Self-Awareness vs. Social Awareness: How to Develop Both for Better Self- and Relationship Management
Emotional intelligence—does that ring a bell? It’s an interpersonal skill crucial for leadership roles because IQ and technical skills alone don’t make a leader! You need to be able to listen actively with empathy, communicate effectively, mentor others, coordinate teams, manage your own stress, give feedback, and collaborate instead of competing while maintaining a high performance. And you need to be kind yet incisive.
But emotional intelligence isn’t a social skill of executives only. A considerable percentage of employers—75% to be exact—promote any worker based on emotional intelligence, and 59% use that skill as a hiring criterion for any position.
When someone’s emotionally intelligent, they recognize their emotions and the emotions of others, understand the dynamics between all those emotions, and positively influence them on both sides. They prevent or resolve conflicts that originate from misunderstandings or clashing egos, keep calm even under pressure, and don’t blame others when something goes sideways.
Emotional intelligence is also an effective tool for achieving career success, namely through enhanced job performance. But you’ve got to develop a few competencies to become more emotionally intelligent, and those are self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
In this post, we’re going to focus on the difference between self-awareness and social awareness, although we’re also going to talk about self-management vs. relationship management. And we’ll tell you how to become more self-aware to better manage yourself and more socially aware to excel at relationship management in the workplace.
Self-Awareness vs. Social Awareness
Self-awareness is your capability not only to self-assess your strengths and weaknesses but also to recognize your own emotions from an unbiased, objective standpoint. When you’re self-aware, you’re legitimately self-confident because you know what you’re truly worth and what you can truly do. You know your abilities, knowledge level, skills, and the ways you usually think and behave.
You also understand how your emotions and behavior might have an impact on yourself and others. In the workplace, that ultimately means an impact on others’ performance, as well as the performance of entire teams, departments, and the overall business.
Social awareness is the capability to recognize the emotions of your coworkers, managers, or the team you’re leading, plus how they have an impact on each other. It’s what we usually call “reading the room.”
Those who are socially aware are empathetic. They make an effort to understand others’ emotions and perspectives and are genuinely interested in their worries. Socially aware employees notice how individuals influence and make decisions based on each others’ opinions and how each person plays a role within the organization, whether that’s the leader’s or the follower’s role.
Self-Management vs. Relationship Management
Self-management is the capability to manage your own emotions and remain optimistic regardless of hardship, especially when feeling stressed or under pressure.
If you manage yourself right, you don’t jump to conclusions, and you definitely don’t act without weighing the consequences. You regulate your emotions very well, not giving in to impulses.
For effective self-regulators, reacting without thinking is out of the question. Instead, they stop, breathe, and take a moment to drink a glass of water, take a walk, grab a coffee, or call a friend. That’s how they collect themselves and act with intention.
Self-management is also about being flexible in overcoming obstacles, honest, and transparent.
Relationship management is the capability to positively influence others’ emotions.
Those who are good relationship managers prevent conflicts from happening and effectively resolve the ones that arise. And they’re not afraid of having tough conversations! They know that’s the only way to move the needle and keep everyone happy at work.
Effective relationship managers lead others by inspiring. They guide, give constructive feedback, and motivate. They also build bonds between coworkers by cultivating networks of relationships. And they promote teamwork and collaboration by encouraging cooperation and team building.
Developing self-awareness for better self-management
Let’s put it this way: Self-awareness is about learning how you work on the inside. It involves recognizing your triggers for emotions, thoughts, and behaviors and analyzing your responses to those triggers. Those are your patterns.
But the self-analysis process must be honest—you must let go of your most ingrained preconceptions about yourself and examine yourself as if you were watching a movie in which you’re the main character.
Then, when you learn how you respond to stress, pressure, and setbacks, what you usually do when you succeed, how you deal with failure, and how you develop competencies more easily, you inevitably figure out what you need to do to regulate your emotions and improve your mindset, abilities, skills, and behaviors.
In other words, self-management builds on self-awareness. You wouldn’t be able to become 86% better at managing your emotions or keeping a positive outlook on problems if you weren’t aware of your worth, competencies, and own emotions.
Self-management also enables you to act on what you found out about yourself. Without self-management, you wouldn’t deliberately do anything about your weaknesses, values, goals, and all those emotional, thought, and behavioral patterns you noticed in yourself and know are having a negative effect on your life. You’d be self-aware, but that wouldn’t bring you to a better place in your personal, family, or professional journey. You’d be the new student in the Salsa class who looks excited about learning something new but actually wants to dance like the pros fast without putting in the work. Worse: You’d judge yourself for not being able to dance like the pros; you’d get angry, frustrated, and in a bad mood—just the perfect recipe to get stuck in life.
Now, almost everyone thinks they’re self-aware, but only 10–15% are truly aware of themselves.
