TRP 333: [Legal] Elevating Emotional Intelligence for Lawyers with David Sarnoff

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by legal dealmaker, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love. You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, and my name is Scott Love. Thank you for joining me on the show. This episode is part of our legal specific series of shows. Our special expert today is David Sarnoff. David works with law firms where the work actually moves people.

[00:00:40] Well, they take action, not just training that gets forgotten by Monday morning. He does coaching and leadership development that changes how leaders think, communicate, and show up for their teams. David is an ICF-certified coach, a leadership trainer, and also a former attorney. So he brings a perspective that most coaches can't offer. He lived inside the high-stakes, high-pressure environments that his clients navigate every day. I've seen David speak before at a legal conference. He's fantastic.

[00:01:08] He's an excellent presenter, and he's got real-world expertise and advice that can help you solve problems. Also, we talk about David's book in our conversation. Make sure you go to the show notes. You can order that directly and also connect with him. I'd highly recommend that. As always, this podcast is sponsored by SharePoint Legal Insights, formerly known as Leopard Solutions, turning legal intelligence into opportunity, and also by The Rainmaking Magazine.

[00:01:36] Now it's entirely complimentary, no charge for the subscription. This is for the intellectually driven and results-focused professional that wants to be the number one professional services provider in their niche. Start your free subscription today. Go to therainmakingmagazine.com. Also, on August 19th at 1 p.m. Eastern, I'm hosting a business development seminar online, a half-hour webinar, for corporate finance and real estate partners on maximizing deal flow.

[00:02:05] Our special guest is expert Ryan Grylecki, who's a global business development coach and consultant for lawyers, who's part of the Bundle Idea Group. You can get access to this by visiting this link, rainmakingseminars.com. This is my regular, free, virtual events that I'm starting to host for partners in law firms. I hope it gives you some value. If you can't attend, register anyways, and I'll make sure that you get the recording.

[00:02:32] Thanks for listening, and I hope you find great insights in my conversation with David Sarnoff today. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking Podcast. Our special guest today is a good friend, David Sarnoff, and today we're talking about elevating emotional intelligence for lawyers. David, thanks for joining me on the show. Scott, pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for your invitation. Yeah, thank you, man. And this is great to see you. I've seen you speak when SharePoint had the managing partner lab.

[00:03:02] The feedback from the leaders in the room was very positive, and I'm a fan. And by the way, I've read not all, but most of your book, Beyond the Courtroom, that you co-authored with Natalie Loeb, Proven Strategies from the Legal Field for Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and Wellbeing in the Modern Workplace. So you have a message that I think can solve a lot of problems in the legal industry. And so our topic title today is Elevating Emotional Intelligence for Lawyers. And David, I always like to start with working definitions.

[00:03:30] What is emotional intelligence, and why is that important in the legal industry today? So thank you for the question, Scott. Emotional intelligence is a really large topic, and we could literally spend days on it. But for purposes of our conversation, I'll define emotional intelligence as having the self-awareness to understand how you show up, how you're perceived, and what the impact of your words and actions are on other people.

[00:03:58] And when I say self-awareness, it's identifying emotions as you're experiencing them, naming them, and using emotional intelligence skills to influence them. If you're in a heightened state, if you're agitated, frustrated, angry, being able to de-escalate that to have a productive, collaborative conversation with a colleague or a subordinate.

[00:04:23] Because if we don't check that, it can escalate through the cortisol and adrenaline that our brain stimulates when we're under stress or threat, and we can damage relationships and impair trust. This is interesting. There's a lot we can talk about. Let me ask you the first question, why? Why is this hard for lawyers, do you think? Well, so there's a lot of research around this. You know, glad we're sitting.

[00:04:53] This might come as a shock, but a lot of the research shows attorneys as a population have a below average emotional intelligence score when compared to the general population. And that's probably not a surprise to a lot of people. And for me, one of the foundations of what that is is because the legal profession leverages IQ immensely. You know, IQ is the price of admission.

[00:05:18] Being able to use your cognitive, logical, numerical, verbal, spatial skills to solve problems. Where emotional intelligence gets challenged, in my opinion, is based on the work of psychologist Morton Seligman, who was one of the pioneers of positive psychology, and Dr. Larry Richard, who was a lawyer who became a clinical psychologist and studied lawyer personalities for many, many years.

[00:05:45] And what they found, particularly Seligman, that lawyers score high in pessimism. And he says pessimism is an essential skill to be an effective lawyer. We have to be critical thinkers, look at the consequences, you know, peek around corners, protect our clients. But if we don't leverage optimism to motivate and inspire and drive performance through other people and build relationships and trust,

[00:06:12] then pessimism permeates our personality and our mindset. And Seligman says this contributes to the exponentially higher rates of depression, substance abuse, self-harm and suicide in the legal profession compared to the general population. That's interesting. And I know in the context of the workplace, how they impact other people, especially partners impacting associates, partners impacting other partners.

