Dr. Kevin Dutton in his book The
Wisdom of Psychopaths claims that
some professions attract people with psychopathic tendencies, and lawyers are second on the list (the
first in the list are CEO’s and the third is Media people who works on TV and
radio).
A quote from a successful young British
attorney Dutton interviewed perfectly illustrates the psychopath attitude in
lawyer’s profession: "Deep inside me there's a serial killer lurking
somewhere," the unnamed attorney told Dutton. "But I keep him amused
with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating
cross-examination."
Dutton describes psychopaths as
brilliant, calculating, often highly intelligent people, who feel no emotion and don't even understand what an emotion is or
why non-psychopaths feel them.
I
also found one good example in the article about Lawyers Emotional Intelligence[1] I want to share: In April 1955 Dean of Harvard Law School
Erwin Griswold noted that "Many lawyers never do seem to understand that
they are dealing with people and not solely with the impersonal law”.
The reputation of lawyers generally
has suffered from the image of lacking interpersonal sensibilities, such as
compassion. Further, the high rates of divorce, suicide, addictions and plain
dissatisfaction among lawyers is evidence of less than satisfactory emotional
balance across the profession.
So now it’s quite clear that people
with lack of empathy and emotions might be qualified as those who have high risk
to become a psychopath, divorce, suicide, get addictions to drugs or alcohol
and lawyers are on the top of professions.
Using
your Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Emotional intelligence refers to "the
abilities involved in the recognition,
use, understanding and management of one’s own and others’ emotional states to solve problems and regulate behavior" a definition taken
from Mayer and Salovey.
It‘s scientifically proven that best analyses
and decisions are made when we engage the emotions,
as well as the intellect. Lawyers can upgrade their performance by adding
additional data available from their own and others’ emotions to enhance their
cognitive skills.
And what is really interesting here that Emotional Intelligence does not correlate
with IQ. Some professionals, such as lawyers, exhibit high average IQ
scores (in the 115-130 range), while at the same time scoring lower than the
general population on EI (85-95).[2]
Legal services as high-emotion services
High-emotion services trigger strong
feelings before the service even begins. So in general it’s services, related
to major life events such as birth, marriage, illness and death fall in to this
category, as well as legal services. For example legal services for a divorce
can have big impact on client’s assets and finances, child custody and etc., so
legal services should be considered as high-emotion services too.
From the professional service
provider’s or salesman perspective we usually think that features and benefits of
service/product mostly plays role for our customer in process of buying
something and we ignore the role of emotions.
Managing emotions can have a big
impact of expectations and perceptions of quality and value, enhancing customer’s
satisfaction and loyalty. Professional
service providers should identify emotional triggers, respond early to intense
emotions and enhance customer’s control.
Indentifying emotional triggers
The need for service by itself can
be emotional trigger and company’s underperformance can heighten negative
emotions such as anger and fear. But emotions also present opportunities to
exceed customer’s expectations. So it’s very important to have a strategy how
to identify the feelings client have about the service and then minimize negative
emotions. In some cases a client who comes to a lawyer may feel fear of being
sued and in other cases some person might be feeling anger to sue somebody. In
every situation managing of client’s emotions should be different. But you
cannot ignore emotions in general.
Respond early to intense emotions
Here we go to the second step –
response. If you fail to recognize and respond to customer’s emotions they
might get a feeling of being scared, frustrated or even ignored. So what you should
do? Just inform and prepare customers for “what’s next”.
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