What is Relational Intelligence?
Dialogue Tools – Relational Intelligence
I’ve been thinking about leadership a lot during past weeks. There are couple reasons for that. One reason is that I have now spend five months working in Humap Ltd, which I think has been a great time for me to reflect about leadership. One reason might be, that our company, Dialogue Tools, is taking it’s first steps at the moment and that’s why we have been writing down some text for our first customer leaflet and becoming web pages?
Couple months ago I was having a dialogue with my Humap colleagues about the bigger picture of our company, Dialogue Tools. What is it that Dialogue Tools is actually doing? Very soon we started to talk about “Relational Intelligence”. Those two words sounded very good: Dialogue Tools – Relational intelligence.
So what is Relational Intelligence all about?
Leadership theories are in breach. After our society has strongly moved towards knowledge work the factors affecting productivity have changed drastically from what we are used to. Even one conversation can have an affect of 100 percent on effectiveness for several days, for good and for bad. In a more traditional and industrial work it wasn’t so.
Organisational measurements usually explore only individual characters: personality, role or abilities. Identifying our personality helps us to understand something essential of ourselves. However that’s not enough to tell how we act in different relationships.
Relationships are built, renewed and changed in interaction, all the time. How these interactions are built in work communities has become crucially important competitive advantage for organisations. In a complex and networked world boosting work procedures cannot solve the productivity. The value of knowledge work is created in dialogue in which shared meanings, thinking together about the future and energy are built.
The jubilant challenge for leadership is to understand the affect of relationships on productivity. How can we make this connection transparent and concrete?
