Empathy-building 101: the top 10 list

Some important social intelligence skills are empathy, compassion, and a positive mental outlook. These skills can be taught as any other skills such as leadership and goal-setting. Some of the important aspects of developing empathy are self-awareness, self-compassion, active listening, and the ability to experience or identify with the thoughts and emotions of others.

One way to deliver social intelligence-building experiences is on the mobile platform. A virtual coach ('Siri 2.0') can send you randomly-timed messages like the examples below. If you are interested, sign up now for the beta launch the DIYgenomics Social Intelligence Mobile app by messaging our personal virtual coaches led by Marbet Grant 650-209-0872 or marbetgrant AT gmail.com.

1. What is one of your best qualities? Think about how you know you have this quality. Who else has this quality? Where are useful places in your life that you might use this quality?
2. Think of three goals you plan to accomplish today or tomorrow and write them down
3. When you really stop to think about it, what is really great about your life right now?
4. Where are you today? How are you feeling in your body right now?
5. What do you feel grateful for right now?
6. What’s one of your biggest flaws that a lot of other people might have too?
7. Think of a recent situation where you noticed the emotion experienced by someone else and get a sense what that must feel like
8. Take a moment, drop inside and get a sense of how you are felling right now, describe this with some emotion words
9. Think of a recent situation with someone else that didn’t go as well as you wanted. Put yourself in the other person’s position and identify what positive intent they may have had for the way they behaved
10. Ask yourself what you really want out of this current work project (or job or relationship). Say this back to yourself, ‘so what you really want in this [project, job, relationship] is _________’ and see what you notice

Newtech: enterprise social networks

Like email, instant messaging, and wikis, the latest newtech spreading into businesses is social networks, essentially serving as a private internal version of Facebook and Twitter. Enterprise social networks are used for a number of purposes, first and foremost, status updates to work teams, but also for real-time messaging with colleagues including document transfer, broadcast announcements, and opinion capture via polls. There are several companies in the enterprise social software sector (Gartner chart). Among the most vibrant are Yammer and Chatter (affiliated with salesforce) each of which has over 100,000 corporate customers in a wide range of industries from finance to entertainment to professional sports; Jive is a third large company in the space. The standard pricing model appears to be freemium-based, free for light-users and $5/seat/month for power users. Enterprise social networks are typically externally-hosted.

Two of the key challenges that come to mind with enterprise social software are: consolidation with other internal communications platforms and data mining. As with enterprise instant messaging, archival and retrieval is important, both at the personal level (for productivity) and organization level (for information systems backup and compliance). There need to be effective ways to consolidate and mine multi-platform internal communications. Formalizing the explosion of casual interaction as it naturally occurs could be abstracted into value-added tools such as a codification of internal knowledge and expertise in the internal wiki for training purposes. It might also be possible to integrate communication flows unobtrusively and automatically into prediction markets or other sentiment analysis algorithms to capture opinion about key upcoming events like product launches and quarterly sales results.