Leadership

I got my last job without looking for it. Two of my NYU students followed my advice and got job offers without looking for them. It takes a while to explain how to do it, but once someone gets it, they get it. The technique doesn't get you job offers non-stop or on a predictable schedule, but it will lead you to get offers for jobs you like. Having the expectation helps when you have a job you don't like. Instead of wasting resources on looking for a new job, knowing one will come from this technique will make your current job more palatable. You can still search for other jobs while doing this technique. It will probably augment that search. The core of the…

An old saying in sales says that If they're talking, you're winning. The phrase says a lot and suggests effective strategies. (You have to forget how it implies the interaction has a winner and loser). How do you get someone talking a lot? The best way I know is to get them talking about what matters to them. What matters to them is what motivates them. If you're talking, you'll have a hard time getting them to share or understanding their needs.

I've learned to view what many people call failure as experience and lack of failure as not experimenting enough. If you avoid failure absolutely, I would guess I would sound annoying to me. Not that I'm special in this way. The entrepreneurial community celebrates failure, at least among those who learn from it despite the pain. So do sports and plenty of other places. A major part of my failures come in the form of rejections. Like many of my failures that turned into great learning experiences that led to great successes, many rejections renewed passions in me to succeed at whatever some gatekeeper blocked me from. You can learn to make rejections motivate you. Click here to read the series.

When you think about influencing or motivating someone in business, what tools do you think of using? How do you think of motivating people? Did you think of incentive-based tools based in authority, like bonuses, promotions, raises, increasing or decreasing someone's responsibilities, threat of firing, threat of demotion, and the like? In my experience, most people do. Why not? We're used to seeing them used. They work fairly predictably---almost nobody prefers no raise to a raise. We're used to experiencing others use on them on us. We can easily see them used and measure their effects. These tools fail you when you want to motivate someone you don't have authority over. Who might you want to lead that you don't have authority over? If the…