Archive for category: Coaching for lawyers

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen’s Idealawg, I’ve been mulling over a couple of interesting articles that connect neuroscience with the law and with leadership.  First up is a Wall Street Journal article titled, Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism.  Research suggests not only that the human brain is predisposed to an optimistic view of the world, but that the effect of moderate optimism is quite beneficial… Except in law.  From the article:

The influence of optimism on human behavior is so pervasive that it must have survival value, researchers speculate, and may give us the ability to act in the face of uncertain odds.

Medical evidence is suggestive. Optimistic people at risk for skin cancer are more likely to use sunscreen. Optimistic coronary artery bypass patients are more likely than pessimists to be taking vitamins, eating low-fat foods and joining a cardiac-rehab program five years after surgery — and living longer, studies show.

“If even half the time our actions work out well, our life is going to turn out for the better,” Dr. Phelps said. “If you are pessimistic, you are unlikely to even try.”

Indeed, the researchers suspect that the breakdown of this brain network may contribute to clinical depression. All in all, Dr. Seligman said, optimists tend to do better in life than their talents alone might suggest.

Except lawyers.

Surveying law students at the University of Virginia, he found that pessimists got better grades, were more likely to make law review and, upon graduation, received better job offers. There was no scientific reason. “In law,” he said, “pessimism is considered prudence.”

David Giacalone of f/k/a offers an interesting rejoinder that suggests a lawyer will be far more effective if he or she expresses both optimism and pessimism: “To be truly good at issue-spotting and at giving excellent advice (as a good consigliere must to survive), you need to be able to envision both good and bad outcomes, and all those in between.”  Amen.

The second article, It’s All in the Mind,  questions the impact of “neuroleadership,” which it defines as “a blend of certain findings from neuroscience with a set of leadership practices and principles designed to encourage more consultative, creative and empathetic corporate chiefs.”  The article identifies four “elements of brain function that are deemed most applicable to business leadership:”

• • the ability to think more creatively and use intuition by improving attention and changing thinking habits;
  • the ability to interconnect and empathise, which is enhanced when we have lower-frequency brain waves or slow down our thinking;
  • the understanding of how the brain reacts to change and the need for positive feedback to help create and reinforce new ways of operating; and
  • the health effects on the entire body from the brain continually working under chronic stress and with excess adrenaline.

Neuroleadership purports to offer scientific evidence to support tools and techniques for leadership development that might be less palatable in hard-driving business settings absent such evidence: “With many years’ experience of talking to business people about topics such as emotions and spirituality, [Daniel] Byrnes [consultant and lecturer in leadership and change management at Australian School of Business in Sydney] says when the idea can be backed by science it is easier to accept. ‘We can measure this stuff’,’ he adds.”

Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education academic and author of the bestseller Changing Minds, has sounded a note of skepticism about the potential benefits of neuroleadership: “I can’t think of anything a leader should do differently because of what we know about the brain.”  Time will tell, but it will be interesting to see how business — and lawyers — react if neuroscientific evidence does indeed support the “softer” leadership skills.

And for those interested in applied neurosciences, I heartily recommend Stephanie West Allen’s other blog, Brains on Purpose, where she collaborates with Jeffrey Schwartz, MD to address neuroscience and conflict resolution.

One of the enduring challenges for any professional is navigating office politics.  Regardless of the profession, office relationships can be extremely challenging and rewarding — sometimes even at the same time.  Challenges can come from a variety of sources: simple misunderstandings, failure to appreciate different skills and approaches, resentment about coworker’s work habits, etc.  Office conflict is a fairly common topic in a coaching engagement, and the good news is that it’s generally possible to resolve or at least minimize it.

Through the blogosphere, I was introduced to Franke James (pictured here), inventor of The Office-Politics® Game.  Franke has put together a marvelous board of advisers (including experts in the areas of executive coaching, leadership development, dispute resolution, employment law, PR and ethics) to answer letters.  Bob Sutton recently posted an Office-Politics.com letter and provided input on one of Franke’s responses.  I was delighted when Franke invited me to serve as a guest adviser and sent me a letter to review.  The letter began like this:

I am an attorney — specifically, a prosecutor. My problem is that there is a dominant clique in my workplace, and I have been regularly excluded (implicitly and expressly) from social events. I feel as though I’m in high school again, and my co-workers have formed an exclusionary clique comprised of only the “cool” kids.

It all began when another co-worker attorney — a temporary employee who I’ll call “Tad” — began making comments behind my back.

You can read the rest of the letter, in which this prosecutor describes how he and others in the office (all of whom are about 10-15 years older than the bulk of lawyers in the office) are excluded from group outings and my response here.  And don’t miss Franke’s response, which takes a different approach and adds some marvelous ideas.�

I recently ran across a post by Ruthie on Ruthie’s Law inquiring, “Are you tough enough?”  Ruthie suggests that:

The most successful lawyers are the ones who can accept that occassionally making mistakes is the price of progression, pick themselves up, move on and vow not to make the same mistake again. The most successful of all are the ones who can make the same mistake a second time, pick themselves up and move on (although if you make the same mistake more than twice, you may want to ask yourself if you were really paying attention before).

Her post responds to this one by Dan Hull of What About Clients? that argues that lawyers naturally lack resilience but must acquire it to be effective in practice and in the business of practicing law.  Dan posits that

We lawyers are, in the main, natural-born weenies and squirrels. We are great people. But we sweat small stuff–part of our job, of course–and we over-react. We have amazingly poor defenses to each day’s hard knocks and battles.

. . .

However, without even doing an empirical study, it’s obvious to me that lawyer “over-sensitivity” is a huge problem in our lawyer worlds and workplaces. Our reactions to the sum of small bad stuff prevents us from doing the big stuff or from doing it well. This hurts us as people. But way more importantly, it hurts your client: the main event.

And, for the sake of completeness, Dan’s post was prompted by Mark Bennett‘s post on Resiliency, in which he responds to a post by Ed Poll arguing that lawyers “can’t sell” because they lack resiliency.  Mark, who writes the blog Defending People: The Art and Science of Criminal Defense Trial Lawyering, convincingly excludes lack of resilience as an attribute of criminal defense lawyers.

I find this conversation fascinating and worth some exploration.  My first question is, as usual, is it true that lawyers (as a group) lack resilience?  Whether it’s true as a generalization is much less important than whether it’s true for a particular lawyer, in my view.  And if it’s true for someone, the reason why it’s true is much less important than devising a method for that person to increase his or her capacity for resilience.

So, how can a lawyer choose resilience in the face of a challenge?  Rather than make this post one of mammoth proportions, I’ll provide some strategies on resilience on Friday… So check back!