I’ve been gathering data on lawyers’ personalities since the early 1980’s. Personality traits are typically measured on a percentile scale ranging from zero % to 100%. When large samples of the general public are tested, individuals’ scores on a given trait typically form a classic bell curve, with the mean average for any given trait… Continue Reading
Tag Archives: Personality
Why Skeptics Make Good Lawyers and Lousy Leaders
Posted in LeadershipI recently finished conducting a 6-month-long “Action Learning” leadership program with a mid-size law firm. The idea is to train lawyers to be leaders by actually placing them into real live leadership situations, and teaching through experience, instead of using a “death by Power Point” approach. At the end of our capstone meeting, one of… Continue Reading
Stress and the Lawyer Brain
Posted in ResilienceI’ve posted before about lawyer negativity and low Resilience. Today I want to address a related topic–How stress affects people in general and lawyers in particular. When we experience a stressful situation, we each react differently. Some people cope really well with stress, take it in stride, aren’t knocked over by it, and recover quickly… Continue Reading
Using Measures of “Critical Thinking” to Select Lawyers: Not such a good idea
Posted in SelectionI belong to a listserv on Positive Psychology, the new discipline that studies the principles that help ordinary people to thrive (instead of focusing on how to “fix” people who have problems.) Someone on the listserv posed the following question to me (I’m paraphrasing here): Can the Watson Glaser (a test that measures “critical thinking”)… Continue Reading
Resilience and Lawyer Negativity
Posted in ResilienceFriends and clients who have followed my work over the years have heard me speak often about the personality research I have done with lawyers. Perhaps no other finding is as intriguing as the fact that lawyers consistently score low on a trait called Resilience. What is Resilience? Basically, it’s the degree to which a… Continue Reading
Mindset Makes A Difference
Posted in Positive PsychologyCarol Dweck is a psychologist at Stanford University who studies achievement and success. Within her field, she is quite well known for the concept of “mindset” (also the title of one of her best-selling books). Her idea is simple–people seem to come in two flavors–those with a “fixed” mindset, and those with a “growth” mindset…. Continue Reading
Welcome to the ‘What Makes Lawyers Tick?’ Blog
Posted in UncategorizedWelcome. This is the first post in the What Makes Lawyers Tick? blog, and I want to give readers a cook’s tour of what we’ll cover. As a lawyer-psychologist, I’ve spent my career guiding the leaders of law firms in how to manage the “people” side of their business. Along the way, I became fascinated… Continue Reading
Why Leaders Need Empathy and Flexibility
Posted in LeadershipWhen I design a leadership course for a law firm, I usually include an assessment component. Effective leaders need to be self-aware–they need to understand their strengths and weaknesses, their possible blind spots, and the style of leadership to which they gravitate. To gain this kind of insight requires feedback. The two most common types… Continue Reading