[00:06:40] And I know you know this from your work used to do recruiting, I do recruiting. And I think people leave law firms for one of two reasons, either strategy issues, but more commonly leadership issues. The issue of I don't feel heard, I don't feel understood. I can't trust my colleagues. I can't trust leaders. And I think what you have, David, is a solution to most of the problems in the law firms and the leadership context. What you mentioned, the emotional intelligence, the self-awareness.

[00:07:05] So do you think lawyers, as you mentioned, trained at a disadvantage, perhaps trained to think critically that way, always looking at instead of, I think you use this example in your presentation, instead of looking at the ball game, playing baseball is a fun way to do sports. It's a chance you can get hurt. Instead of looking at things that way, do you think there's hope for people in the legal profession? Oh, absolutely.

[00:07:28] Because while the legal profession may have been slower than the corporate world to embrace emotional intelligence, they are coming around. And I coach many and have coached many partners and practice group leaders and managing partners of firms on how to elevate emotional intelligence. The great thing is these are learned behaviors. So anybody can do them with commitment, with practice, with accountability and feedback.

[00:07:58] You can increase and improve your emotional intelligence. I use an assessment called the EQI 2.0 assessment that's administered by MHS Multi Health Systems. And it's one of the most widely used tools in the world to measure emotional intelligence. And I use it with a lot of my lawyer clients. And it evaluates 15 emotional intelligence behaviors.

[00:08:25] And it includes self-regard, having respect for yourself, self-actualization, striving to achieve, having purpose and meaning in your life, stress management, impulse control, interpersonal relationships, flexibility, optimism, empathy, all those things.

[00:08:47] So anybody who says, you know, they'll never have emotional intelligence is just somebody who's not trying. But, you know, just going back to your earlier point about how we see things, I talk about my first day of law school where an administrator said, you know, when you graduate here, you will think in terms of consequences and not possibilities. You'll walk past a playground and not see the joy of play. Only all the ways kids can hurt themselves.

[00:09:16] And it was right when I had kids. And I was like, oh, don't climb that. You're going to fall. You're going to hurt yourself. And other parents were like to their kids, yeah, go to the top. You know, so there is this contrast. So where do you think people usually can make the biggest change? Where do you think they should start in this journey? If they see that this is something I want to learn more about, I want to grow, I want to make certain changes. Where do you think they should start, David? So it's got to start with the self, in my opinion.

[00:09:46] And, you know, we all have varying degrees of self-awareness and being able to step outside of ourselves and objectively evaluate. You know, do we come in with an inviting posture, nonverbal communication, facial expressions, or do we appear intimidating? Are our arms crossed? Are we putting our guard up? And it's just subtle things like that. There's a professor at UCLA, Albert Morabian, who studies communication.

[00:10:14] And he says over 70% of what we communicate to other human beings is nonverbal. It's eye expressions, facial expressions, posture, body language, tone, volume, speed. Our actual words only account for 30%. So one of the key ways to do this is to seek feedback and ask people, you know, how do you experience me? What can I do differently?

[00:10:41] Are there ways that I can better support you or communicate with you? You know, that takes vulnerability. It takes courage. But sometimes people will tell you the truth and say, you know, you have a tendency to interrupt people. Or when people share ideas you don't agree with, you roll your eyes. And I hear that a lot. You know, that the reaction. And that causes members of a team to withdraw.

[00:11:10] So for how it impacts a leader is if, you know, especially in the legal profession, if somebody cites a problem or an issue, they may be reluctant to bring it to the partner's attention because they feel they might react in a negative way. So they won't share that information that is crucial to the partner. And the partner may not learn of it until we now have a crisis. So when you have vulnerability-based trust, people are going to come to you early on and

[00:11:39] say, I made a mistake without fear of retaliation or retribution. And at an even higher level, telling the partner, hey, I just want to let you know you made a mistake. And the partner in a high EQ posture would say thank you, as opposed to being defensive about it. This is interesting. As you know, the legal world is filled with imperfect people that can't admit any sort of weakness or vulnerability because they look bad. But this does require being vulnerable, right?

[00:12:09] A hundred percent. And, you know, if you listen to Brene Brown, the power of vulnerability, the power of empathy. In the talk at the Shorepoint event, I talk about KKR, you know, Kravitz-Kolberg-Robertson Company, $600 billion private equity firm that, you know, one of their co-leaders, Peter Stavros, brought in a psychologist from Stanford named Jamil Zaki, who's an empathy expert.

