Interviewing Do's and Don't

A recent survey showed that almost half the people working today are considering leaving their jobs. The difference between success and failure when it comes to getting a new job is your ability to interview. The more effective you are when you interview the better your chances of getting the job you want. So here are some Dos and Don'ts for interviewing:

INTERVIEWING DOs
1) Prepare: Find out everything you can about the company, the job and the interviewer.
2) Focus on accomplishments not responsibilities.
3) Ask knowledgeable questions.
4) Make friends with the secretaries and assistants involved in the hiring process.
5) Be enthusiastic.
6) Always be positive.
7) Ask for the job.

INTERVIEWING DONTs
1) Don't ever say anything bad about a prior employer, even if true.
2) Avoid being too deferential to the interviewer.
3) Don’t interrupt the interviewer.
4) Avoid talking about salary, or talk about it as little as possible, until you get an offer.
5) Do not assume you can’t negotiate a better deal. (You can if you know how and when to do so)
For more information go to YourCareerDoctors.com

Fall: A time to Focus on Your Career

People are returning from their vacations. Kids are returning to school. You should be focusing on your career. With the end of the summer upon us, now is a good time to focus on your career. Are you looking for a promotion, that raise you deserve or greater job satisfaction? Here are three tips to start the season off right:

1. Try a new look- one that is designed to project authority
2 Nurture your network
3. Take on a project designed to increase your visibility

Try A New Look: How a person looks and how they carry themselves forms the foundation of how people view them. Creating the right image will enhance one’s ability to persuade others. That requires you to look the way the people you are dealing with expect someone in authority to look. So dress like the people who are in the position you aspire to. Police Officers, judges, and doctors for example, all dress in a way that let’s you know instantly that they are functioning in a role that sets them apart from the rest of us and signals how we are expected to react to their directives. Different occupations have different ways of dressing to indicate your status. That will of course be different for women than for men. It will also differ depending on whether you are in Singapore, New York or Moscow. Look at how successful individuals in your field dress and let that guide you.

Nurture Your Network: Create a network of people who care about your career success. How do you do that? Build relationships with people in your field, both within your organization and outside. Stay in touch. Periodically call them and try to get together. E-mail them with information that they might find useful. Send them articles of interest. Remember their birthdays. Ask for their help and advise. More importantly, offer assistance. Look for ways tohelp them. Networking is about giving. give unselfishly. Your efforts will pay dividends many times over.

Take On a Project Designed to Increase Your Visibility: Seek out opportunities to work on projects that are important to the organization and to your boss. Good work is not enough. Your work needs to be noticed. So try to do it where people are looking. Work on the projects that people care about. do a good job and people will take note. I have a saying I use when I coach " If a tree fall in the forest and no one hears, who cares? But if you do great work and no one notices then career opportunities pass you by.

Coming into the Fall with a plan to move your career forward and you will reap the benefits. For more information go to YourCareerDoctors.com

Career Change Can Be Very Rewarding

I am in the Berkshires at a golf resort with a friend, and client, who publishes a golf and resort guides. He started his career as a lawyer and had developed a successful practice. A friend of his needed a favor. She was the editor of a monthly regional lifestyle magazine. They were doing a special edition with a section that covered all the major golf courses in the region. Their writer had just pulled out. My friend was a good golfer, a good writer and had previously helped another friend, a professional golfer, write a golf book. She asked him if he would take a little time off, come down and write the section for her. She, of course, offered to pay him.

He called me for advice. He wanted to do it, but financially it did not make any sense for him. While he wasn't really happy with the work he was doing, it certainly paid much better then working as a freelance writer. He was thinking about doing it anyway, as a favor to his friend and because it sounded like fun. We talked about it for a while. Then I suggested a way that he could write the piece and make money. Since we were dealing with a magazine that was not in the guide business I knew that they only intended to use what he wrote one time, when the monthly magazine was published. So I suggested he sell the magazine the right to first publication and exclusive rights thereafter for 90 days. Then the rights to what he wrote would revert to him. Since that was all the magazine was going to use the material for anyway and because they were in a bit of a bind, they readily agreed. After the 90 days he republished the material, along with a map of the courses, some additional photo spreads and some articles about other attractions in the region as a golf guide. He was able to get advertisers to run ads in the guide and the golf courses and resorts to purchase reprints. In that way he was able to make a nice profit.

