Engaging over the looooooong term

How are you with building and maintaining long-term relationships?

My strength — and also my weakness — is that I’m good at this. I genuinely enjoy connecting with people, and I have developed habits of staying in touch. The negative is that I don’t always seize opportunities. I move slow.

Having confessed my weakness, here’s what has worked for me:

1. Engagement is its own reward

I genuinely, thoroughly, fully believe that engaging with someone is an end and a reward in itself. So it is a joy for me to connect, and I do it with no agenda.

For a while, I was embarrassed to stay in touch with some people. Maybe I was bothering them by emailing once a year to say hi? Turns out, most people actually value this.

2. What about engaging customers?

If you’re a business, do you email customers just to say “hello?” If it’s true to your brand persona, you could. If you’re a professional service firm, you certainly should — it’s account management.

And if you’re a product or platform, like my MacBook, people are engaging with that thing all day. The little bits of humanity in it actually make it more personal.

3. Most responses are invisible

A reader of this newsletter — someone I admire and who is quite successful — told me they take screenshots of my emails. This is the first they’d told me of it, after I recently emailed them to wish them well as they leave their long-term role.

You never know what is going on.

4. Just keep engaging

Whether it’s with employees, customers, or communities — it’s about keeping on engaging, and choosing consistency over intensity.