June 2000

Hiring Emotionally Intelligent Associates

We've all encountered the "900-pound gorilla" partner who throws his weight around, intimidates other partners, excoriates hapless associates who displease him, and eviscerates the poor secretary who forgets a comma.

The wayward partner can be managed. However, it's much easier to hire emotionally intelligent lawyers in the first place than to change the behavior of 900-pound gorillas once you've got them at the firm. Many hiring partners and managing partners state that they seek to hire well-rounded associates who are not only good lawyers, but good people. But if you look at the actual criteria that are used by the firm to evaluate potential associate candidates, much greater emphasis is placed on academic prowess — law school attended, grades, law review, etc. Little systematic attention is paid to the temperament of the associate. Temperament is really a lay term for the visible layer of personality traits possessed by an associate. Personality tends to be stable, which means that if you hire an associate who has a short fuse, in seven or eight years you'll be admitting a partner with a short fuse.

For years, lawyers have dismissed psychological matters as irrelevant, touchy-feely and insignificant. In the practice of law, which is fundamentally a service business and hence a people business, temperament and people skills often play a large role in the ultimate success of a lawyer.

Significant research conducted over the past 15 years establishes in more scientific terms the important role that these "softer" factors play in a lawyer's success on the job. This is an area called "emotional intelligence," often abbreviated as EQ (in distinction to academic intelligence, which is known as IQ). In 1995, psychologist and journalist Dan Goleman published a book entitled Emotional Intelligence, which has become an international best-seller. In 1998, Dr. Goleman published Working with Emotional Intelligence, in which he demonstrated the importance of EQ principles to the workplace.

What is emotional intelligence and why does it matter? It embraces four clusters of psychological skills, or what are more aptly called "emotional competencies."

This is the gold standard of emotional intelligence, the foundation element on which all the other emotional competencies are built. According to the research, people who lack self-awareness are much more likely to derail in their careers than people who are skilled in these competencies. This cluster includes an awareness of one's inner emotional life, knowledge of one's strengths and limitations, and self-confidence.

To be aware of your inner emotional life, you need to be self-observant and in touch with your feelings. If you are not, you can easily suffer what Goleman calls "an amygdala hijacking." The amygdala is a structure in the ancient part of the brain that stores emotional memories and helps us to make instant, primitive decisions such as "Am I its prey or is it mine?" When a mangled phrase in an associate's first draft of a pleading leads a senior litigator to see red and publicly excoriate the associate, the litigator has suffered an amygdala hijacking. At the time he blasted the associate, chances are he didn't have a conscious awareness of his anger before he got to the point where that anger triggered a powerful flood of hormones that led to the behavior. His lack of awareness resulted in his having little choice in the moment. Emotionally intelligent people can detect an emotion and identify it early enough to allow the higher cerebral function to intervene and thus head off embarrassing and ineffective behavior.

Knowing your strengths and limitations is also a key part of the self-awareness cluster. Lawyers unaware of their limitations can all too easily accept a case outside of their core area of expertise and become a malpractice suit looking for a place to happen. The emotionally intelligent lawyer knows when to refer a matter.

Closely allied with this is the self-confidence element. Many lawyers present a bold, assertive air of certainty when arguing a point. This gives the impression that the lawyer is confident. Confidence in this sense includes the idea that the individual is thick-skinned enough to take criticism and not become defensive, instead listening and reflecting on the feedback to see if there's an element of truth to it. Research on lawyers' personalities reveals that the majority are on the thin-skinned side of the spectrum, are defensive, and do not readily hear or accept criticism without arguing or deflecting it. The emotionally intelligent lawyer has an interest in getting feedback and using that feedback to become aware of shortcomings and blind spots so he can learn and improve.

It's not enough just to be aware of your emotions. Another key set of competencies revolves around the ability to take the next step and manage those emotions. In research that centered on business leaders who were pursuing promising careers and then "derailed," the most significant factor for derailment was lack of impulse control. In other words, whether they were aware of their emotions or not, they allowed them to erupt in ways that got them into trouble. Lack of impulse control shows itself in inappropriate behavior such as telling off-color jokes, blowing up at people, slamming your fist down in a meeting, or committing sexual harassment. The emotionally intelligent lawyer is both aware of his emotions and able to head off those that will hurt others or get him into trouble.

Another type of self-management has to do with being able to develop an impulse that you don't presently have — to motivate yourself, especially when it comes to doing something you don't really want to do, like returning a call to a client you don't like dealing with. The emotionally intelligent lawyer doesn't take the easy, comfortable way out, but is able to buckle down and do the unpleasant but necessary tasks.

Finally, self-management includes adaptability and flexibility. How many times have you seen a partner insisting that it be his way or the highway? The research clearly shows that adaptable people succeed in a wider variety of ways than dogmatic people. Adaptability also allows lawyers to selectively use certain personality traits. For example, in our research we have learned that lawyers, on average, score about 20 percent higher on a personality trait called "skepticism." Being a skeptic can actually be an asset in the practice of law, and that's probably why so many lawyers have an elevated score on this trait. But that same trait can become a weakness in some of the other important roles lawyers play — mentor, partner (in the true sense of the word), team member, client relationship manager, committee chair, etc. These roles require good people skills. Lawyers who are flexible are able to turn off their natural skepticism in these situations and turn it back on when they have to step back into the lawyering roles that require analysis, argument and research.

