“60% of lawyers, or just about, are introverts”

“The associates I work with rely on email too much. I wish they’d pick up the phone/walk down the hall to discuss.”

“Getting mentoring programs to work in law firms is hard.”

“I wish the partner I work with the most took more time to talk to me more broadly about my experience and career.”

“We need to get more people back into the office.  But people seem resistant.”

“I don’t get it - I thought my colleague would jump at the opportunity to [participate in a panel discussion at the conference.”

“I am not eager to do business development. I prefer just to do my work. And I just don’t feel comfortable having to initiate the kind of conversations I think I need to to get business.”

“I struggle with executive presence. I think I need to say more in meetings and take charge of the discussion more often.”

“One of my junior associates is just not getting it.  In team meetings, they just sit there and never have much to say.”

Here’s something I share with lawyers nearly every day: 60% of lawyers, or just about, are introverts. This is the exact inverse of America as a whole, where about the same percentage are extroverts.

There are many possible “causes” behind each of the statements above. But I have come to feel that so much of what we view as challenging in law firms at both an individual and firm level is explained by the fact that unlike the US generally, the majority of lawyers are introverts. I think this fact explains in [large] part the challenges we experience at law firms with engagement, communication, mentoring, resistance to business development, reluctance to take on leadership, managing stress and more. To be clear, I am not suggesting that extroverts are qualitatively better at any of these – they aren’t. Rather I believe our perspective on each of these challenges – both at the individual and firm level – is often framed in extrovert terms. What we think of as good, successful, necessary is extroverted behavior: social, gregarious, talkative. These can be helpful for leadership and team management and business development, but so can more introverted tendencies: focus on building intimate relationships, reflective, calm, etc.

I think to empower our lawyers to succeed we need to reframe what we value and promote. We need to reframe our language and expectations. We need to celebrate the strengths of introverts and understand the limitations of extroversion. We need to help both introverts and extroverts leverage their core approach and to be comfortable flexing when needed.

There is so much more I want to say here. So, more to come.

PS. I say this as a raging extrovert.