20 Bad Behaviors That Even The Most Successful Attorneys Need to Stop

If you’re reading this article, there’s a strong likelihood that you are either already a highly successful attorney or you have strong desires to become a highly successful attorney. Many of the people I have the honor of meeting while doing my work as an executive coach, have worked hard and figured out what they needed to do to climb the ladder of success.  Now, they are indeed successful, often very successful. They also want to become even more successful but have now found something is stopping them and they seem to have lost their way. 

The problem is not that these lawyers don’t know who they are, where they are going, or what they want. They do. It’s not that they don’t have a sufficient sense of self-worth. Again, they do. Indeed, sometimes their sense of self-worth is, shall we say, “more than sufficient.” 

The problem that stands in the way of these successful lawyers becoming even more successful is they don’t understand how their behavior (the very same behavior that earned them the success they now enjoy) is coming across to the people who matter most to their ability to earn even more success. People like their boss, colleagues, partners, legal assistants, paralegals, associates, clients, judges, opposing counsel, and others they interact with throughout their workday. This problem also gets magnified in their personal lives. 

Left unchecked, these behaviors can cause serious, yet avoidable, problems.

Left unchecked, over time these seemingly minor quirks begin to chip away at the social capital these successful lawyers have accumulated in life and in their careers.  When that happens, other people begin to withhold the assumptions of goodwill that friends and colleagues often extend. And it’s at this point that a normally minor irritation blows up into a major crisis. 

How did things wind up reaching a boiling point? Why did this happen? More often than not, it’s because the successful lawyer’s inner compass of correct behavior has failed them… and they have become clueless regarding their position among their coworkers. 

Meet Peter Drucker and Marshal Goldsmith

One of my mentors, Marshall Goldsmith, was a member of the Board of Directors for the Peter Drucker Foundation for 10 years.  For those who may be unfamiliar with Marshall Goldsmith and Peter Drucker, please allow me to briefly introduce them to you. 

Peter, for decades, was without question the world’s leading authority on business management. Indeed, shortly before he passed away in 2005, Peter Drucker was celebrated by BusinessWeek magazine as “the man who invented management.” Naturally, when most people hear that description, they think of corporate management. That’s fair since Peter Drucker did, in fact, advise a host of giant companies (along with several nonprofits and government agencies). But he came to his life’s work not because he was interested in business per se. What drove him was trying to create what he termed “a functioning society.”

Throughout the over 10,000 pages in books and countless articles he authored, Drucker displayed an awe-inspiring ability to see things differently or as he put it an ability to “look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”

Marshall Goldsmith has been praised as “a great thinker and leader… in the field of management” by the American Management Association, a “top executive educator” by the Wall Street Journal, a “great communicator” by O, the Oprah Magazine, one of “the five most-respected executive coaches” by Forbes, an “influential practitioner in the history of leadership development” by BusinessWeek, and “one of the most credible thought leaders in the new era of business” by the Economist. 

As a result of Marshall serving on the Board of Peter’s foundation, he enjoyed many opportunities to listen to Peter share his very importantand valuable knowledge, insights, and wisdom regarding life, leadership, and business management.

One of the greatest lessons Drucker taught Marshall and then Marshall taught me is this: “We spend a lot of time helping leaders learn what to do. We do not spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half of the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”

As a lawyer leader, if you stop and think about this for a moment or two, there are a lot of good reasons for this. Perhaps the most persuasive reason is the fact that leaders and organizations focus on demonstrating a commitment to positive action to maintain forward momentum. For instance, using the phrase, “We must begin to listen more attentively” rather than focusing on what we can stop like, “Playing with our iPhones while others are talking.” Likewise, the recognition and reward systems in most organizations are generally focused on acknowledging people for doing something. For instance, we might get credit for doing something good. For lawyers, that could be winning a trial or a motion, signing up a new client, or collecting more than your projected amount of legal fees during the fiscal year. But when you think about it, when was the last time you received credit for ceasing to do something bad.

If you’re like most lawyers and leaders I’ve worked with, there’s a good chance that off the cuff you can’t think anything you do that is bad which you need to stop doing. The truth is, as a lawyer leader, there’s a really strong argument to be made that even you have something or more than likely a good handful of bad things you do that you need to stop doing to become a better leader. If you’re not yet convinced that you have things you should stop doing, it likely means you have a blind spot. 