The story does not end there. He was so successful, and enjoyed it so much, that he gave up the work he was doing and began to publish golf and resort guides internationally, using that same formula. He now travels all over the world, stays in fabulous resorts and has published guides in such exotic places as Thailand and the Dominican Republic. What started as a lark became a fulfilling and financially rewarding second career for my friend.

Everything started with a single project that he did for two weeks while on vacation from his regular job. If you do not find fulfillment in what you are doing, you don't have to quit your job. Start small. See if you can turn a hobby into a second career. Moonlight. Try things out on weekends and when you have vacation time. You never know where it will take you.

When is a $70 million dollar salary not enough?

When your friends are making $71 million dollars. I was surprised to read in the Wall Street Journal that Mark McGoldrick left a prestigious position at Goldman Sachs running their " Special Situations Group" because he felt that he was working too hard and wasn't being paid enough. The salary he was not happy with, last year amounted to $70 million dollar ($200,000 a day). Most of us won't make $70 million dollar in our lifetime and would be thrilled with a hundredth of that salary. So what makes someone complain about a salary bigger than the gross national product of certain small countries? Fairness, jealousy, envy. Call it what you will but in life we measure happiness not by what we have in some absolute sense, but rather by what we have compared to the people we feel are like us.

So Mark McGoldrick was unhappy with his salary because his counterparts at hedge funds and private equity firms were making a lot more than he was. This should not have come as a surprise to me.

As I wrote in UP: Influence Power and the U Perspective-- The Art of Getting What You Want:" While money can effectively be used as a motivator, even money becomes significantly less useful as a motivator once you achieve a certain level of wealth. There is a significant body of research that shows that once personal wealth reaches a certain level additional wealth produces virtually no increase in one’s sense of happiness. Moreover, according to Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics, peoples’ sense of their own wealth is subjective and is determined primarily by comparing themselves to others. Therefore when incomes rise across a nation there is no greater sense of wealth or happiness. For example, real income in Japan more than quintupled over the thirty years starting in the1950s yet researchers found no corresponding increase in how happy people felt. Even very wealthy people can feel disadvantaged when their friends are significantly wealthier than they are. Understanding that may cause you to propose a business opportunity to a very wealthy individual by focusing on some other benefit beyond just its profitability, such as by making it exclusively available to that individual or by allowing that individual to gain status by being able to offer it to his or her friends."

Understanding that we react in this way and that so do others is important to keep in mind if you are seeking to get hired, to get a raise or to gain a promotion. The fact that someone else is interested in hiring you makes you more valuable. It is not so much the fear of losing you that increases your value. Trust me, they will find someone else equally talented. It is losing you to someone else, especially someone they view as a competitor, that really drives people crazy. We all want what other's want and it is even better if we are the only one, or one of an elite few, that has it. Harness that knowledge to your advantage to move your career forward.

Stress and the Pace of Working in the US

I am two days back in the USA. People in Singapore and India work very hard. Some do so and are just barely able to scratch out a living. Nonetheless it is not the same. We really do move at a much faster pace than anywhere else in the world. We just take for granted that we are on call 24/7 with our cell phones, blackberrys, Internet, video cams etc. No where else is anyone so connected to their work. To the extent that you enjoy your work it provides a source of satisfaction. But sometimes you have to disconnect. When I was traveling I left a message on my voicemail that I would not be checking it and to contact me by e-mail. I was able to conduct my business but the pace somehow seemed less hectic.

That brings home the point of how important it is to take some time off periodically to refresh yourself. When I was a corporate executive I got to travel to lots of exotic places but I never got to really see them. I saw the hotels. I ate at nice restaurants. I went to lots of restaurants and bars. Then I went home. What a waste.

Take your vacation time. Most Americans don't use all their vacation. They are too busy and it is too hard to catch up when they get back. Or they are afraid if they are gone that they will miss something important. Hard work is important to success but you need to stop every once and a while to see what is going on around you and around the world, not to mention sharing time with the people you care about. It will make you better at what you do and a better person as well.

