legal sanity

If you regularly stop by here, you’ve likely noticed that I devote a lot of blog posts and other professional space to exploring the topic of human energy and how it factors into our ability to create successful business relationships and avoid unsuccessful ones. This is much more than an academic interest for me.

For close to 25 years, I’ve tried my best to keep good company; that is, to surround myself as much as possible with positive people as opposed to negative people who drain the heck out of me. In any situation, I’m vigilant of the energetic influences around me and monitor whether I’m experiencing them as filling or draining. Of course, as a practicing lawyer and mediator, steering clear of negativity has been a big challenge. And I’ve noticed that, where negative people and positive people co-mingle, the negative energy usually ends up trumping and stifling the positive to a large extent.

Given my interest and observations about negativity and positivity, I was captivated by a terrific post from Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf on happiness and workplace productivity. Starting with the premise that “happiness at work is the #1 productivity booster,” Kjerulf shares 10 reasons why this is the case. Topping the list is this point:

Happy people are a lot more fun to be around and consequently have better relations at work. This translates into:

• Better teamwork with your colleagues
• Better employee relations if you’re a manager
• More satisfied customers if you’re in a service job
• Improved sales if you’re a sales person

In making the case for the happiness-productivity connection, Kjerulf (who, by the way, has a book on the topic called Happy Hour is 9 to 5 that you can buy or read online for free) points us to a related post by one of my favorite bloggers, Kathy Sierra. Hopping over to her space, I read her take on how Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain.

In it, Sierra provides scientific backing – neuroscience, to be exact – for the finding that negativity tends to be contagious. Specifically, she writes, due to the phenomenon of emotional contagion, “negative emotions exert a more powerful effect in social situations than positive ones.” That’s why a generally happy and upbeat person will likely become depressed or angry when hanging out with someone who’s depressed or angry. According to a source Sierra quotes, the converse is also true: If we’re around someone who’s self-confident and buoyant long enough, we’re likely to feel good about ourselves.

For more on the impact of negativity around us, tune in to Anna Farmery’s podcast on Managing Negativity at Work. For more on the intersection of neuroscience and business, check out the archived posts at Stephanie West Allen’s idealawg. West Allen has also written a couple of recent posts on two of my favorite subjects to cover at legal sanity: energy and self-esteem at work.

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Last week, over at the motto blog, contributor Curt Rosengren wrote about a new, albeit small, study addressing what people are looking for in their next job. The survey found that the respondents didn’t consider a “move up the career ladder” a top priority. Instead, they put a premium on finding work that “challenges and stimulates them," satisfies their personal values and fits their lifestyle.

The survey’s findings aren’t surprising. They’re likely a sampling of a larger trend that’s emerging with the rise of the dual-centric workforce. As I’ve discussed here before, more and more lawyers are hungry for work that inspires, energizes and fulfills them. To sate that hunger, they’re willing to leave the security of law firm life and ride the job circuit to find a place and position that’s the right fit for them.

There are some law firms and businesses that have put themselves on the leading edge of legal service innovation by recognizing the trend depicted in the survey’s results.

One of these innovators is Axiom Legal, a law firm that’s built a thriving business and earned a stellar reputation by hiring top-notch big firm alumni and matching them with corporate clients on an as-needed basis. I had the pleasure of meeting with Axiom CEO Mark Harris a few weeks ago and came away very impressed with his business model and clear vision of what it means to be a happy, healthy and satisfied lawyer.

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My recent posts about narcissism and self-awareness in the practice of law prompted a friend of mine to question the boundary between the two concepts.

This is a great question.

I’m not a therapist, won’t pose as one and certainly can’t give a clinical definition. But, I’ll share my layman’s take on the answer.

As I’ve noted here before, many people resist the notion of self-reflection and self-expression as vital business skills because it raises the specter of the robber barons of yesterday (and today) – people often pejoratively described as Self-Absorbed; Selfish; Self-Centered; and Self–Aggrandizing. While I understand why they make this connection, I believe it’s a faulty one. There’s a big difference between being a complete narcissist and infusing a healthy sense of self (an amalgam of our needs, wants, interests and values) into our work and workplace relationships.

People certainly can take self-awareness and self-expression to an unhealthy extreme such as narcissism. When they do, there’s no room for anyone else. There’s no give and take. So, there’s little to no chance of creating mutually rewarding and lasting relationships in business or elsewhere. But, the same poor odds hold when we try to cultivate business connections without putting our self into the mix. As I’ve also previously asserted, business relationships are as much about valuing and evincing our selves as they are about reaching and helping others. Both aspects (self and other) need to be expressed and honored to foster lasting connections for business success and satisfaction.

Highlighting this last point is a mediate.com article by Trime Persinger titled What Do You Want? In it, Persinger looks at self-expression as an important, but unsung, relationship skill. Noting that our “parents, our peers, and our culture have taught us that it is selfish to ask for what we want,” she discusses why we shouldn't heed that lesson and offers guidance on asking for what we want from others.

