Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

Two companies had formed a joint venture to develop a new telecommunications product. Engineers in both companies were hard at work, but the project itself was stalled. The reason? A consultant we know diagnosed the problem this way: “Engineers on each side never saw each other,” he told us, let alone coordinated their work on the project. “The two sides just e-mailed their irritations to each other. They were having a flame war.”

Flaming, of course, refers to an e-mail message that comes across as rude or otherwise annoying, and a flame war happens when the recipient of such a message flames back, leading to an arms race of insult. Flaming is but one of numerous ways a lack of social intelligence can sabotage the use of technology, especially when it comes to working with others together online. Any IT manager takes a risk that a group’s efforts will falter if he ignores the psychological dimension of social computing.
Read more at CIO.com

Being cool in crisis seems essential for our being able to think clearly. But what if keeping cool makes you too cold to care? In other words, must we sacrifice empathy to stay calm? That’s the dilemma facing those who are preparing top teams to handle the next Katrina-like catastrophe we might face. Which gets me to Paul Ekman, a world expert on emotions and our ability to read and respond to them in others. Paul and I had a long conversation recently, in which he described three very different ways to sense another person’s feelings.

The first is “cognitive empathy,” simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective-taking, this kind of empathy can help in, say, a negotiation or in motivating people. A study at the University of Birmingham found, for example, that managers who are good at perspective-taking were able to move workers to give their best efforts.

But there can be a dark side to this sort of empathy – in fact, those who fall within the “Dark Triad” – narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths (see Chapter 8 in Social Intelligence) – can be talented in this regard, while having no sympathy whatever for their victims. As Paul told me, a torturer needs this ability, if only to better calibrate his cruelty – and talented political operatives no doubt have this ability in abundance.