Leadership Skills

SI: Build Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is the type of social radar where you can read situations and interpret the behaviors of people in these situations. Interpreting people includes their intentions, emotional states, and anticipated actions.

Try these activities in order to build your situational awareness:

• Sit in a public place and watch groups of people. Try to figure out their relationships. How do they signal their relationships?
• Study the work contexts you are in throughout the day. How does the physical space influence how people behave? Who sits where in a meeting and what does that say about that person's status or attitude?
• Study the different social status levels you see interacting throughout the day. How do they react by their language, slang, figures of speech, use of profanity (or avoidance), or specialized vocabularies.
• Study the nonverbal signals people use to define and reinforce their relationships. How does a boss convey authority as opposed to a coworker? How do others show respect towards others in authority?
• Watch an unfamiliar TV show or movie with the sound off. How do the actors move and arrange themselves in relation to each other? How do they communicate their roles without sound? Do the nonverbal behaviors contribute to and reinforce the scene, or do they seem artificial?