Meet Dr. Tasha Eurich

My dear friend, Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist and New York Times, bestselling author. She is also one of the world’s leading experts in the field of self-awareness. In the world of psychology, for more than 50 years, researchers have used varying definitions of self-awareness. For example, some see it as the ability to monitor our inner world, whereas others label it as a temporary state of self-consciousness. Still, others describe it as the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us.

In other words, self-awareness refers to your ability to look in the mirror and see yourself. Tasha and her team spent years “studying people who look in mirrors, rearview and otherwise in their search for self-awareness.” She wanted to know what self-awareness really is, where it comes from, why we need it, and how to get more of it.

Her research team qualitatively surveyed thousands of people. They analyzed nearly 800 scientific studies and conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with people who made dramatic improvements in their self-awareness. Based on all of the data they collected, Tasha and her team found that 95% of people think they’re self-aware, but the real number is closer to 10 to 15 percent.

Are You Lying to Yourself About Lying to Yourself?

So, what does this mean? It’s simple, most people feel like they know themselves pretty well, but in reality, frequently we don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think we do. 

But what if you, as a lawyer leader, could get to know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life? Would it be worthwhile to invest just a few more minutes reading this article?

Even though research shows that self-aware people are more successful, confident, and fulfilled, most people don’t see themselves as clearly as they could.

Fortunately, both Dr. Eurich and Marshall have taught me that becoming more self-aware is a surprisingly learnable skill. A great place to start your self-awareness journey is by learning what you need to stop doing.

Take the First Step.

The first step is to identify what behavior to stop. In Marshall’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, he offers an in-depth discussion of the 20 bad habits of leaders. Everyone I have met has exhibited one or more of these behaviors, including me! Now it’s your turn to review the list and see if you can identify with any of these bad habits? If you are like the majority of people, the honest answer is yes, and you are ready to start becoming more self-aware and stop engaging in these destructive behaviors. 

What Are the 20 Bad Habits of Interpersonal Behavior?

The 20 Bad Habits of Interpersonal Behavior are a group of common behaviors exhibited by leaders (both consciously and subconsciously) that can have negative effects on not only your own personal development but your entire organization. These 20 Bad Habits are all typical behavioral traits that I’ve seen exhibited by some of the most successful leaders in the world.

The 20 Bad Habits That You Need to Stop:

1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations.
2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make us witty.
5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone “I’m right and you’re wrong.”
6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
7. Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
8. Negativity, or saying “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked.
9. Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
10. Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to give praise and reward to others.
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: This is the most annoying way to overestimate our contributions to any success.
12. Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
13. Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
15. Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
16. Not listening: This is the most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
17. Failing to express gratitude: This is the most basic form of bad manners.
18. Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
19. Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
20. An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.

Have you Developed Any of These Bad Behaviors?

Every lawyer leader can find themselves ensnared in the trap of developing these bad habits. Knowing exactly what these bad habits are and being able to identify whether you exhibit these behavioral traits yourself will enable you to make positive changes, so you can become a better lawyer and leader. A number of these bad habits (like “winning too much” and “adding too much value”) can cloud your opinions and lead you to make decisions that aren’t necessarily the right ones for your clients or your law firm out of stubbornness. Others (like “passing judgment,” “playing favorites”, “not listening”, and ‘failing to express gratitude’) can make you difficult to work with and affect morale in your team – making talented and valuable employees more likely to jump ship prematurely.

Addressing these behaviors before they have a chance to become a bigger problem won’t just be beneficial for the success of your law practice; it will also ensure that you’re not limiting your own potential. Everyone has the ability to grow and improve, and we need to embrace positive change in order to develop.

It’s also important to remember that if you are guilty of showing any of these behaviors in your workplace, it’s likely that those same bad habits are also making an appearance in your personal life too. By nipping these bad habits in the bud, you won’t just become a better lawyer and leader – but also a better friend, parent, or partner too.

This is the first in a series of articles that I’m going to write to help lawyers eliminate any of these bad habits that may be stopping them from reaching the next level of success. 

If you would like to have a conversation to explore ways we can help you become a better lawyer and leader, click here to schedule a free consultation. 

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