Personal touch

Learning about emotional intelligence and employing it in today's competitive and pressured business environment will help to give law firms the edge over their competitors. Infrastructure and technology have become ever more sophisticated and firms are better at setting out their service offerings in the market place. So what distinguishes one firm from another when providing identical legal services? The answer is the people.

Technical skills, experience and intellect are important parts of the 'high performance' equation. But so too is emotional intelligence (Ei): what is meant by it? Briefly it means using thinking about feeling (or feeling about thinking) to guide behaviour. It consists then of two parts:

• intrapersonal intelligence - being intelligent in picking up what is going on inside us (self-awareness) and doing what we need to do about it (self-management); and
• interpersonal intelligence - being intelligent in picking up what is going on in other people and between people (other awareness) and doing what we need to do about that (relationship management).