[00:12:36] And he evaluated the CEOs in the portfolio of KKR and found that the leaders who scored high in empathy led companies that outperformed companies whose leaders scored low in empathy. So it wasn't empathy about coddling people or wanting to be liked or being nice. It was connecting to other people's circumstances and understanding what support and resources

[00:13:03] they need to thrive and succeed and providing that. That was empathy. How can I support you to succeed and thrive? Because you benefit, but we all benefit. And this isn't Sesame Street. This isn't some social interest nonprofit. This is KKR, who had the moniker Barbarians at the Gate in the 1980s. If you go to their website now, they prominently feature this Bloomberg article, and it says

[00:13:30] Empaths at the Gate because they discovered empathy makes money. That's great. I love that. So within law firms I've seen, there are some where everybody loves the team. The leaders really support their colleagues. I'll call partners and they'll say, I don't want to leave. I love it here. Why is that? And there's always an emotional context associated with that. It's never mathematically. It makes sense for me to stay, then to leave.

[00:13:57] And I think just looking at the human factor of what motivates people, even a partner that's leading a team of two or three associates and maybe a junior partner in a council. That person is a significant leader, even though they've got a team that's small compared to what most corporations have and other industries. That's an important team. Let's just say you're coaching someone or take me through the arc of what you do when you work with people to help them grow in this emotional intelligence and this self-awareness.

[00:14:25] So it starts with trying to get a baseline of where you are on the scale. So we may use the EQI assessment. I may ask with some of my clients, there is an exercise called the three words exercise. And I ask my clients, describe yourself in three words or short phrases. What words encapsulate who you are? Write them down. And then go to seven to 10 members of your team, your colleagues at different levels, and

[00:14:53] ask them to describe you in three words. And then collect them and let's go through them and see what happens. With one leader who I worked with, you know, I said, oh, how do you think your team's going to respond? Oh, my team loves me. So to his credit, went to the members of his team, said, please describe me in three words. Leave it on my chair when I'm not in my office. Type it up. I don't want to know who said what. He collected them. We sat in the conference room. We started to go through them.

[00:15:23] Untrustworthy. Micromanager. Mean. Vindictive. Shocked this person. And after he sat with it for a couple minutes, he turned to me and said, I don't want to be this guy. And he put in six, eight months of really hard work. You know, having to come to terms with how his behavior has impacted other people, caused high attrition. You know, as I know in our work in recruiting, attrition is expensive.

[00:15:53] It costs firms significantly. And I still think even today with all the metrics and programs, they still don't fully appreciate how low EQ takes millions of dollars off the table in profit. Because people don't leave firms. They leave managers. They leave partners. What do you think the main pitfalls people have to watch out for if they want to make these changes?

[00:16:21] Where are the missteps, potential missteps in terms of going through this growth? So great question. And everything we're talking about today, you know, self-awareness and communication and feedback, it's all great. You know, and we can have a variety of conversations around different behaviors. Where the rubber meets the road is under stress. You know, and in law firms, we live in high stress, high stakes all the time. I was a litigator.

[00:16:51] I spent nine years at a firm from being a trial paralegal up to mid-level associate. I second chaired and third chaired about seven trials in state and federal court, many of them multi-week cases where you're just running on cortisol and adrenaline. And just to give you a little neuroscience around stress, in our brain is the amygdala and it senses fear, threat and stress.

[00:17:16] And when it's fired up, it starts pumping cortisol and adrenaline into our blood to wake us up, get us into survival mode. And it's kind of a primitive reaction to stress. And maybe 10,000 years ago, if you were being chased by a wild animal, your amygdala is saying, run in this direction. It doesn't want you thinking. It just wants you reacting. And coming up in my career, I work with a lot of partners who under stress reacted. They didn't think.

[00:17:45] And as the amygdala is pumping cortisol and adrenaline into your blood, your prefrontal cortex where logic and reasoning is stored, your thinking brain physically begins to close because the amygdala doesn't want you thinking. It just wants you acting in fight, flight or freeze. And the way to deescalate that is through nasal diaphragmatic breathing. I know you had your military career in the Navy. Navy SEALs are among the best at this.

[00:18:14] It's box breathing or nasal diaphragmatic breathing because they need to stay calm in chaos. And I worked with practice group leaders and one person in particular at a large firm. And we started working on breathing exercises. And he came to me because he was in a heightened state, very stressful situation. He implemented his box breathing that he was practicing. And he said, David, it was a game changer. I didn't yell. I didn't slam anything.

[00:18:42] I was able to get to a calm state. And people will react much more positively. There's a very underutilized quote by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Be a thermostat, not a thermometer. Set the climate and tone in the room, not reacting to what other people give you. Because emotions are contagious. Stress is contagious. Anxiety is contagious. But calmness is contagious.

