Whether you’re an up-and-coming business professional, a seasoned professional or a newly-minted college graduate, chances are you rely on technology heavily to keep up with your workload and accomplish daily tasks. But reliance on technology has led to a decline in social skills and personal interaction – interaction that helps forge satisfying long-term relationships on both a professional and a personal level.
In this age of virtual meetings and asynchronous communication, it’s important to build relationship capital, the face-to-face connections between people that encourage warm, personal interaction. Because the fact is: People like doing business with people they like, and simply tweeting, texting or uploading product and service information to a website doesn’t provide the human touch needed to build relationship capital. Expanding your relationship capital is also fulfilling. It allows you to interact with and get to know other people in real time, which is certainly more rewarding than reaching out to contacts entirely on a 4-inch screen.
Here are some ways to use relationship capital as a tactical strategy to enrich your business and personal life:
- Invite a client for a dinner at a restaurant where the decibel level is conducive to conversation. Discussing business strategy or product specs after a nice meal shows you’re interested in more than just business – you’re also interested in cultivating a friendly relationship.
- Call your contacts instead of texting and emailing incessantly. While not everyone can take your call immediately, a friendly voice mail provides the personal touch that’s missing in many interactions today. But don’t just leave your call-back number and call it a day. Wait a reasonable amount of time and call again. The best times to reach movers and shakers are before working hours (say, 8 a.m.) and after 6 p.m., when the regular staff has decamped.
- Grab every opportunity you can to speak in public, whether it’s at a business meeting, a conference or even a client’s social event. Public speaking can be daunting, but it gets easier the more you do it. More importantly, you’ll build your relationship capital with those in attendance by helping to put a face to your name.
- Wade into the crowd. Imagine you’re running for political office, and introduce yourself to as many people as you can in a business setting without rushing. Offer a warm smile with a firm handshake. Cultivate the skill of making the person you’re speaking with feel as though he or she is the only person in the room by maintaining strong (but not aggressive) eye contact. Offer a business card only after you’ve made the personal human contact and demonstrated your interest in that person as a person.
- Tap into networks outside your usual milieu. For example, an organization like the Chamber of Commerce is a great place to meet people whose skills are both different from or complementary to your own. Build relationship capital with individuals from multiple spheres, and your professional and personal universes will automatically expand.
You don’t have to give up all social media or electronic devices when building relationship capital. There is a need for virtual networks like LinkedIn for making preliminary contacts and connecting with other business professionals. But try to move those contacts out of cyberspace and into the real world whenever possible. The art of personal interaction may have declined due to an onslaught of social media and virtual connections, but the fact is, people thrive on strong interpersonal relationships. You can gain a strong advantage by tapping into the human need to connect.
