How Are You Smart About People?

As Dr. Richard Boyatzis, psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University, and his colleagues have pointed out, leadership in the workplace is ultimately a matter of personal skills that have to do with self-awareness-realizing the difference between your ideal self and your real self, and then bridging the gap through step-by-step learning. Here’s the basic principle: intelligence takes many forms. We are all familiar with intelligence quotient (IQ), and in recent years, concepts such as emotional intelligence and social intelligence have been popularized by Daniel Goleman, author of the bestselling Emotional Intelligence, and Richard Boyatzis, among others. We’ve stopped asking the increasingly meaningless question, “How smart are you?” and have begun to ask, “How are you smart?” There are multiple “smarts” as Howard Gardner, Robert Ste berg, and Thomas Armstrong have shown us in their books Frames of Mind, The Triarchic Mind, and Seven Kinds of Smart, respectively, subsequent works. We now accept concepts as intellectual bandwidth, intrapersonal intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, moral intelligence, and more. We’ve found in our work that there is also such a concept as ConnectAbility. This is the capacity for understanding the framework of a multitude of human relationships and for operating authentically within that complex challenge. Those with ConnectAbility enjoy much greater success in all types of dealings because they see beyond the momentary human interactions to the desired business outcomes. This involves understanding human interaction within the context of continuing communication and commerce. It means seeing relationships as essential components of the business dynamic, each unique in its needs and contributions. The business community has come to embrace this concept more and more each year. One tool that has helped in this respect is customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM systems have become so commonplace that an entire subculture has grown up around them. International conventions now exist strictly for the exploration of concepts and practices that establish, expand, and sustain relationships over time. What used to be simply a Rolodex information, or database, has now become a complex system among systems for keeping people connected, for example, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others. We’ve advanced into the understanding and anticipation of people’s needs and interests to such an extent that it has taken on the trappings of a science in today’s world of business.