[00:19:10] So that breathing helps us to really find that place where we can understand what our emotions are. What should we be doing? How should we respond? Is that the whole point of that, David? Yeah, so it helps us get to a calmer or a calm state where we're able to access our thinking brain. And that's where we make better decisions than, you know, Daniel Goldman, who was a thought leader and pioneer in emotional intelligence.

[00:19:38] He coined the phrase amygdala hijack. Because we're much more likely to act irrationally. Like, otherwise rational people get into a road rage incident. You're at the airport, you're rushing for your flight, you're stressed, and your flight gets canceled, and you see somebody have an outburst at the counter. They're an amygdala hijacked. You know, their ability to de-escalate becomes greatly impaired.

[00:20:04] I used to see this in the legal practice all the time. So what have you seen then with the people you've coached, not just how it's impacted them personally, what's the payoff? What's the result? How has this impacted team loyalty, execution, profitability, things like that? Oh, it dramatically increases retention. You know, I'll use associates, but it goes for paralegals, business service, everybody in the firm.

[00:20:33] They want to be valued, seen, and heard. You know, they want to be listened to. They want to contribute to decision-making. They want to be part of the process. They want to know their work matters, that they're part of this larger strategy, not just given some, you know, isolated tasks to do and not knowing how it fits in. And, you know, there's a Teddy Roosevelt, a quote attributed to Teddy Roosevelt from over 100 years ago.

[00:21:02] People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And it could just be a subtle thing. Scott, I care about your career growth and skill development because I care. I need to give you this feedback. And you could be very direct. I mean, one of the misnomers is that emotional intelligence, empathy somehow sacrifices quality or rigor or setting high standards.

[00:21:28] I believe it helps you get there much faster, much more effectively than the taskmaster and somebody driving in a way that's more intimidating than supportive. That's great. So let's say as we bring our conversation to a close, David, if you could give us three action steps. Somebody says, I want to get better at this. I'm going to learn more. What would be three action steps you'd recommend for them to really start these changes in their lives?

[00:21:56] So number one, be more aware of how people are reacting to you. The next time you're in a conversation with somebody or you're in a team meeting and you start to talk, pick up on how people are responding. Are they leaning in? Read the room. Are they leaning away? Did they cross their arms? Are they staring at the ceiling or the floor? Are they maintaining comfortable eye contact with you? Are you maintaining eye contact with them or are you staring away?

[00:22:26] Just to get a sense of how you show up. Because I think it's really important. Once I have clients do this, they are really surprised that they're picking up on things they previously didn't because it just wasn't a priority and it didn't stand out for them. And now they're noticing all these reactions and the way people are showing up and responding to them.

[00:22:52] The other thing is before you head into a meeting or you're going to have a difficult conversation, really take assessment of what's going on with you. You know, is your breathing rapid? Is your jaw tense? Is your jaw tense? Are your shoulders, you know, uptight? And try to bring yourself to a relaxed state so you can react as calmly as possible in a difficult situation.

[00:23:19] Because if you go in amped up, there's a better chance the situation is going to escalate from there. And that typically doesn't go well. And the last thing is focus on incremental change. You know, like anything else, dieting, working out. If we try to do too much too fast, it's generally not sustainable. And what my coach teaches me, be 1% better today than you were yesterday.

[00:23:47] So at the end of every day, journal, write down, what did I do that made me at least 1% better today? That's such great advice, David. So tell us more about what you do. What offerings do you have? What services do you provide that you'd like our listeners to know about, David? Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. So I do a mix of services and consulting, but primarily I do one-on-one executive coaching.

[00:24:14] And those engagements typically run about six months. I do shorter engagements, but the standard for working with a leader or a high potential, high performer is about six months. I also do a fair amount of workshop facilitation, either in intact teams or open workshops, not only with law firms and legal departments, but in the corporate world as well.

[00:24:42] And some of the topics I address are EQ versus IQ, relevant today, giving and receiving effective feedback, active listening. Listening is such a vital emotional intelligence skill, really important for lawyers and leaders. I also do workshops on bridging generations, how to create better understanding of how different

[00:25:08] generations have preferences for communication, technology, feedback, and try to elevate that understanding so we can have more collaborative, productive interactions. And I also do workshops on time management, delegation, as well as having those difficult conversations and managing stress. That's great, David. Thank you so much for being here.

[00:25:35] To everybody listening, we're going to put all of David's contact information on the show notes. Wherever you listen to the podcast, just go there. I'm also going to put a link to the book that you and Natalie co-authored together on there so people can order that directly. And like I said, I'd highly recommend that. This book has so much info that will help people in the legal industry to become more effective at emotional intelligence and leadership. David, thank you so much for being on the show, and I'd love to have you back on in the future. Oh, thanks so much, Scott.

[00:26:01] It's truly a pleasure, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you for listening to The Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.