Because we want you to belong to the group of people who are truly aware of themselves, here are a few strategies to improve your self-awareness:
1. 360-degree assessment
In this exercise, you get feedback about your performance at work and compare it against your own perception of it. One of your managers or an HR staff member runs a 360-degree feedback survey and asks
- Your managers about your performance against goals, work ethic, and the way you add value to the team
- Your colleagues about how well you collaborate and communicate with them
- Your team members about your leadership style, communication, and effectiveness as a leader
Your clients, customers, and partners may also receive the survey asking about your performance. And you are also asked about your own performance and improvement areas.
Then, based on all the gathered information, the exercise consists of mapping your self-evaluation onto the opinions of those who answered the survey. The results will give you insight into your behavior, competencies, strengths, weaknesses, and leadership gaps.
2. Journaling
Another excellent way to become more self-aware is to journal. Writing a log of how you thought and felt throughout the day, what caused you to think and feel like that, and what you think others thought and felt because of you is quite effective in establishing a daily routine of reflection.
Take the journaling time as an opportunity to think about how those emotions affected your decisions, the way you interacted with coworkers, and how you conducted or contributed to meetings each day. You don’t get points or a prize for positive emotions, so don’t be afraid to register any evidence of a negative pattern.
After all, if you don’t pinpoint negative patterns, you don’t make room for improvement and growth. Keep journaling so you become aware of what to do again in the future (because it worked) and what not to do (because it had a negative impact on yourself and others). Remember: That’s what’s important, not that you once failed.
But if it takes a bit for you to realize a pattern in yourself, don’t worry too much—that’s part of the process.
3. Mindfulness and meditation
Through the practice of mindfulness, you become more self-aware. It develops present-moment awareness, which is the capability to purposely focus on present feelings and the surroundings.
Meditation is another self-awareness practice—the practice of focused attention and contemplation. You explore your feelings by focusing on your own thoughts and intentionally contemplating your inner self.
Mindful leaders and those who meditate don’t judge or criticize their feelings. Instead, they connect with themselves and experience their inside to the fullest. They deliberately focus on one thought at a time—such as the flame of a candle, the sound of an instrument, a positive feeling, or a mantra—to recoup and grow.
You may also practice mindfulness meditation, which entails refocusing your awareness on the present moment whenever you notice thoughts wandering through your mind.
Summing up, mindfulness and meditation help you acknowledge your own thoughts and emotions and assist you in better managing your mind so it doesn’t get caught up in turmoil.
Enhancing social awareness for effective relationship management
It’s much, much easier to resolve conflicts at work when coworkers can identify each other’s emotions and perspectives. That’s to say that effective relationship management in the workplace benefits from employees being socially aware. Every effectively addressed conflict spares eight hours of non-billable time for companies.
The absence of relationship management skills puts a strain on company resources and employee morale. On the other hand, social awareness reduces the misunderstandings that often originate in conflicts on the job.
If you listen and empathize—which is a capability of those who are socially aware—you understand your colleague’s moods, behaviors, motives, and especially the feelings and concerns they’re trying to hide. You discover how to interact with them, and in return, you build healthier relationships around you at work.
Here are a few suggestions on how to improve relationship management through emotional intelligence, namely social awareness:
1. Active listening
Start with putting your phones away from the table, the hand, and even the pocket if you don’t want to put them in airplane mode. Focus your full attention on what your team member is saying. Nod and do other micro facial expressions to show you’re genuinely interested and invested in listening to their reasons, feelings, and worries. Ask questions and paraphrase when you ask those questions but don’t do it unless you’re truly committed to establishing a meaningful relationship of mutual respect and trust with them.
When you start listening actively, you can read employees’ emotions while being actively engaged in conversations with them, and that’s when you start becoming an effective leader.
2. Perspective-taking exercises
Walking in someone’s shoes helps you better understand others’ points of view, which in turn makes you more empathic when interacting with other people.
Dialogue (or roleplay) simulations are the kinds of experience you need to achieve those goals. In those exercises, you enroll in a simulated scenario from the perspective of someone else. The scenario mimics an actual conversation with a real person, and the purpose is for you to evaluate how your own assumptions and biases interfere with the way you communicate.
3. Fiction book reading
Another form of perspective-taking is reading fiction literature. That’s because fiction stories aim to make you feel like the characters and understand their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
By reading a fiction book, you engage with the character’s challenges and dilemmas and develop an empathic vision of their situation. And if you go one step further and attend a book club to discuss the characters’ feeling, motivations, and worries, you’re on the track to becoming more socially aware than you would by just reading the book.
For more suggestions on becoming more socially aware, read our article on social awareness.
Self- and social awareness in leadership
If you become more self- and socially aware, you get better at managing yourself and your relationships at work. And that’s crucial in building yourself as a leader, advancing your career, and contributing the the business’s bottom line.
When you perform better in your role because you’re more aware of yourself, you raise the odds of getting promoted. And when you’re more aware of those around you, you turn yourself into a more respected, trustworthy, and effective leader. You increase your team members’ satisfaction at work, make them more engaged with their jobs, and lower your company’s employee turnover rate.Develop your leadership skills with Positive Leader.
