Building relationships in a challenging times: the strength of weak links

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Itzik Amiel
The Switch, Amsterdam
info@itzikamiel.com

The strength of weak links

The Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down the business development of many law firms but at the same time has forced law firms to maintain and build relationships with their clients and connections. Many law firms are facing tension between generating new work and clients during a period of extreme economic hardship and respecting the threats to life and livelihood that have altered clients’ priorities and preferences. This tension is very real, particularly for smaller firms. Cutting costs is inevitable for many firms. However, this does not have to come at the expense of good relationships, which can create substantial value to the firm.

During research for the book The Attention Switch I came across interesting research that showed that in times of crisis, a client’s interaction with a law firm can trigger an immediate and lingering effect on his or her sense of trust and loyalty. As a lawyer or a law firm, you will be judged, in times like this, by how you build relationships with your clients and connections and meet their new needs with empathy, care and concern. So what can you do to use your time in self-isolation to build relevant relationships online to lay the foundation for growth when the pandemic comes to an end?

Here are three leading relationship-building strategies that are relevant to this specific time:

Focus on fundamental elements

Now more than ever, many of your connections need to feel that you care about them and their needs. They want guidance from someone they can trust that can make them feel safe when everything seems uncertain and that offers support when so much seems to be overwhelming. Let connections know that your firm understands and cares about their situation and the difficult social circumstances by reaching out, not through marketing or overt attempts to gain a competitive edge, but to offer genuine support during this difficult time.

Some of your clients may be feeling upset, lost, annoyed and adrift because of personal or external events. This is the time when they need you as a trusted adviser, so be there for them. Ask them how they are doing. Be caring, be empathetic. Make a personal connection with no other agenda.

Your firm and employees’ social media channels and your clients' mailing lists are perfect instruments for sharing this message with the relevant connections. The way in which you step up to play this role for your connections, your employees and the broader community is likely to leave lasting memories in your connections’ minds. Your sincerity and authenticity count in this period, so pay attention not to come across as insincere.

Focus on the right connections

This time presents many great – even unique – opportunities to strengthen the right connections you have. Within our society it seems obvious that the better we know someone and the stronger the relationship, the more valuable it is for us. Over the years, and especially in difficult times such as this, I have found out that when you are building relationships or expanding your business, going outside your circle of routine is counterintuitive.

It is not the strong ties that can be the most beneficial; in fact, weak ties can sometimes be far more valuable. By weak ties I refer to people that you might not know that well or acquaintances. Sociologists identify strong and weak ties as the main types of relationships in a social network. Your strong ties are your family, friends, close colleagues and people with whom you associate frequently. Weak ties might be childhood friends that you do not speak to regularly or your local librarian. Strong ties are limited in number because they require more time and effort to keep up. You can only see and associate with so many people on a regular basis. Weak ties have fewer limits — you can handle many more of them. Weak ties enable you to reach populations and audiences that are not accessible via strong ties. One of the main differences between strong and weak ties is the time it takes to build and maintain the relationship. While strong ties require a lot of effort to maintain, this is not the case for with weak ties. Thus, it allows you to have more weak ties.

Do not get me wrong, as a person who believes in building relationships for the long term, I also know that many times, especially when you give sincere attention to other people, a weak tie may grow into a strong tie. However, you need to remember that weak ties that do not develop into strong ties are still very valuable to you. So don’t let them be forgotten and disappear. The best example I can think of, especially in this period when we are bound to work from home, is your social media friends. We all know that we cannot maintain all the relationships with contacts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and any other social network. Think about how you use LinkedIn, for example. Are all of your relationships strong ties? Do you count all of your connections as good friends? Or are they colleagues with whom you occasionally interact with? Are they important to you at all? Should they be? I bet that many of these relationships are weak ties, but you are still able to maintain them.

You’ll probably find several sets of weak ties in your social networks once you start to look. Do you connect with them? Do you watch their activity feeds? Do they look at your feeds to keep in touch? Sometimes it goes unnoticed, but our weak ties are the ones that help us many times to connect to others, both offline and online.

Focus on deepening your skills

Think about how to use the coming months to sharpen and to deepen your skills, develop new ones and increase your effectiveness as a professional and client adviser. Look at the present situation also as an experience and how you can learn to build a better, stronger and deeper relationship with your connections. Trust me, it will be worth it.

It is a good time to work at the specific things that will make us better builders of relationships, more empathetic and caring professionals and more trusted advisers – rather than going back to the old routine and doing the same activities over and over again without improvement. My suggestion to you is to create a list of a few things you’d like to work on to improve your relationships with your connections and develop more relevant skills. Maybe it involves learning how to use emotional intelligence in managing your client relationships. Perhaps this year you’d like to create a better routine to categorise your relationships and follow up accordingly with each group.

In everything you do this year, collaborate more than ever. Work to connect with your colleagues and friends. Use the togetherness created by this crisis to create momentum for your legal practice. As Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence: ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’

Last word

Finally, stay safe, sit back and breathe. 2020 will be a unique year and it will not be easy for many of us. However, while business development slow down, building relationships should not. This year will bring surprises for everyone.

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