacity to form lasting friendships, and the willingness to leave loneliness behind.
Students face many challenges as they develop their identities. Beginning in middle-school, their social lives are shaped increasingly by their interactions with others in their schools. In response to fear of failure, painful encounters with fellow students and teachers, as well as positive experiences, each child learns to adapt. Sometimes, the adaptation is to go–it-alone. Loneliness is pervasive among adolescents and young adults. Bullying others, and physical violence is another reaction to the threats and challenges that emerge as students struggle to develop their social identities. Research shows a steep decline over the past ten years in empathetic concern and perspective-taking among American college students. School cultures are also moving increasingly toward selective attention to purely cognitive development, and a disregard of social development. Our society is now paying the price of inattention to the value of finding the humanity in one another with the alarming increase in school violence. This trend can be reversed by providing social intelligence training for both educators and their students.
Click here to read more about why students and schools need social intelligence.
Social Emotional Learning Framework for Schools
Read the full Harvard 2012 SEL Report to learn more social and emotional learning (SEL) in schools and the role of policy.
Military Veterans
To navigate the transition from active duty through rediscovering the complexities of social relations in family and civilian work life, and finding again the pulse of social connection within community.
The transition from military life to civilian life is challenging on many levels. Many returning veterans initially experience a profound disconnect with a society that doesn’t remotely resemble the war-torn countries where they have been living. In addition, they have left behind close relationships with fellow soldiers and face the daunting task of finding new friends and reestablishing close family ties in the civilian world. Developing a sense of self in relation to others in their new environment is crucial to their well-being and their capacity to adapt to new challenges at home, at work, and in their communities. Learning the lessons of social intelligence can serve as a bridge from camaraderie at war to social connection in peacetime.
Criminal Justice
To provide a restorative alternative to incarceration through diversion.
The problems of those committing crimes of aggression, whether it be toward strangers or loved ones, are complex. They defy simple solutions. Yet too often, the court offers only a single alternative to jail time – an expensive anger management course. Social intelligence (SI) training offers a comprehensive approach to learning how to successfully navigate one’s social world, and does not rely on lesson plans with impulse control exercises and sterile lectures on the misuse of power. Instead, SI training leads people to find ways to break patterns of reactivity, and build a social identity as an aware person who understands the humanity in themselves and in others.
To prevent juvenile deliquency through early intervention.
Click here to read more about how social intelligence can address juvenile deliquency.
Care Providers and Healthcare Workers
To meet the challenge of providing patient-centered care, and advancing the culture of the workplace as a caring community for all involved.
Empathy is an essential ingredient of all quality client/care worker relationships. Research shows that emphatic communication skills are associated with increased patient satisfaction, improved adherence to therapy, decreased medical errors, fewer malpractice claims, decreased burnout, and increased quality of work-life. Yet current training in patient management is often insufficient to fully prepare health professionals for the difficulties they will face in sustaining a working alliance with those under their care. Their clients need guidance in finding friends and sustaining the relationships they form. The health care workers themselves have similar needs. A social intelligence program, grounded in strong neuroscience evidence, will advance the quality of the lives of staff and patients alike.
Behavioral Health
To understand how to re-enter community life and fully engage with co-workers, family, and friends while charting a course to sustain their physical health and mental health.
Behavioral health programs have long trumpeted “recovery” as the singular focus of efforts to improve the prospects of those with disabling mental health and substance abuse problems. However, the best hope for those troubled by behavioral health problems is not a return to a former state of normalcy, but to learn from past mistakes, and chart a future that provides meaning and value to their lives. Clients need to know how best to re-engage at work, at home, and within their communities. They also will encounter bias and neglect of their humanity from others. Understanding these challenges, socially intelligent staff can mentor them effectively, showing them the way forward.
You and Me
To learn to connect with others and feel a sense of belonging.
Too often we treat loneliness as a defining feature of our lives that we are powerless to change. With social intelligence, we pursue a new way of understanding ourselves and our relationships. When we feel lonely, our minds are sending us an important message; it is time to connect. We each have a social self that flourishes not in isolation but in concert with trustworthy others. We are not meant to be isolated, but working and living with others. The neuroscience evidence for humans as social animals is undeniable. To build the capacity to see ourselves as social beings who can choose to allow others into our lives, we need to embrace a new way of seeing our identities: Not as self-centered organisms, but people concerned with ourselves and others.