legal sanity

I just finished reading a Knowledge at Wharton article on Managing Emotions in the Workplace. It summarizes the latest thoughts on how affect (a/k/a emotion) impacts “job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership.” Evidently, due to an “affective revolution” over the last 30 years, academics and managers have come to recognize that people’s emotions – both short-lived displays and more enduring moods or personality traits – “are integral to what happens in an organization.”

The piece considers two topics I’ve covered here before: emotional contagion and emotional intelligence. First, it acknowledges how our negative coworkers can deplete us and the entire workplace because they’re energy suckers. Like a virus, their half-empty vibe passes from person to person. Realizing the toll that emotions can exact on the job, more business schools are teaching executives emotional intelligence skills.

It’s great to learn that emotions are getting mainstream attention in the business world. Law firms and their leaders would benefit from acknowledging and managing the emotions that impact practice group dynamics, relationships between lawyers and attorney-client connections.

We all bring our feelings and affect to work. While we may be able to suppress their public display to some extent, our emotions usually manifest in one way or another during the work day. Our workplace interactions would be much healthier and more effective if we had license to admit and address the interplay of our own and others' emotions.