Social intelligence, or a person’s ability to intelligently recognize and respond to the various facets of a social situation, is especially critical in the workplace. The workplace is a fundamentally social environment! Your social relations with your coworkers, boss, and subordinates all influence your life, so knowing how to socialize should be one of your top priorities. Here are a few baseline tips for improving your social intelligence!

Practice Self and Social Awareness

Self awareness is typically defined as your awareness of yourself – your emotions, morals, motives, and how you interact with the world. On the other hand, social awareness can be best summarized as your ability to recognize, understand, and appropriately react to various social situations.

Self and social awareness come naturally to some of us — and can be a daily struggle for others. Regardless of your inclinations, however, it’s still important to take the time on occasion to practice proper self and social awareness. This means focusing on how you respond to various situations and triggers, practicing active listening, making sure you are accurately understanding others’ feelings and intentions.

Empathize

Empathy is more than listening to someone vent and offering your support – true empathy requires you to really understand where someone is coming from, from their point of view. To understand why they feel how they do, and how they came to the conclusions they have, even when you dislike their or disagree with their opinions.

In the workplace, empathy is sadly easy to forget in the rush for results and personal success. We see our coworkers, bosses, and staff as nothing more than cogs in the great work machine – and it’s not healthy! Remember that not everything is a competition; that it’s worthwhile to open yourself up to someone else’s emotions and experiences once in a while.

In fact, if you take the time to make yourself more accessible and approachable, or to take a step back and consider certain situations from the perspective of someone else, you may find your workplace will become a more open and welcoming space.

Avoid Social Pitfalls

I’m sure you’ve seen it before: the negative social side of the workplace. We’re talking about drama, complaining, holding grudges, selfishness, peer pressure, and pointless criticism for the sake of pushing others down and pulling yourself up. The negative side of social interactions, the ones that often keep us from opening up socially, are also those that are most damaging to our ability to enjoy a well-connected, social workplace.

Part of practicing good social intelligence is to learn to weed out your own negative social habits and how to react in a calm, healthy manner to others’ negative sides (namely, how to avoid them, ignore them, and prevent them from affecting you).

Offering advice and empathizing with others is good, but don’t let the drama in someone else’s life affect or influence you own. Instead of complaining, try to think constructively, and come up with possible solutions to your problems. Instead of being overly-critical of another’s work, remember that no one sets out to fail or do poorly.

With the advent of the internet, online interactions, and the birth of a whole slew of social media options, it’s easy to see how people in the modern workplace have begun to lose their ability to interact properly in face-to-face social situations.

However, that doesn’t mean that the importance of social interaction – and therefore social intelligence – has decreased. In fact, people with a high level of social intelligence are more likely to find happiness and success – both in the workplace and in their daily lives.

Tips for Improving Your Social Intelligence in the Workplace