Mid-Atlantic Region

Program Recap: Fearlessly Relatable – How to Build Confident Client Relationships, Referrals, and Revenue

By Gina Eliadis
Director of Marketing & Business Development at Goodell DeVries

In our relationship-driven industry, connecting with others is a must-have skill. When it comes to generating new business, all the marketing in the world will never trump the truism that clients want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. A significant factor in creating that connection is relatability.

In the May 12, 2022, LMA webinar, “Fearlessly Relatable: How to Build Confident Client Relationships, Referrals, and Revenue,” relationship expert Rachel DeAlto shared her insights into how people connect. DeAlto is an author, speaker, and media personality. Her book, relatable: How to Connect with Anyone Anywhere (Even if It Scares You), was released last year.

In this fun and eye-opening session, DeAlto mixed anecdotes, interactive breakouts, and discussions of her core principles of connection-building. Attendees were asked to complete “The Relatable™ Assessment”—DeAlto’s trademarked tool for helping you discover your social superpower—in advance of the session. She explained what the results can teach each person about oneself, and how that awareness can improve one’s ability to form connections. “Relatable people connect, communicate, and inspire,” DeAlto explained, and led the group through the categories of social superpowers uncovered in the assessment:

• Captains are the confident ones among us. They rarely feel uncomfortable and can talk to anyone. They tend to hide their weaknesses and have trouble accepting feedback.
• Ringleaders are also confident and warm up to others quickly. They love to be in the limelight, and they aren’t the greatest listeners. They tend to act and speak before thinking.
• The Builder is the most common social superpower. Builders are good listeners, accept feedback with grace, and think before speaking. They need a little time to warm up to others, and they tend to care too much about what people think. They tend to be slightly awkward in social situations.
• Analysts are listeners, and they take everything in. They’re data-driven and like to think and research before acting. It takes them a while to warm up to other people, and they may not be as confident in social situations.

DeAlto’s social superpower assessment provides a new way of understanding how one approaches connections. The main takeaway, though, is right there in the program title – “fearlessly.” If Builder is the most common social superpower, that means that many of us approach new connections with some degree of trepidation. We hold parts of ourselves back, unsure of whether or how to share our experiences or voice our opinions, especially in professional settings. When we hold back too much, there’s little or nothing for others to latch onto. As DeAlto put it, “The challenge is that we have to allow our fear to show us where we might want to push ourselves a little bit, because when we are afraid of connecting, when we are afraid of showing who we are, it starts to change the way that we connect with each other and the way that we connect to ourselves.”

It’s easy to understand how this fear might manifest among lawyers and influence their relatability (and marketability). Lawyers are subject to the same anxieties as anyone else when it comes to forming connections. Add to that the tendency of law firms to cling to impersonal, buttoned-up personae, and relatability becomes a particular challenge.

“It’s time to humanize leadership,” DeAlto said. “We’re all human but depending on the level of interaction that people have with certain leaders in their organizations, they can feel more like an enigma. And so it’s really essential in terms of that connection, in terms of becoming relatable, to really start to create human leaders who show all the sides of themselves, who show their flaws, who are open to their weaknesses, who are open to really connecting with people beyond just the formalities, because that’s what people start to hold on to. That’s what people start to connect to, and what people start to seek out in terms of clients seeking organizations. And firms with human[anized] leaders create employee-centric organizations, which creates a better work product … and that creates far better relationships with our clients.”