Motivation on the Run

Are you the best leader you can be? Is your networking paying dividends beyond your wildest dreams? Two stories in Business Week Online yesterday take us where no leader or networker has gone before.

In the first, by Carmine Gallo, seven secrets are revealed to make you a better leader. Carmine is working on a new book titled Fire Them Up. For the book, he interviewed a lot of leaders on how they inspire and lead. Judging from the article, the book will become a must read.

The Seven Secrets of Inspiring Leaders
American business professionals are uninspired. Only 10% of employees look forward to going to work and most point to a lack of leadership as the reason why, according to a recent Maritz Research poll. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All business leaders have the power to inspire, motivate, and positively influence the people in their professional lives.

For the past year, I have been interviewing renowned leaders, entrepreneurs, and educators who have an extraordinary ability to sell their vision, values, and themselves. I was researching their communications secrets for my new book, Fire Them Up. What I found were seven techniques that you can easily adopt in your own professional communications with your employees, clients, and investors.

Liz Ryan’s article titled, 10 Tips for Networkers, is a keeper, too. She cuts to the chase without mincing words uses great analogies to illustrate her points. If you think you’re a good networker and don’t seem to have a great time at different events, don’t let Liz hurt your feelings. Listen and learn to get better.

10 Tips for Networkers
If you want to impress your friends with a fancy new word you’ve learned, here’s a good one: retronym.

Dictionary.com defines it as “a term, as acoustic guitar, coined in modification of the original referent that was used alone, as guitar, to distinguish it from a later contrastive development, as electric guitar.”

I bring this up in a workplace-advice column only because I’ve got a new retronym to add to our vocabulary, and it’s this: “non-disgusting networking.” Yes, back in the old days we could talk about plain old networking, referring to business events after hours and industry galas where businesspeople would mingle. We could use the word networking to refer to our LinkedIn activities and other kinds of outreach that happened among professional types online. Those days are pretty much gone. Now, if we don’t want to alarm people when we talk about our networking endeavors, we have to be quick to note that we’re talking about the non-disgusting kind.

[tags]Business Week Online, networking, leadership, inspire[/tags]