Introduction
There is a quiet crisis of emotional intelligence (EQ) in the legal world. Firms around the world are struggling with this post-pandemic trend, specifically with their junior employees.
To understand the EQ crisis, consider the challenges the youngest generation in the workplace has faced. They grew up with ubiquitous screens distracting them, and sociologists are only beginning to understand the impact on their psyches. As they were pursuing degrees, the pandemic hit, and they were forced to learn remotely, which took away a critical period of socialization. Now they have entered the workforce, and many have found themselves in largely remote working environments. They have been denied the water cooler chatter, the impromptu happy hours and lunches that so many of us benefited from earlier in our careers when older colleagues mentored us.
While each generation tends to complain about the ones that follow, something more concrete seems to be occurring with this trend. Frustrations over communication and behavior are widespread when you speak to executives. The remedy towards ameliorating the issue could come from a surprising source: spies.
Spies are gifted communicators
Spies are gifted communicators, highly adaptable, and with elevated emotional intelligence they use to connect with their targets. My work involves bringing spy tradecraft to business communications, and I have tips on how to help your team improve their communication skills.
One of the hardest but most essential things to do is to be a good active listener. When we feel listened to, we feel respected, which should be the goal when dealing with a colleague or a client. But active listening is hard because of the way we are wired, which is to listen with an intention to reply, not to understand. Because of these natural impediments to listening, we need to commit ourselves to increasing our active listening practice – there is no trick that turns you into a great active listener, but it is the skill that all good communication strategies flow from.
Becoming a good active listener
One of the challenges to listening is that we have evolved to comprehend four times faster than we speak, so we are typically ahead of our conversational counterparty, which makes concentrating on what they say quite difficult. When speaking with someone, have you noticed them become restless as you’re speaking and that they may even finish your sentence for you? That’s because they know where you are going before you’ve finished. It requires commitment to steady your body language, make consistent (but not creepy) eye contact, and, most difficult of all, to ask a clarification question rather than the reply you’re dying to share.
Mirroring is the physical replication of another person’s body language, and it has been shown in countless studies to augment the rapport-building process. Simply put, if your client is leaning forward, elbows on the table, eager to hear what you have to say, mirror their posture.
Verbal mirroring is an important tool in the toolkit of hostage negotiators – who can’t be right in front of the targets they seek to influence – and it works similarly. If you use the same language as your target, it will signal that you’re on their side. Look in particular for colloquialisms or pet words – the little sayings we all tend to favor. In corporate life, we are bombarded with sayings like “let’s circle back” or the countless campaign slogans that businesses utilize – look for these colloquialisms and bits of corporate jargon to repeat back to your clients.
Making both physical and verbal mirroring an integral part of your communications will help to build better connections with clients to make them feel like you’re an auxiliary member of their team. A word of caution though: mirroring should be used subtly, and you should practice with friends before you use it in your career. When done badly, mirroring can backfire and make it appear that you’re mocking your target.
Elicitation is a skill savvy spies use to subtly collect information and can be an effective way for lawyers to gather information in depositions and other situations. When we meet someone of interest, we want to learn about that person, but if we ask lots of questions, we risk eliciting a reaction that is the opposite of our goals – suspicion of our intentions, for instance.
There are a variety of triggers for elicitation that behavioral science can point to. One is known as the tendency to correct. The idea is that all human beings are vain, and there is no detail too small about ourselves that we don’t feel compelled to correct. So if I was to say to you, “Isn’t your favorite color blue?” you wouldn’t simply say, “No, it’s not blue.” Rather, you would correct the record about what your favorite color is and say, “It’s green.”
Takeaway
The corporate EQ crisis is real, but the good news is that with a little training it can be improved. Investing in your team’s communication skills can increase workplace morale and grow your business. The world of spies can uncover the secrets on how to do so. ß
Editorial note:
For further details on this topic, see the book Sell Like a Spy, which was written by our author. (tw)
Author
Jeremy Hurewitz
jhurewitz@interfor.international
www.interforinternational.com/interfor-academy/