October 1999

Hiring Emotionally Intelligent Associates

by Lawrence R. Richard

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. We’ve seen him make embarrassing outbursts at partners’ meetings, or tell off-color jokes, or beat a minor point to death.

As a consulting psychologist and lawyer, I am often asked by law firms if anything can be done to manage the wayward partner. While the answer is often a qualified "yes," I want to tell you in this article what I always tell them: 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.

Chris Argyris, a Harvard psychologist, has coined the labels "espoused theory" versus "theory in use." The espoused theory simply means what we say we do, whereas the theory in use is what we actually do. In organizational life, most of the time these two are different. In discussions with many hiring partners and managing partners, I frequently hear their espoused theory 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, their theory in use places much greater emphasis 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 matters psychological as irrelevant, touchy-feely, and insignificant. I’ve always believed that in the practice of law, which is fundamentally a service business and hence a people business, that one’s temperament and one’s people skills should and do play a large role in the ultimate success of a lawyer.

This is no longer just a hunch. Significant research conducted over the past 15 years establishes in more scientific terms the important role that these "softer" factors play in one’s success on the job. I’m talking about an area called "emotional intelligence," often abbreviated as EQ (in distinction to academic intelligence which is known as IQ.) In 1995, Dan Goleman, a psychologist and journalist who used to write for the New York Times, published a book entitled Emotional Intelligence that’s become an international best seller. Dr. Goleman followed it up last year with a book called Working with Emotional Intelligence in which he demonstrated the importance of the principles to the workplace.

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

Lawrence R. Richard, J.D., Ph.D., is a principal with Altman Weil, Inc., in Newtown Square, PA. As a psychologist and former trial lawyer, he consults to law firms on issues of management and organizational behavior. He is certified to administer a number of tests that measure emotional intelligence in the law office.

"Lawyers need to start paying attention to this stuff for their own survival."

Self-Awareness. This is the gold standard of emotional intelligence, the foundation element on which all the other emotional competencies are built. People who lack self-awareness, according to the research, are much more likely to derail in their career 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 or blind spots, 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’re not, you can easily suffer what Goleman calls "an amygdala hijacking". The amygdala is a structure in the ancient part of our brains 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 excoriating behavior. This is not to excuse the litigator, but rather to explain that 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. A lawyer unaware of her limitations can all too easily accept a case outside her 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 or consult a specialist.

Closely allied with this is self-confidence. Many lawyers present a bold, assertive air of certainty when arguing a point. This gives the impression to many that the lawyer is confident. In the sense I’m using the term here, confidence includes the idea that the individual is thick-skinned enough to take criticism and not become defensive, but instead will listen and reflect on the feedback to see if there’s an element of truth to it. In research on lawyers’ personalities, we find, surprisingly but consistently, that the majority are on the thin-skinned end 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 she can learn and improve.

Self-Management. It’s not enough just to be aware of your emotions. Another key set of competencies revolves around your ability to take the next step and to manage those emotions. In research that looked at business leaders who were pursuing promising careers and then "derailed", the single most significant factor for those who derailed 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, committing sexual harassment, etc. The emotionally intelligent lawyer is both aware of his emotions and able to head off those that will hurt others or get him in trouble.

Another type of self-management has to do with being able to develop an impulse that you don’t presently have. In other words, to motivate yourself, especially when it comes to doing something you don’t really want to do, like completing your taxes or 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 use certain personality traits selectively instead of suffering the tyranny of a "one size fits all" approach. For example, in our own research, we have learned that lawyers, on average, score about 20 per cent higher than the general public 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 very same trait can become a weakness in some of the other important roles that lawyers play -- mentor, partner (in the true sense of the word), team member, client relationship manager, committee chair, etc. These latter roles require a large dose of 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 tasks of lawyering -- analysis, argument, research, etc.

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

The empathy that we’re talking about here isn’t the "I feel your pain" type of emotional empathy, where you emotionally identify with another person. Rather, we’re talking more about 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 go on 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.

Social Skills. 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 her colleagues in a team. Other competencies include the ability to lead, communicate, and be a change catalyst.

Why do these competencies matter and how can we hire associates that have them?

They matter for at least two reasons. First, the practice of law is changing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In the old days, you could say "If I just practice good law, the clients will come to me" and you would be 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 -- competition from technology, competition from accounting firms and other multidisciplinary practices (MDPs), and competition from the self-help movement.

In today’s marketplace, many of the entities we compete with are and have for years been run like businesses. They select, hire, develop, and train their people to behave in emotionally competent ways. Nowadays, clients have choices in their legal counsel, and over the long run, these factors will give the accounting firm or the bank or the securities firm a competitive advantage. Lawyers need to start paying attention to this stuff for their own survival. 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 by then, competing providers of legal services will already have had 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 this stuff is important is quite straightforward — the research tells us so. 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 or IQ; work experience; and technical knowledge, which for a lawyer means competence in a particular practice area. The research suggests that these three factors taken together only account for a third of the factors that predict who is going to be successful, while the emotional intelligence or EQ factors predict the other two thirds. And as you climb the ladder of responsibility, EQ increases in importance. Among leaders, such as CEOs of companies and managing partners or practice group leaders in firms, it’s been estimated that EQ factors account for over 90 percent of one’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 and experience and technical knowledge are critical factors in getting into a field; they’re just not predictive of success once you get in. So it’s still a good idea to hire the best and the brightest, but you need to supplement it 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.

So how can you hire associates that have emotional intelligence? There are two main ways: you can use psychological testing to help hire people that have personality traits that fit the job they’ll be doing, or you can train interviewers in how to ask the right questions and how to observe what candidates say and how they behave 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. This difference in perspective is evident in the fact that the American Management Association reports that 68 percent of Fortune 500 companies use psychological testing for hiring, while I estimate that less than 1 percent of law firms use it.

Lawyers will give all kinds of theoretical objections to it, from "it will turn off associates" to "we’ll be sued." In actual practice, in those firms where we’ve used it, none of the dreaded consequences have come to pass.

Interview training takes time but can be very effective. Lawyers are much brighter than the average person and are for the most part "quick studies." In my experience, they resist true 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 gain a cognitive understanding of certain ideas, but because they get a chance to see effective interviewing in action, get to try it out themselves, get feedback, and have a chance to rehearse. Which plane would you rather fly? The one whose pilot learned to fly by reading a book called How to Fly, or the one whose pilot was trained to fly in an experiential training program?

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 shows you how to compete effectively with other well-run businesses that pay attention to the development of their human capital. Hire associates who are not only smart but interpersonally effective, and you’re on your way to building a world class law firm.