Developing More Situational Awareness

SUMMARY

Human beings are unique, and although in our vocabulary we've developed names, understandings, and groupings of emotions, not everyone experiences those emotions in the same way. In fact, when people are feeling a certain way, they may even label them differently from you.

So, you need to remember that social intelligence needs to come in, and this is the ability to be aware of what ‘could’ be going on in the emotions of the other person or group. Then, using the skills of reflective listening and having a lot of empathy and understanding, you might actually know what it is that they're feeling.

This week, I will help you develop more situational awareness by being able to use what you understand about your emotions to navigate them in a healthy way.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you find it hard to understand what's going on with the emotional current when working with a group, whether at the workplace, in your community, or anywhere you are working with a gathering of people?

It’s challenging enough to understand what's going on for ourselves emotionally, and we've done a lot of work on that.

So, stick with me because this week, I want to help you to be able to read the room.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation around social intelligence by helping you to develop more situational awareness.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about the area of intelligence that helps us to work with people. We've done a lot of work on our own emotional intelligence and being able to use what we understand about our emotions to navigate them in a healthy way.

However, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, if we apply those same principles alone when working with others, misunderstandings come in and that causes conflict.

We talked about the fact that human beings are unique, and although in our vocabulary we've developed names, understandings, and groupings of emotions, not everyone experiences those emotions in the same way. In fact, when people are feeling a certain way, they may even label them differently from you.

So, you need to remember that social intelligence needs to come in, and this is the ability to be aware of what ‘could’ be going on in the emotions of the other person or group. Then, using the skills of reflective listening and having a lot of empathy and understanding, you might actually know what it is that they're feeling.

By looking through their lens instead of yours, you get the true picture for them rather than going: “Okay, this is how I feel when I experience that emotion.”

“This is how I'm feeling right now, and I'm reading those particular facial expressions or signs and signals from somebody else, so they must be going through the same thing.”

Doing this will enable you to have an accurate assessment and, therefore, remove misunderstandings. When you’re able to do that and be more socially aware, you will get a different result.

We talked about empathy last week, which is the key and most critical social awareness element.

It says: “I want to understand.”

It's not apathy that says: “I don't care.”

It's not sympathy that says: “I feel sorry for you.”

It says: “I'm not sure I know what you're going through, but I'm willing to find out. I'm willing to open my mind and allow myself to seek to understand before getting my point across.”

Now that you’ve got those skills about working with an individual, you need to take that to the next level because when you get into a group of people, you've got all these human beings with their own uncertainties, frailties, fears, and strengths all coming together.

You’ve got the emotions of individuals causing a collective feeling in the room. This can make it a little bit uncomfortable, and being able to ask, work with, and understand one person is challenging enough. Now, you have to get that for all the people that you’re working with.

Unfortunately, when you get this wrong, you don't read the political currents or see the group's influential relationships (the power relationships) and you get hit with surprises in behaviour, and things happen. Whether it's in your workplace or other areas of your community, you will go: “Wow, where did that come from?”

So, having situational awareness is important for a leader to be able to work with people to influence them to go in the direction that you want to take them.

It's certainly a skill that I had to develop. I remember in my corporate career; I was just totally focused on me. I just did my work and was really good at it. But the relationships I built along the way weren't healthy. This is because I was focused on myself, and I put my head down and my tail up, and I just did what I knew how to do really well.

However, to become a different leader who was able to navigate with others, what it is that we wanted to do, I had to learn to not only keep my eyes on what I was doing but to widen my view so that I could see what was going on around me as well.

It reminds me of a scene on the battlefield where someone is looking down range, and they only have a field of view directly in front of them. Therefore, they’re susceptible to being ambushed and flanked from either side or by someone even coming up from behind.

Now, I'm not suggesting that being a VUCA Leader is all about going into battle. Although if you look at the concept, I'm sure you can draw a parity of what you experience on a weekly basis.

The first thing that you and I need to do is to continue to look at what it is that we are doing, but look around and have the spatial awareness and that sensory acuity that says:

“I can feel some other stuff going on right now as well.”

When you're able to have situational, organisational, or community awareness on a larger scale, you are able to identify things before they come up as a problem.

One of the biggest challenges in the business world right now is the attraction and retention of great people.

You may become quite surprised when somebody decides that they no longer want to be part of your team.

You want to make sure that before your team members get to that point, you’ve done some things differently from what you’re doing now that enable you to understand and help them to either stay or (if it's the right thing for them to go) to go.

However, when they leave, it is not in a way that comes as a surprise and puts everybody in an upheaval. Where you now need to find someone to replace them because they left in the middle of a project that’s going on, and it’s going to interrupt that.

So, situational awareness is a key skill of a leader.

How do you develop this?

Firstly, you need to keep an eye on yourself, but you also need to keep an eye on everybody.

I’m not talking about keeping an eye on people in a micromanaging way.

I'm talking about being present and available to see and hear what's going on around you.

We are all busy. Every person I talk to in my work around the world says: “Oh, I'm just way too busy.”

The way I look at this is I had to develop this skill so that I had less time taken away in recruiting new people or having difficult conversations, and all those things that tend to pop up with a lack of situational awareness to going:

“Let's invest this time in a proactive way and put my energy into others, not just into what I'm doing." 

This is why I believe that a leader is totally different to a manager.

A manager manages the process, but a leader inspires and takes people on a journey. So, it's not about ticking boxes and getting tasks done; it's about building relationships. As you are building these relationships, you want to see things from the group's perspective.

We already talked about empathy with individuals. The empathy that I am talking about here is empathy on a larger scale.

So, understanding what your team are feeling right now is critical.

For you to do that, there are a few things that you can bring into your daily and weekly schedule that are going to help you with that.

The first thing is to flip that mindset first and go, “I need to have a wider angled view here.” Instead of having a focused lens that's just looking at where I'm going, I need to use a wide-angled one that captures what's going on around me as well.

The second thing that you need to do is to schedule and block out space in your diary when you have conversations with others.

You can interview your team individually; you can see how they're going. You can do that organically and casually as well as periodically doing that as a purposeful activity.

Now, what that says to your team straight away is: “This person cares about me, not just what we're doing.”

To do this, you need to employ all the skills that we've talked about for weeks and weeks about how we listen, how we take on and respond to feedback, how we keep ourselves in a healthy environment with our emotions, removing those fears and uncertainties and worrying about what other people are saying but listening to them with an open mind.

Remember, just because someone has a different opinion from you doesn't make either of you wrong; it’s their perspective right now.

You’ve probably heard this saying many times: Perception is reality.

Just because you are trying to convince them that it's different, until it actually connects with them emotionally, they're going to see it as different.

Situational awareness is something that we all need to develop.

You need to have an understanding of what could be going on. To do that, you need to be present and available.

You might be thinking: “But here’s something else I need to do.”

However, you need to make time for this because this is investing in the environment that you and your people are working in so that you get more done overall.

So, whilst I would sometimes think: “Well, this is going to take the time I don't have”, I counter it by saying: “No, doing this is actually going to give me more space to get the things done that I need to get done.”

How much of your week, bandwidth and energy is being taken up by putting out fires, fixing things that get broken because you weren't over it, and it just came as a big surprise?

Situational awareness is going to help you with that.

I want to encourage you to start looking at ways to know more about how your people are feeling. The only way to do that with certainty is to get them involved, to ask them, to give them an opportunity to be able to give you a true understanding so that you can then resource them in that so that they can navigate forward with you.

Well, that's it from me for another week.

Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around social awareness by looking at a key element of leadership, and that's having an orientation towards the service of others.

I'll see you then.