Emotional intelligence competencies include not only dealing effectively with oneself, but also dealing effectively with others. This cluster of competencies includes the ability to be empathetic, to understand organizational politics, and to be service-minded.

This empathy isn't the "I feel your pain" type of emotional empathy, or emotionally identifying with another person. Rather, it is the cognitive component of empathy — the ability to shift perspective, to imagine what another person might be thinking or feeling, to discern the likely effect your own behavior might have on someone else, and the ability to read the emotions of others. For example, lawyers who continue speaking long past the point at which the listener's eyes have glazed over are not demonstrating empathy.

Understanding organizational politics speaks for itself. Being service-minded simply means that the individual places a value on being considerate, thoughtful of others, and interested in helping another human being instead of being self-absorbed.

This last cluster includes eight different competencies. The most important of these is the ability to influence others in such a way as to preserve the relationship when the influencing is done. Likewise, the emotionally intelligent lawyer is able to resolve conflict with others in such a way as to preserve the relationship when the resolving is done. And the emotionally intelligent lawyer is able to build coalitions, social bonds and relationships, and ultimately to collaborate and work with colleagues in a team. Other competencies include the ability to lead, communicate and be a catalyst for change.

Why do these competencies matter, and how can we hire associates who have them? These competencies matter for at least two reasons. First, the practice of law is changing and will continue to change. In the old days, you could say, "If I just practice good law, the clients will come to me," and you would have been right. Today, this is no longer the case. In the old days, the number of lawyers per capita was relatively low. Today, there is not only a glut of lawyers competing for the same business, but we are facing new types of competition — from technology, accounting firms and other multi-disciplinary practices (MDPs), and from the self-help movement.

In today's marketplace, many of the entities we compete with are run like businesses. They select, hire, develop and train their people to behave in emotionally competent ways. Clients have choices in their legal counsel, and over the long run, these factors will give the accounting firm, the bank and securities firm a competitive advantage. Recently, an ABA committee recommended eliminating the restriction on nonlawyers practicing law. Within two years, we will see a very different legal landscape. MDPs will be commonplace in the U.S. legal marketplace. You can't afford to wait until then, because competing providers of legal services will already have a significant head start in cultivating emotional intelligence among their professionals. At least one of the "big five" professional service firms (they used to be called accounting firms) has instituted a formal program to train all their consultants in emotional intelligence competencies in order to achieve a measurable standard of behavior. I know of no law firm that has done so yet.

The second reason that these competencies are important is quite straightforward. Research by Goleman and others has demonstrated that the cognitive factors we always valued in the legal profession simply do not predict success. These include academic intelligence, work experience and technical knowledge, which for the lawyer means competence in a particular practice area. The research suggests that these three factors taken together account for only one-third of the factors that predict who is going to be successful, while the emotional intelligence factors predict the other two-thirds. And as you climb the ladder of responsibility, EQ increases in importance. Among leaders such as company CEOs and managing partners of practice group leaders in firms, it's been estimated that EQ factors account for over 90 percent of a person's success.

Does this mean that we have to stop hiring smart associates? Not at all. The three factors mentioned above are not unimportant. IQ, experience and technical knowledge are critical factors in getting into a field. They're just not predictive of success once you get in it. Supplement selection of the best and brightest by paying attention to the EQ factors of the associates you hire. If you hire well at the associate level, you'll get emotionally intelligent partners at the other end of the pipeline.

There are two main ways to hire associates with emotional intelligence. One way is to use psychological testing to help hire people who have personality traits that fit the job they will be doing. You can also train interviewers to ask the right questions, listen to what candidates say, and observe their behavior in order to discern their level of emotional intelligence.

Psychological testing is less expensive and more effective, but more controversial. Lawyers are a risk-averse lot, and seem to err on the side of avoiding potential liability, whereas most business leaders seem to view risk as something that must be weighed against the benefits to be gained. The American Management Association reports that 68 percent of Fortune 500 companies use psychological testing for hiring, while I estimate that less than one percent of law firms use it.

Lawyers give all kinds of theoretical objections to psychological testing, including that, "It will turn off associates," and "We'll be sued." In firms that have used it, none of the predicted consequences have actually occurred.

Interview training takes time, but can be very effective. Lawyers tend to be "quick studies." They frequently resist training, and would rather read some literature to absorb the information that would be conveyed in the training program. But this kind of training works not because the participants gained a cognitive understanding of certain ideas, but because they saw effective interviewing in action, tried it themselves, received feedback, and had a chance to rehearse.

In summary, hiring emotionally intelligent associates will eventually result in an increase in the number of emotionally intelligent partners. Emotional intelligence is not a peripheral, inconsequential irrelevancy, but rather a body of knowledge that gives you a roadmap about how to compete effectively with other well-run businesses that pay attention to the development of their human capital. If you hire associates who are smart and interpersonally effective, you will be on your way to building a world-class law firm.

©1999 Altman Weil, Inc. All rights reserved.

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