The Formula for Success: EQ ≥ IQ

Our recent interview in The Lawyer sets out why the future of lawyering is all about tech and EQ. Its our recipe to thrive.

We’ve been thinking about emotional intelligence, or EQ, a lot recently. After all, lawyering is a people business. It requires not only a high IQ—that’s a given—but also a highly-developed EQ.

In Daniel Goleman’s seminal book Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, the science journalist outlined what he believed are the five main elements of EQ: self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy, and social or interpersonal skills. These elements will be more and more important in the practice of law in the years to come. Put simply, if we don’t develop and finetune them, we’ll struggle to thrive.

On 5 July 2021, The Lawyer published an interview with us on this vital subject.

The magazine has been ‘helping lawyers see around corners for over 30 years’ on- and offline. So what’s around the corner with EQ?

For us, it’s how EQ will be equal to or greater than IQ.

As we say in the article, ‘over the course of spending so much time developing innovation, what has become obvious [to us] is that emotional intelligence is becoming increasingly important to the role of lawyers.’ ‘As machines get more intelligent, our intelligence quotient is only going to get us so far – we will need to instead rely more on our emotional intelligence.’

As the article notes, ‘with tech becoming a leveller, EQ skills are the differentiator.’

That’s not to say, of course, that tech doesn’t have its place. No. Tech is absolutely vital, but it is about people and tech, not people or tech. Ultimately, lawyers that act and behave like robots will be replaced by robots.

Check out the article by clicking the download button below and do let us have your thoughts on this topic.