Sensitive leaders: Develop emotional intelligence for change management

The legal sector is undergoing significant volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). There have been mergers and acquisitions, outsourced services, new technologies (including artificial intelligence), increasing globalisation and a stronger focus on pre-empting clients' needs. The skills and talent needs of law firm leaders are evolving, creating succession planning challenges in many firms today. In this era of unprecedented change, how can law firm leaders and their firms adapt, become agile and ensure future success?

The evolving external market and internal changes in law firms provide both an interesting and challenging backdrop for any aspiring leader. There is pressure to remain competitive, to grow and to prosper, yet there is no definitive route map on how to do so. There is also a clear need for law firm leaders to drive strategy forward through formulating a clear vision and achieving desired outcomes.

This is no small feat when you consider that these abilities are not what most lawyers were trained to do at the start of their careers. In addition to needing strong business abilities, effective leaders need to engage their people - peers, junior colleagues and specialists - to collectively build a high-performing business.

To operate as an effective leader in this new landscape of change requires an in-depth understanding of emotion and the ability to use this awareness to get things done, manage change and enable people to operate at their highest potential so that the firm's business goals are achieved.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an area not yet fully understood in law firms. The very nature of legal work removes emotion from the equation. But, emotion is often involved at times when people assume they are being their most rational and unemotional. Whether you are trying to persuade colleagues to adopt a new process or technology or building the business case for merging with another firm, emotions will be involved. By understanding the role of emotions in decision making, you could harness their power.

Pyschologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work on behavioural economics, conceptualised the relationship between emotions and our central cognition as the 'dual-process model'. According to his model, mental processes fall into one of two system-based categories.

The everyday reactions that we have to events are System 1 processes. These unconscious processes tend to be instinctual, fast, automatic, with no awareness of the emotion prior to conscious reflection, particularly when we are experiencing any kind of threat. System 2 processes use central cognition. These are typically slow and deliberate; our thinking unfolds with rational reasoning and considered responses.

System 1 isn't a single system; it's composed of many small, largely autonomous processes that operate in parallel and work on very specific tasks. In other words, we all have many different components of the system, each of take in different types of information and come to their own conclusions.

For example, when you recoil in anxiety at the thought of representing your firm at a cross-sector event, it may not be because you carefully assessed the elements that made up that anxiety. Because this processing occurs at an unconscious level, you may not even understand why the thought of public speaking creates so much anxiety.

System 2, our central cognition, is centrally located in the prefrontal cortex, within the working memory and executive control centres of the brain. When you find yourself making a complicated decision, weighing different factors, and considering different strategies, you are likely relying on System 2 reasoning.

When it comes to behaviour, the complication is that both System 1 and System 2 can be in charge. It's helpful to think of the competition for producing behaviour like an election. Different brain processes elect different candidates and, as the primaries move along, different coalitions form around the most electable candidates. Ultimately, the candidate with the most powerful backers wins the election and gets promoted.

There's no default hierarchy here - sometimes System 2 wins, sometimes the emotions driving System 1 win. The outputs of each system are always competing with one another. Sometimes, after making lots of decisions, System 2 can get tired, and it becomes more likely that your emotional responses will win. Other times, we don't even bother using System 2, even when it's not tired - we just let System 1 take the driving seat. What you end up doing is less the result of clear leadership of your leadership headquarters and more the result of a disorderly scrum.

You may think that there is collaboration between the System 1 processes and that they form a unified front against System 2. But, there isn't just competition between System 1 and System 2 processes; there is also competition among the various System 1 processes. For instance, your fear response can compete against your anger response. You may really want to get angry with a colleague who has not delivered a document on time, but you are afraid of the potential consequences.

In summary, emotion is a source of information, motivation and connection. Emotions guide us in knowing what is going on and what is needed. It is natural, because it is based on our brain's automatic appraisal of what is happening, which then triggers a series of psychological, physiological behavioural responses influenced by our evolution, beliefs and situation.

Neurologist Antonio R. Damasio discovered that feelings are what arise as the brain interprets emotions, which are themselves purely physical signals of the body reacting to external stimuli. He found that "feelings are not just the shady side of reason but that they help us to reach decisions as well".¹

The recent movie Inside Out, by Pixar Studios, provides a fresh insight into what emotions are and how they operate. Whilst lighthearted in tone, it provides a contemporary insight into the basis of five core emotions, how they live together and what behaviours they produce.

Navigating change

Whether it is a merger, or the introduction of artificial intelligence to automate 100 days' work within a few seconds, there are predictable emotions involved in managing change. The role of leaders is to persuade people to embrace new technology and change. This will include having the confidence not only to work with new technology now, but eventually to help grow the scope of the technology that is being introduced.

The change curve usually starts with excitement at the beginning of the initiative. It is the positive feeling of knowing specifically what is happening, particularly when a change has been discussed for a period of months, resulting in a decision and communication by the leaders of a firm. These 'upward' feelings are soon replaced by feelings of self-doubt as events start to prove to be more difficult or complex in the implementation phase, interfering with normal work. There is usually less certainty about how things will work out. Eventually, there comes a period of acceptance, where the low feelings reach a limit before people can start to work with the change. Once people feel totally on board with a change, they can start to work with it.

See Figure 1 for a visualisation of this 'change curve', which can be useful for planning your next strategic change or business development activity. By understanding the natural cycle of emotion, you will be able to ensure adoption of a new process or technology. Figure 2 shows how to help people through each stage of the change curve.

 

Emotional resilience

Using an understanding of emotion and the power of emotional resilience, law firm leaders can build strong businesses through their people. Emotional resilience is the ability to choose the thoughts, actions and feelings that enable you to function at your best at individual, team and organisational levels. It gives both the structure and the specifics to operate at your best. It enables you to keep your own emotions in check, to manage the emotions of others when working together and to handle the emotions of key stakeholders.

Geetu Bharwaney is director of Ei World (www.eiworld.org) and author of Emotional Resilience: How to be Agile, Adaptable and Perform at Your Best (Pearson, 2015).

References

1. See 'Feeling our Emotions', Manuela Lenzen, Scientific American Mind,
   April 2005