5 Pieces of Career and Business Advice for 2019

1. If One Employee Makes All The Other Employees Miserable, And They Still Don’t Fix Their Behavior After You Try To Change It A Few Times, They’ve Got To Go

This is one of my most talked about pieces of business advice that I get asked about constantly, and it makes sense why.

If someone in my company acts like a jerk to everyone they work with, here’s how I handle it:

First of all… I don’t “look the other way” even if they happen to be someone who’s crushing their numbers. To me, culture drives the organization at the core and if that’s ruined, nothing else matters.

Then, I sit down with them and try to have a conversation.

I take the blame first because it’s my company and every problem is my fault – I ask them what I’ve done wrong to put them in a position where they feel like they have to act that way. Are they not clicking with someone they’re working with? Is something going on at home? What am I missing?

I also spend 80% of our meeting trying to make them feel safe and penetrate any insecurities that might be the source of the issues.

Sometimes, the person will turn their behavior around in a couple of months. Other times, it’ll continue and I’ll let them go. If their bad behavior continues and you’re a CEO who keeps them around because they’re hitting their targets, you’re sending a clear message to other employees about what you really think about company culture.

2. Focus On Your Own Happiness More Than What Other People Think of You

There are so many people who hate their Mon-Fri and genuinely cheer for the weekend as soon as the week starts.

I have zero problem with people looking forward to the weekend, but if you dread Mon-Fri, why would you want to live your life that way? The truth is, if you factor out sleep, you basically live to work. It makes up the majority of your life. If you’re unhappy at work, then it’s time to take a step back and ask yourself what you’re actually doing — not by judging yourself or beating yourself up, but by thoughtfully analyzing what you could do to change your situation.

I want to make people realize that they should focus on maximizing their happiness, not necessarily the dollars to take an extra vacation a year, buying things out of insecurity or unhappiness, or pandering to other people’s opinions of you.

3. The Best Sales Strategy? Stop Trying to Sell the Unsellable

It’s been fascinating to see the evolution of how people interpret sales, especially since the rise of the internet.

But there is one huge mistake that I think many salespeople make – and that’s trying to “convince” people who don’t want to buy. They try to sell everyone instead of the people who actually want to be sold to. It’s a GIANT waste of time when you could be moving on and talking to more potential buyers.

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4. Chase the Process, Not Just The End Result

If you love your process, you’ve already won.

I LOVE my process of business, I’ve often talked about my life goal of buying the NY Jets. But really it’s the journey that brings me happiness – a big reason why I picked that as a goal is because it’s such a big “North Star” for me to aim at. It allows me to continue doing what I love for a long time.

You need to figure out something that you enjoy doing so much, that just doing it makes you happy, not just the end result.

5. If You’re A Boss Realize You Work For Your Employees, Not the Other Way Around

This one hits close to home as a CEO and manager – really wish more people understood this:

I work for my employees. They don’t work for me.

Many people may think this is counterintuitive to being a “boss” but I actually believe that this is an incredibly important part of being a boss.

The owner of a business is entirely responsible for everything that happens under that umbrella, including the employees. If you don’t like how something is happening within your company or how employees are performing, it’s your processes or frameworks that created those issues in the first place.

Everyday I think about how I can put players in a position to succeed – that means delivering feedback with radical candor in a constructive way, observing everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and understanding what everyone cares about at any given time.