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One of the inroads to creating work-life synergy in the law (pdf) is flextime work. I’ve covered this topic before, particularly in connection to the challenges faced by women lawyers. Lately, I’ve come across a number of articles and other commentary on the feasibility of these alternative work arrangements. Here’s a sampling of them for you:

• How to Ask About Flexible Hours
• Women Executives Discuss Flex Schedules
• Flexibility As a Key Talent Management Strategy (via the Job Blog)

I think these pieces team well with this set of compelling articles and posts on women engaging life in and out of the full-time paid workforce.

• The Job Without Benefits

 • Don’t tell me about admirable moms

• Hiding behind data about extreme jobs

• This One’s For All Of You Neglectful Moms

Through Lisa Solomon at Legal Research and Writing Pro, I learned of an interesting new effort called Ms. JD. Still in beta version, this is an online community started by a group of female law students concerned about “the rates at which women opt out of the legal profession, the lack of representation of women in the highest courts and echelons of the legal community, and the role of gender in the progression of many women’s legal careers.”

In addition to providing a cyber forum for dialoguing and networking, Ms. JD will formally launch at Legally Female, a national conference to be held at Yale Law School on March 31, 2007. You’ll find registration information here .

Endnote: After writing this post, I checked my feeds and saw that Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle published a post today on work-life balance that mentions Ms. JD and asks readers: “Have you found the elusive work life balance or do you feel that you're burning the candle at both ends?”

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In my last post, I noted that self-knowledge is one aspect of the emotional intelligence (EQ) that’s integral to our success in the law. I’ve previously discussed why I consider self-awareness and self-expression elemental to effective lawyering. To forge lasting and rewarding relationships with others – clients, prospects or coworkers – we first have to meaningfully connect (or re-connect) with ourselves.

Through posts from Stephanie West Allen and Susan Cartier Liebel, I learned that a recent Harvard Business Review article on authentic leadership (order page) identifies self-awareness as “the most important capability for leaders to develop.”

Although she doesn't dispute this finding, West Allen does suggest that self-awareness may be a lofty goal because it's "elusive of definition and difficult to achieve."

I agree that self-knowledge is not easy to come by. It takes time to undertake this kind of inquiry. But, with persistence and some guidance, I think that self-awareness is something that most of us can gain to the benefit of ourselves and our business and personal relationships.

For people who resist the idea of isolated introspection, it’s reassuring to know that we can learn a lot about ourselves by interacting with people (clients, coworkers, friends and family) and engaging in activities (work assignments, business development, recreation and community events). By noting who and what regularly makes us feel energized and positive as opposed to depleted and negative, we get a solid idea of what we need from the practice of law and in life. Identifying our own needs in this way is a core component of self-awareness.

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For years, I’ve been very interested in exploring how our emotional intelligence (EQ) affects our lawyering and our work relationships. As I’ve noted before, EQ is one of the multiple intelligences that are becoming more and more essential to our professional success as we enter the Conceptual Age.

A while back, I referred to an article by syndicated columnist Penelope Trunk discussing the growing importance of EQ in the workplace. Tipped by David Maister, I learned that Trunk writes a very engaging and insightful blog called the Brazen Careerist where she posts “daily tips for making work life and personal life one happy, synchronized adventure.” I read through the blog’s archives and found a lot of information and ideas that would benefit new and seasoned lawyers alike.

In a recent post on emotional intelligence, Trunk notes that EQ has several facets. It’s grounded in our:

• self-knowledge
• empathy
• likeability
• ability to connect people and ideas   

The post itself is great and it generated a really interesting comments thread (that Trunk participates in). One contributor, citing the work of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, defines empathy as “the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.”

This definition really grabbed my attention because I’d just finished reading an article about the rise of narcissism among college students. One of the experts quoted in the piece states that narcissism leads to breakdowns in relationships.

This doesn’t surprise me. Most of us have dealt with narcissists in the workplace. When we interact with a narcissistic coworker, boss or adversary, there’s no real relating going on. It’s all about one person. There’s an absence of empathetic exchange and mutuality, two prerequisites for healthy and rewarding business relationships.

And, I venture, narcissists feature prominently in the pool of people with the lowest EQ.

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In a post called Lawyer unhappiness: Chicken Little at law, Stephanie West Allen highlights Robert Ambrogi’s recent reference to a chain of commentary about scholarly work on the subject of lawyer happiness. The chain backtracks from West Allen to Ambrogi to Jeff Lipshaw at the Legal Profession Blog to John Steele from the Legal Ethics Forum.

I enjoyed reading about the studies (and the bloggers’ perspectives on them) and wasn’t surprised to learn that they’ve yielded some inconsistent conclusions.

Over the years, I've discussed the topic of lawyer happiness and unhappiness from many different angles at legal sanity. If you want to conduct a study on satisfied lawyers, you'll find enough of them to gather data on. If you want to study lawyer discontent, you'll find plenty of empirical fodder for your consideration.

To add a different perspective, practitioners (especially newly-minted ones), law firm leaders, law students and their educators would benefit from a new study delineating the specific factors and forces (such as meaning, money, employee engagement initiatives, leadership, client interaction, and flex-time work options) that make or break lawyer happiness today.

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