Are We Socially Intelligent?
Are We Socially Intelligent?
Francis Pangfei Lai
Abstract:
It was Daniel Goleman’s book “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships” that started the author thinking on the relevance of social intelligence to property professionals. In the course of practicing as a property consultancy and lecturing at various universities over the years, the author notices that a property professional tends to lack the many soft skills of emotional and social intelligence. In this paper, he advocates the need to include such soft skills of ‘social intelligence’ as an essential component in the training of future property professionals.
The term ‘we’ in the title therefore refers to property and real estate professionals such as property valuers, real estate agents, property developers, architects and other design consultants, quantity surveyors, builders and includes those amongst us who are involved in the training of these professionals.
The author cannot find any research on the relevance of emotional and social intelligence to property issues. However, in topics related to the teaching profession, there is now a ground swell of opinions advocating the need for teachers to be learners and to engage their students in a teaching-learning environment. This is essentially a call for teachers to be socially intelligent in their relationships with their students or learners. Whilst the hard skills of the property profession such as property valuation, to take an example, can in future be replaced by a computer application, it is the soft skills such as a person-to-person relationship that need to be understood by property professionals of the future.
This paper thus advocates the need to include soft skill subjects such as social intelligence as an essential component in the training of future property professionals and suggests some further research topics for consideration under this subject heading.
Key words: Social Intelligence;
Francis Pangfei Lai
Abstract:
It was Daniel Goleman’s book “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships” that started the author thinking on the relevance of social intelligence to property professionals. In the course of practicing as a property consultancy and lecturing at various universities over the years, the author notices that a property professional tends to lack the many soft skills of emotional and social intelligence. In this paper, he advocates the need to include such soft skills of ‘social intelligence’ as an essential component in the training of future property professionals.
The term ‘we’ in the title therefore refers to property and real estate professionals such as property valuers, real estate agents, property developers, architects and other design consultants, quantity surveyors, builders and includes those amongst us who are involved in the training of these professionals.
The author cannot find any research on the relevance of emotional and social intelligence to property issues. However, in topics related to the teaching profession, there is now a ground swell of opinions advocating the need for teachers to be learners and to engage their students in a teaching-learning environment. This is essentially a call for teachers to be socially intelligent in their relationships with their students or learners. Whilst the hard skills of the property profession such as property valuation, to take an example, can in future be replaced by a computer application, it is the soft skills such as a person-to-person relationship that need to be understood by property professionals of the future.
This paper thus advocates the need to include soft skill subjects such as social intelligence as an essential component in the training of future property professionals and suggests some further research topics for consideration under this subject heading.
Key words: Social Intelligence;