How Lawyers Strengthen Emotional Intelligence Skills

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Summary

• EI leads to higher productivity and profitability, improved leadership and team performance, stronger relationships, greater satisfaction, and better mental and physical health. It also improves risk assessment, negotiation, and case management skills.
• A good place to start an EI improvement program is with emotional awareness, or the ability to recognize our own emotions and those of others.
• Mindfulness has long been established as a free and simple way to build several emotional intelligence skills, starting with emotional awareness.
• The greatest tool for gaining emotional awareness is listening. Done well, listening can improve your emotional awareness, empathy, understanding, and regulation.

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Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance. —Confucius
Decades of research have revealed the personal and professional benefits of high emotional intelligence (EI) in the practice of law. EI leads to higher productivity and profitability, improved leadership and team performance, stronger relationships, greater satisfaction, and better mental and physical health. It also improves risk assessment, negotiation, and case management skills. However, lawyers, as a group, unfortunately have lower EI on average than other professionals, such as doctors.

So, what can be done? The good news is that you can raise your emotional intelligence. Thanks to our brain’s “plasticity,” or ability to change, we can improve both specific EI skills and overall EI, regardless of our age or career stage.

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A good place to start an EI improvement program is with emotional awareness, or the ability to recognize our own emotions and those of others. It’s the foundation of all other emotional intelligence skills, but it's also the EI skill that lawyers, on average, are weakest in. Like trying to see the back of our own head, it’s difficult to know what we don't know because we lack sufficient perspectives on both our internal and external reality.

To jumpstart your emotional awareness, here are eight steps you can take right now.

1. Assess Your EI

There are several acknowledged EI assessments—for example, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI®), and Emotional Quotient-Inventory™ 2.0 (EQi-2.0)—that usually take less than an hour to complete. However, you may have to engage a professional to administer the test and interpret the results. But even short free online quizzes that are less theory-based, like Mindtools, can provide helpful insights. Or take the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.

Aside from using these tools, you can gain insights by making time for intentional moments of self-reflection. It is prudent to take inventory of your self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, capacity for empathy, and social skills. A simple way to test EI is to turn off the sound on movies and TV shows and see if you can follow the plot by observing facial expressions, body language, and context.

2. Engage with Mentors, Coaches, or EI Buddies

Legal workplaces often offer mentoring through structured programs that include training, periodic check-ins, and progress reports, or through more informal conversations at occasional lunches. However, legal workplaces are not well equipped to identify effective mentors. And the core skill of mentoring––making the unwanted but constructive observation––may be hard for a lawyer, who is often acutely aware of how difficult this message is to hear.

Professional coaching, which some firms provide or pay for, has proven more effective in developing EI skills, with “average short-term improvements in interpersonal skills of 50%.” And pairing EI development programs with coaching magnifies their impact. You can also consider attending coaching circles, in which a coaching expert from outside your organization works with small groups, as a cost-effective alternative.

Apart from structured programs, one of the most valuable things you can do is to identify someone you believe has good EI instincts and use that person as a sounding board––your EI buddy. Ideally, this is someone who often sees things differently from you and handles difficult situations with aplomb. Describe a situation and ask for their assessment––what the body language, words, and tones might mean, and how best to proceed. Get their take on your behavior, too.

3. Take Classes and Trainings

Sustained improvements in EI have been documented after even relatively short instructional sessions. Your firm or department, alum groups, bar associations, CLEs, and other organizations may offer courses of varying lengths and cost, both in person and online, that could help develop your emotional intelligence, even if they’re not explicitly for that purpose. Look for classes that burnish business development, client service, communication, and leadership skills. Emotional intelligence directly empowers success in all those areas.

4. Take Advantage of Behavioral Health Services

More than half of large employers globally, including an increasing number of law firms and law departments, are offering services from in-person or online behavioral health professionals. In some cases, these services can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Both professional and personal concerns are usually discussed, offering another route to expand one's awareness, manage stress, and generally improve overall mental health.

5. Profit from Performance and Client Reviews

While performance reviews are being widely scrutinized, typical reviews are not likely to be frequent, accurate, and insightful enough to move your EI forward, in part because, again, lawyers are making judgments about interpersonal matters. And self-evaluations have long been recognized as notoriously deficient. But performance reviews can still, even if not done so well, provide some insight into how others view you, so take advantage of those that are available.

You can always take it upon yourself to informally ask your supervisors and clients questions about your performance, essentially, “What would you like to see more of?” and “What can I do differently?” Then, going back to the same people periodically to ask about your interim performance shows your ability to use that awareness to improve.

6. Embrace Mindfulness

Mindfulness, a mental state achieved through the physical practice of meditation, has long been established as a free and simple way to build several emotional intelligence skills, starting with emotional awareness.