Generational Differences Can Impact Workplace Effectiveness (or why I have difficulty communicating with my son)

Today I received a copy of a book review of my new book UP: Influence Power and the U Perspective- The Art of Getting What You Want by the Midwest Book Review. The quote from the book that they chose to describe the U Perspective reminded me how important understanding of the U Perspective of different generations is at work. (Text of Book Review below). The different generations are usually classified as follows:

Boomers 1943-1964
Gen X 1961-1980
Gen Y 1977-2000
Millennials 1998-2012

Because each generation was affected by different life shaping events, their U Perspectives- what they care about and what will motivate them- differs. As a result, frequently generational miscommunication arise. If you are a boomer, you need to recognize that money and success which motivated you, may not be the prime motivator for other generations, or at least not a motivator in the same way as they were for you. Gen Xers want challenging work and work life balance in addition to money. Gen Yers also seek challenging work. While they expect to have many jobs and employers they tend to be more loyal and respectful of authority if you can win them over. Millennials, not really in the workforce yet, tend to be more relationship driven (although often those relationships are virtual), more easily distracted and better able to multi-task than prior generations. Since most of them are still being supported by their parents, how they see money and career remains to be seen.


What does this mean for the workplace. If you want to succeed pay close attention to the different U Perspectives of each generation. Gaining their support and cooperation, whether as a boss or a colleague, will require understanding the generational aspects of their U Perspective. Motivate them to want to help you by focusing on what they care about. Money alone will generally not be enough to attract and retain them nor to gain their support. Don't assume that they would do "what you would if you were in their shoes." Trust me they wear different shoes than you do. Avoid miscommunications by listening and learning about how each generation sees things, how they like to process information and how they define career success. However, do not assume that everyone from the same generation is the identical. While U Perspectives are informed by shared generational experiences, everyone's U Perspective is unique because everyone specific life experiences and values are different. Once, however, you understand an individual's U Perspective motivating them to want to help you achieve your objectives becomes a much simpler task.


THE BOOK REVIEW UP: Influence Power and the U Perspective- The Art of Getting What You Want:

"Written by experienced businessman and winner of the 2005 Seton Hall University Business School's Award for Teaching Excellence Lee E. Miller with consultant and entrepreneur Barbara Jackson, UP: Influence, Influence, Power and the U Perspective- The Art of Getting What You Want is a self-help guide to cultivating one’s ability to influence people and build lasting agreements that advance mutual goals.

Chapters discuss the "three C's" method of influencing others (Convince, Collaborate and Create), and the importance of understanding others' perspectives. "Since our beliefs and values are developed over time, on a subconscious level, most people simply assume that everyone sees the world the way they do. Even when we recognize that someone else sees a situation differently than we do, our first instinct usually is to try to persuade them to see things our way. The U Perspective takes the opposite approach. Its effectiveness is not rooted in the ability to convince others to change their views or adopt different values. Instead, its power comes from recognizing what others already believe and want and providing solutions based on that information." A top-notch guide, especially ideal for greasing social wheels in business circles but packed cover to cover with tips for more effective negotiation and team-building in personal circles as well."

Lessons from India

"Go see the world and you will never regret it." This advise given by an old man to a young student on a train in India at the beginning of the movie Namesake struck a cord with me. Having just returned from giving cross cultural influencing seminars in India it was particularly appropriate.

Whenever I travel to speak I invariable learn as much as the students I teach. India is a very exciting place to be doing business. Opportunities abound. If given the chance to work in places like India or China or other rapidly developing countries you should take it. Business is becoming more and more global. Whether selling into those markets, outsources services to them or importing goods or services from them, no business can afford to ignore those markets. Knowledge of the culture and how to do business in those countries will be invaluable to potential employers. Careers can gain a big boost by working overseas provided you remain visible at home while making your mark abroad. (More on that in another blog). If that type of opportunity doesn't readily come your way and you are interested, make it happen. There is a tremendous shortage of management talent and needs abound. Seek out opportunities and as the old man on the train said you will never regret it.

I leave you with a quote from Harvard Professor Stanley Hoffman "I am more and more convinced that people are intensely different from country to country. Not everyone is motivated by the same things." The better you understand how different people around the world are motivated the more successful you will be.