Leading in the Law With Emotional Intelligence: The Path to Becoming a Twenty-First-Century Leader

If asked to reflect back over the course of your life about who had the greatest influence as a leader and helped you get to where you are today, who comes to mind? What qualities allowed them to have such a profound influence on your life? Research suggests that leadership success, well-being, happiness, and performance have as much if not more to do with social and emotional intelligence than legal knowledge and cognitive intelligence. Indeed, leadership is about how you make others feel and what you bring out in them, and research shows that only about 15% of success is determined by intellectual abilities, technical skills, and knowledge. This book is about the key factors that make up the other 85% of success: factors that fall under the umbrella of emotional intelligence.

Leading in the Law with Emotional Intelligence offers extraordinary stories that reveal how the four domains of emotional intelligence (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness or empathy, and relationship management) form the basis of exceptional leadership in the law. It also includes dozens of self-discovery exercises; reflective writing prompts; vignettes; and legal application of material from diverse fields, including business, psychology, and neuroscience, to equip students with the skills necessary to lead in the law in the twenty-first century, sustain personal happiness, and develop and maintain the rich relationships necessary to both.

Rob Durr, Ph.D. is the Principal Owner of Carolina Psychological Assessment Center (CPAC). Dr. Durr is a Licensed Psychologist (LP) and Health Service Provider (HSP).

Cliff Zimmerman is a Professor of Practice at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.