The Ultimate Currency for Business Success

It is not only our relationships with our clients that are important. We can create enormous value for our clients by helping them to foster great relationships amongst themselves. In fact, we propose, it’s an essential part, a responsibility of all STEP practitioner’s role.   

This is excellent news in a world where AI will make technical work - legal agreements, accounting, even structural planning - more efficient. It is the human factors that our clients truly value the most.  

 There are three qualities that underpin relational skill, the ability to help clients relate well together.  

1. Respect

Not the kind that demands respect based on position in the family or business. Truly valuable respect is a positive regard for other people’s perspectives. It is seeking to understand where other people in the family or business are coming from, listening and learning rather than telling and controlling. Empathy such as this does not necessarily mean agreeing with other people’s decisions; it does mean seeking to understand why those decisions are important to the person making them. This strengthens trust, a crucial factor in good relationships.  

What might this look like in reality?  

• Do not hide.  There was an adage in the 1990s that ‘information is power’. Hoarding and protecting information rarely builds trust. Good, healthy relationships are built on openness. ‘Shared information is power’ is the better wisdom. Keeping our agendas open and encouraging inclusive decision-making will build trust and respect, especially when we know that, by including others, achieving our own desired outcome will become a little harder.  

• Relate well. This sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how quickly good relations can evaporate based on poor relationship skills. Open listening, speaking well, being available to others, being present, attentive and kind are just some of the ways that we foster healthy relationships. Especially when others in our lives are seeking to provoke the very opposite reactions.

• Walk the walk. Trust and respect disappear when we impose our own rules and views on others but fail to live them ourselves.

• Exercise good judgement.  Good judgement is well-informed. Decisions are based on evidence and fact, not conjecture and whim. Finding out what’s truly going on before acting is often the difference between a healthy and a broken relationship.

• Share power. This is the most difficult of these five realities. Many of us and many of our clients like to exert control over their people and families. Rather than encourage others to explore their own unique qualities, we may seek to impose our way, because - in our minds - our way is the best way. Wills designed to exert crushing control - ‘you will do what I say even when I’m gone’ - can perpetuate a sense of suffocation, a harsh and difficult environment on which to build trust.  

2. Peace  

Bringing peace to our relationships and our client’s relationships is immensely value-adding. One of our clients recently spoke about their broken relationship with their father. There were good reasons for the breakdown and the son had not spoken with his father for over 20 years. And now, the father was in the last few weeks of his life. With a gentle prompt from us, the son chose to visit his father in the days before he passed away; he was there at the end. Later, in describing a moment of some reconciliation, it was clear that this had been a truly profound and valuable moment for him.  

Peace and reconciliation are valuable. Being peacemakers and helping others to reconcile their relationships is extremely valuable. There’s no AI in the world that can do this; it’s part of what makes us human. Money and power are close bedfellows. It can be tempting for people to use their money to assert power over others. Yet ancient wisdom, and our humility, call for something deeper. Peace. Peace encompasses humility, gentleness, a willingness to yield to others, impartiality, sincerity and exercising mercy. Wouldn’t it be great if we could enable and foster such qualities in our clients?  

Too often, we are called upon to achieve the very opposite. To litigate aggressively in the pursuit of a single agenda, create conflict and assert my rights with no regard for the damage done to relationships.  

Instead, we can ask ourselves whether we are enabling peace and reconciliation, or something else. That will provide the foundation for truly valuable advice. Relate first, litigate last.  

3. For-Good Advice

We all know what good advice for our clients looks like. But what about for-good advice, choices that are for the good of others? Just because we and our clients can do something doesn’t mean that they should.  

For-good advice will prioritise:

• purpose - how will this decision make the world a better place and improve the lives of other people?  

• the whole family system - what will be the impact on the wider family, or organisation? For-good advice takes into consideration and cares for the whole.

• horizon thinking - how will this decision impact future generations?  

Clients who don’t care beyond their own personal interests and experiences may benefit from our challenge.  

In a world that’s being changed by artificial intelligence, we can and must deepen our emotional intelligence. The greatest value and true success rest on creating deeper connections with and amongst our clients. 

* STEP is the global professional body, comprising lawyers, accountants, trustees and other practitioners that help families plan for their futures