In addition, mindfulness builds greater empathy, significantly improves our ability to regulate our emotions, improves cognitive functioning, and even slows physiological aging. It also promotes more positive feelings, a greater sense of well-being (less depression and more happiness), and improves moral discernment, thereby championing ethical behavior.

As little as 5 minutes of meditation a day, while walking or sitting at your desk, can help you start on the path to becoming more mindful. Focusing on your breath or a simple repeated mantra like “I am surrendering” can help stop unhelpful automatic reactions, which, for lawyers, often include rumination, suppression, and negative self-talk. That detachment gives a needed moment to refresh, and it also powers the important ability to “count to 10” before reacting.

Bar associations and an increasing number of law schools, law firms, and law departments offer mindfulness training. There are also multiple meditation offerings online and in apps that can be accessed at any time of day or night.

7. Listen Well

The all-around greatest tool for gaining emotional awareness is listening . Done well, listening can improve your emotional awareness, empathy, understanding, and regulation. Here are some ways to hear the emotional message:

Be Curious

Simply ask for feedback in the moment. You’re sitting across a conference table from a colleague who makes a face or says something that surprises you. Ask whether they are annoyed, angry, or whatever your instincts are telling you, or just ask what they are feeling. It might feel a little awkward, but if your tone is low, warm, and nonthreatening, you’re likely to get a response. Follow up with questions about what the problem is and what can be done to improve it. Or be relieved that you’ve misread the moment and are better informed the next time.

Use Empathy

Rather than prioritizing your own agenda––what you will say or how you can best impress the client/witness––listen for what the speaker is thinking or feeling.

Find a Shared Identity

Small bits of shared identity—geographic origins or favorite sports teams—can help you build a bridge that makes you more interested and interesting.

Mirror the Speaker’s Style

Focus on how the speaker says certain things—the rate of speech, tone of voice, and volume—and try to replicate them yourself. Mirroring their style can make them more comfortable and more candid, and make you seem less alien and more persuasive.

Act “As If” You're Listening

Give the appropriate social cues––eye contact, the small nod, or a brief smile––that are little indications of having heard and wanting to hear more. Use attentive body language, too: fidgeting or doodling will make the speaker feel ignored and may cause them to clam up.

Practice Active Listening

Summarize what the speaker is saying (“As I understand it, you are interested in closing the factory at all costs”); ask questions both to clarify (“What evidence do you have of the fraud?”) and to confirm your understanding (“So, you would like us to present all the possible approaches?”); and articulate and sympathize with both the spoken and unspoken feelings displayed (“It sounds like this experience has understandably been very frustrating for you.”). This helps you connect but also develop and take advantage of a broader emotional vocabulary.

Use Emotion Words

Ask questions like “How did that make you feel?” and “What was particularly upsetting?” This will help reveal some of the unspoken feelings around the issues.

Manage Your Emotions

Put aside your emotional distractions, such as internal concerns about your appearance, competence, or respect.

Limit Your Talk

Be comfortable with conversational pauses, something that can be very difficult for high-urgency lawyers. Give the speaker a chance to fill those spaces.

8. Persevere

While this may seem like an obvious piece of advice in any quest to improve, lawyers are especially prone to failing to persevere in building their emotional intelligence. Pervasive pessimism tells us the effort won’t make enough difference; high skepticism makes us distrustful of both people and processes; and low resilience makes the possibility of failure frightening.

Yet this is an area where, to reap substantial benefits, we must nevertheless persist in this uncomfortable position of feeling less confident and less competent. Emotional learning requires consciously rewiring entrenched neural connections that have become dominant over time, as well as establishing new ones.

Once you know the area you would like to work on and a few specific behaviors you want to adopt, allow yourself at least a six-week cycle to practice and reinforce the new approach. During this period, “self-talk” can either be your friend or your foe. The greatest behavioral contributors to raising EI successfully are a more affirmatively optimistic outlook and a conscious determination to motivate oneself. These do not come easily to many lawyers.

We are built to meet our expectations, whatever they are. Persist in being your own cheerful champion, your own leader, urging yourself onward with patience and understanding and an eye on the reward.

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If you are interested in a deeper dive on emotional intelligence, check out Ronda Muir’s second edition of her book Beyond Smart: Lawyering with Emotional Intelligence, where she updates the research that shows how lawyers in all walks of the profession can use the burgeoning science of emotional intelligence to address the pressing issues individual lawyers and practices are currently being confronted with.

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Endnotes

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Author

Ronda Muir

Law People Management, LLC

Ronda Muir, Esq., Principal and Founder of Law People Management, LLC, is one of the country’s leading authorities on lawyer personalities and solutions to both traditional and emerging people management challenges that are...

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Author

Ronda Muir

Law People Management, LLC

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