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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

Wanted: Faculty Candidate Who Has Been Anointed To Teach Secured Transactions, Payment Systems, Bankruptcy, And Other Commercial Law Courses. Must Have High EQ.

By Tim Zinnecker

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My friend, Beau Baez (pictured), is the chair of the faculty appointments committee at Charlotte School of Law. In a recent hiring-related post over at Prawfsblawg, Beau wrote:

Our primary focus will be on those that will fit in with our culture, which values Emotional Intelligence("EQ") as much as IQ. Not only do we screen for EQ during the interview, but faculty have regularly scheduled EQ training sessions and retreats.

I?m not familiar with ?Emotional Intelligence? and related testing, so I asked Beau to elaborate. He did, with this email response:

I am not sure there is any one great definition for Emotional Intelligence (?EQ?). The Wikipedia entry for ?emotional intelligence? provides an adequate definition. EQ does presuppose a team approach to excellence?a faculty that works extremely well together can achieve great things. The faculty recently read Patrick Lencioni?s book ?The Five Dysfunctions of a Team? and some had the opportunity to meet him at a conference for Infilaw schools (Charlotte, Phoenix, and Florida Coastal). Other writers that promote EQ, directly or indirectly, include Stephen Covey (?The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?), Jim Collins (?Good to Great?), and Jon Gordon (?The No Complaining Rule?). Faculty EQ training sessions focus on helping us to understand ourselves, so that we can avoid negative behaviors. Not just avoiding negative behaviors, but finding the corresponding positive behavior so that we can become better people, and thereby better members of the team (i.e., faculty).

The faculty hiring team does not have the professional skills necessary to test for EQ, so all candidates are screened by our talent vendor. We worked with our talent vendor in creating our ?ideal faculty? profile, which the talent vendor uses as a guide in their interview with a candidate. All the data on a candidate is then employed in making a hiring decision.

We value EQ because it reduces the number of bad hires. Someone may be a great scholar or teacher, but is not a pleasant person to work with. The amount of resources to deal with one bad hire can be enormous, both in terms of lost on-boarding costs when that person leaves and that person?s continual emotional drain on the law school.

I?m curious if other law schools engage in this (or similar) testing of potential faculty candidates. We don?t, and I?ll bet we?re with the majority of law schools. Hiring committees probably share Beau?s desire to avoid ?bad hires? and anyone who ?is not a pleasant person to work with.? Are we overconfident that our 30-minute screening interview in DC, our campus callback, and faculty deliberations are sufficient to disclose that this candidate is not a ?good fit?? Do we have a tendency to place too much emphasis on potential for both teaching and scholarship at the expense of faculty unity/harmony? Does (should?) school rank dictate the profile of an ?ideal faculty? member? Is it possible to agree on what makes a person a ?bad hire? or an ?unpleasant? co-worker or, alternatively, a ?good fit?? Does (should) our limited interaction with colleagues make ?EQ? rather irrelevant?

Questions to think about, perhaps, during this faculty recruitment season.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 10, 2009 (boomark / email).