legal sanity

I read with interest your comments on Emotional Intelligence. As an attorney and a professor of organizational behavior, I am reprinting below an article that I wrote for lawyers in Michigan Lawyers Weekly in 2004 on the role of emotional intelligence in the work place:

"Do you remember in law school the common adage that “A students end up being law professors, B students end up being judges, and C students end up being lawyers?” There is some truth in that comment. In every day walk of life don’t we encounter people with common sense and being “street wise” who are high performers with financial success? Even in the practice of law, higher performing lawyers are those that are able to make connection with their clients and opposing parties while also being rainmakers for their law firms. And guess what? IQ doesn’t play a significant role. The recent March issue of the Michigan Bar Journal reported that the average IQ of attorney hovers around 127, which means that most lawyers are viewed as close to the gifted range. Whether you practice as a sole practitioner or in large corporate settings, the traditional benchmark has been IQ. How many of you were A or B students in law school, scored well in your LSAT, and passed the bar exam but yet feel that you have not realized your full potential in the your career? What holds you back? Clearly, it is not enough for success just to be “smart”. To succeed and make more money lawyers need to exercise high emotional intelligence (EI).

A lawyer, let’s call him Harry, when interviewed about the challenges faced in practicing law stated “you need a much greater range of skills than the things most of us focus on in law school.” Harry who had been practicing law for over 20 years went on to state “the general public perception is that lawyers are more unfeeling than they ought to be. Maybe we don’t teach enough about the relationship between lawyer and client. The attorney may overemphasize legal remedies; sometimes lawyers are a little tone-deaf when it comes to what a clients really wants.” In short, effective legal work means being aware of the client’s concerns and motivations and helping clients sort through their own tangle of priorities and feelings. Unfortunately, the legal profession and the education received in law school, fails to invest much time in cultivating these capabilities. Instead, the legal profession has focused on strengthening the technical and cognitive skills of the lawyer. Even as a lawyer, the focus is on advocating a client’s position and securing a favorable outcome. Little consideration is given that a lawyer may have been abrasive and unconcerned about the human affairs of the client.

Faced with an increasingly complex and fast paced competitive environment, how does one become a “rainmaker” at a firm or increase one’s performance? Some of the greatest challenges facing law firms and the people who work in them are learning to cope with constant change, managing massive amounts of data, and working together with one’s staff and client effectively. This requires exercising a new set of skills. Lawyers to maximize their performance need to pay close attention to developing social and interpersonal skills including; empathy, skillful communication, building bonds, and partnering and collaboration. Research has shown that technical and cognitive skills are only entry or threshold skills for professions such as law. It has been reported that traditional IQ contributes at best about 20% to the factors that determines life success.
Studies have found that it is EI skills that have been shown to differentiate outstanding performers from average performers. In fact, EI based skills have been found to be twice as important as cognitive ability and technical expertise combined. Thus, your IQ may have played a strong role in getting you hired but it is EI that determines where you end up in your career. In addition, the studies have concluded that in general, the higher a position in an organization, the more emotional intelligence mattered. For individuals aspiring to be in leadership positions or enhance their performance, 85% of their competencies were in the emotional intelligence domain. Even the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has adopted a vision statement calling emotional intelligence an extremely important skill for the profession. How so? As in law, good accountants must be perceptive, persuasive and effective problem solvers. So what is emotional intelligence or EI? Daniel Goleman, the co-author of the best selling book, Primal Leadership defined EI as “the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationship.” In short, EI is about being aware of one’s own feeling that can be enhanced and improved to be better performers as lawyers.

Conceptually, EI is about being aware of the possibility of expressing feelings appropriately, or perhaps consciously controlling or suppressing it. The concept of EI might be new to some professionals, however the idea has been in existence for some time. The popularization of EI began in the early 1980’s with the reporting of various academic studies, which highlighted the value of non IQ. A key value is that EI development can be learned and developed throughout adulthood. You are never too old to learn EI. In fact, people tend to improve in EI over the course of a lifetime, because life lessons often make people wiser in this domain. But if you want to move the process forward more rapidly and achieve higher performance, then developing these skills requires paying closer attention and having the willingness to learn them.

In general, the EI consists of four competencies, which include self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management. The starting point is being aware of one’s own setting, what is controlled and what is not. Thus, self-awareness is the threshold competency that leads to address all the other competencies. Awareness of our feelings allows us to perceive the feelings of others accurately, to be empathetic, and to feel with another person. Empathy with clients or with co-workers forges an emotional connection that tends to bond people together more deeply than even shared beliefs and ideas. Empathy serves as a key foundation to many other interactions such as teamwork, persuasion, and leadership.

Once a lawyer is sufficiently grounded in self awareness, then he/she can be more effective in gaining influence in a way that renews people’s trust, improve their relationship with colleagues and clients and thereby improve the bottom line revenue. Within this new shift, lawyers can become effective in maximizing the influence they have and the contribution that they can make as practicing lawyers. Lawyers who are able to work effectively in managing conflict, influence, teamwork and collaboration, developing others end up being more successfully financially. But yet being more effective in teamwork and collaboration has been difficult for lawyers to attain. Core attributes of most lawyers include expertise, autonomous behavior, collegiality, and service to others. As a consequence of the way lawyers have been selected, educated and socialized many are highly competitive, relatively independent practitioners. Our education and socialization fosters commanding leadership styles that may not be appropriate in all settings. Instead focus should be in developing skills that emphasizes empathy, as well as teamwork and collaboration.

To attain increased skills in self-awareness and relationship management requires constant practice over a 12-month period working with a coach who is dedicated to developing your skills. Once reserved for executives at Fortune 500 companies and other professions, coaches are increasingly joining consultants, financial advisors, and personal trainers as part of everyday business people’s private support staff. Coaching offers one the opportunity to build on his/her competencies. Studies have found that having a coach is invaluable in generating and implementing an action plan that accelerates the learning process and facilitates better results. Coaches come in many forms. Some may be formal executive coaches, others informal mentors, and still others can be colleagues or even friends. However, hiring an executive coach can provide the opportunity to talk more freely than one could with a colleague or a friend. Having a coach offers benefits beyond simply honing your EI skills, it offers another set of eyes and ears, and so can be antidote to the peril of the information quarantine that one could suffer. Good coaches help you see outside of the balloon surrounding your daily experience. A coach can tailor an action plan specifically geared to you, offering the luxury of going through the entire process outlined in a one-on-one basis. As a minimum a good coach will seek to perform an assessment of you to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses. But be wary of coaches that advertise fast results, since many behaviors are deeply rooted and difficult to change unless it is practiced over and over again. Rarely do people make meaningful progress on their development goals in less than a year’s time.

To be viewed as charismatic, likable, and trustworthy goes beyond being at the high end intellectually. EI serves as the defining demarcation between successful performing lawyers and those who are just average. As in all professions, the intellect and technical expertise gets you only so far, but it is the human qualities that make you a star. Top performers recognize that they cannot function without a clear understanding of their own feelings and those of the people around them. Top performing lawyers know that having high EI determines where you end up in your career. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote that “the life of law has not been logic, it has been experience.” By having high EI skills, attorneys can achieve and be high performers. Specifically, it can determine how confident you are, how well you take the initiative, how effective a team player you are, and how well you handle conflicts. As businesses have become global, they have become aware of the increased importance in interpersonal and collaborative skills. Similarly, lawyers to succeed will need to keep pace with their clients and that will mean effective use of EI skills."

Hope it provides some insight. Knowing how to make use of your emotions as well as understanding others' emotions can serve to make a more effective attorney.

Dr. Agustin V. Arbulu C.