By Andrew P. McCoy and Fred Sargent
Published On February 15, 2024
Service and maintenance electricians who spend their entire work week shuttling from one customer’s location to the next are in a position to benefit from a psychological phenomenon that most of them—and their managers—might never have imagined: the awesome power of weak friendships.
Because service and maintenance electricians are in and out of so many facilities and dealing with different people, they are apt to form a bevy of “weak ties” with a multitude of folks who they might regard, at best, as casual acquaintances. Psychologists tell us that having these kind of “weak” relationships contributes to our health and well-being. It also has unexpected benefits to business—especially service-related.
From childhood, we are inculcated with a belief in the value of having—and being—a best friend. There are inspiring accounts of lifelong friendships, including such well-known buddies as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, or Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla.
We would never expect to be regaled with stories about strong reasons for maintaining weak connections with legions of other people. But now we can be.
The power of weak relationships
To understand this, however, we have to go back and picture a day in graduate school in Canada when Gillian Sandstrom gained her earliest insight into the remarkable power of weak personal relationships. Although she was excelling in her classes, Sandstrom was suffering from a crisis of confidence in her own academic ability. (She would later call that “impostor syndrome.”)
Crossing campus to class, at one point Sandstrom began a daily habit of smiling and waving to a woman who operated a hot dog stand on a street corner along the way. They exchanged these friendly, silent greetings each day from a distance—but never up close.
In due time, Sandstrom began to detect a dramatic uplift in her spirits. She came to the conclusion that her recovery was mostly a product of her “weak friendship” with that friendly hot dog seller. Out of this deeply personal self-analysis, she formed her initial hypothesis about the hearty benefits of weak ties.
Today, Sandstrom is a senior lecturer in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex and a thought leader in the psychology of weak friendships.