Perceptual intelligence is what we have been missing for years in HR and management land. It is the solution for all our bottlenecks in the ecosystem of the organization. It is a way to work better together, to empower employees and to increase productivity and happiness at the same time. Bold words, but I wouldn’t write them down if they weren’t completely true. Some time ago, HR expert Jan Tjerk Boonstra wrote : “Go into the organization, listen… What is going well with employees and what is not? Go make things possible for them and empower them. If you can let your Slovakia Email List employees thrive, you’re doing great.” I fully support these words, but I also dare to go a step further: don’t just listen to what is said, but also investigate what is not said.
Perceptual intelligence, what is it?
Our identity and our thinking and acting is determined by our self-perception and our social perception. Self-perception is literally the way we see ourselves. Who do we think we Slovakia Email List are? The way in which we subsequently think and act is almost always in conjunction with the image we have of ourselves. If you think of yourself as a calm and reserved person, you will not be the most exuberant person in the room when you meet a stranger for the first time. You act like who you think you are.
social perception
Social perception focuses more on others. It’s the way we look at others, usually those close to us. We also have certain expectations of others. I always say that our happiness can be Slovakia Email List found between the expectations we have and the reality we live. I see this practice coming back time and again in my coaching. If you expect – and therefore actually have the need – that the people you work with are all oriented towards the common good, but that in reality there are some members who are more oriented towards their own interests, then the latter is not by definition bad because it doesn’t fit your expectations. And there we come closer to the concept of ‘perceptual intelligence’.
