You would have thought a friend or colleague crazy last year if they had asked for advice on how to turn down a job offer as everyone around you held on to their jobs for dear life. But as the economy slowly recovers, people are once again beginning to embrace something many considered long gone: choice.

If you are lucky enough to be in a position to choose between two offers or luckier still to have the ability to simply turn down a job that isn’t quite right, your good fortune also brings with it a certain level of responsibility — that of declining the offer graciously and skillfully without burning bridges or creating ill-will.

As with any carefully crafted message, you need to think in advance about how to communicate your decision in a way that makes you look good and leaves your rejected employer with their ego in tact. The best way to do this is to include the following three key points in your conversation:

1. A Gracious Thank You
2. A Well-Thought Out Rationale
3. Forward Momentum

Thank You

The very first thing you must start with when turning down a job offer is a heartfelt thank you to the person who extended the offer. Make sure to communicate that you are appreciative of the offer and state that you respect both the organization and the other person — don’t make it seem as though the position was beneath you or that you didn’t give the offer serious thought and consideration.

Rationale

Next comes your rationale for turning down the job. This is the most difficult aspect of the conversation but also the most important. There are myriad reasons a job won’t be a perfect fit and many of them are perfectly plausible and valid. Others may be harder to justify or voice (it’s hard to decline on the grounds of the hiring manager being a jerk or the fact that you can’t bear to leave the West Coast).

Even if your rationale strays from the politically correct or socially acceptable, 99% of the time you can communicate even the most delicate of reasons in a professional and tactful way. Here is some helpful language around five common reasons you might turn down an offer:

• External Factors: Geography, family, timing. It’s always easier to blame a decision on someone or something else: if issues beyond your control prevent you from accepting a position, be honest: “Unfortunately, I can’t make the move because of family obligations.” Or, “As much as I am interested in the position, I’ve decided it’s not the right time to uproot my family and move across the country.”

   

• Money: It’s absolutely okay to turn down a position that doesn’t pay well (enough). You are allowed to say: “I wish I could make it work, however I need to be at a higher compensation level. I’m sure you understand.”

 

 

• Lack of Skills/Qualifications: If you don’t have the requisite skill-set to knock the ball out of the park or you suspect you’re being set up to fail, then the best way to bow out is to state this: “After much consideration, I’ve decided I can’t realistically exceed expectations and I’d never want to join an organization where I won’t be able to under promise and over deliver.”

 

 

• People Issues: You can’t tell someone you don’t like them or their colleagues, but you can use “cultural fit” as a catchall when your personality doesn’t jive with a team or organization. For instance, “I respect the work you all do but I just don’t think it’s the right fit for me personally. I’m going to continue looking for something more face-paced/more entrepreneurial/ with a flatter organizational structure, etc.

 

 

• Dead End: If a job is appealing today but won’t move you in the right direction towards your ultimate career goals, you are entitled to say so. People will generally respect your long-term career goals. “As much as I’d love to join the team, I really need to get some fundraising experience so that I can transition into a development role in the next few years. Truthfully, the program manager position just isn’t going to do that for me.”

Forward Momentum

Once you’ve given a thoughtful reason for why you’ve turned down the position, thank your counterparty again and offer to stay in touch or wish them luck with the hiring process. You can acknowledge that you’d like to be kept abreast of new opportunities or revisit the situation if your external factors happen to change. It’s not crazy to think that the employer you dismiss today may be appealing to you down the road, so keep the relationship positive and the door open.

[Via HBR]

I started my career as an entrepreneur at twenty-four years old, right out of college. I ultimately built and sold a $250 million global scrap metal company, an experience I wrote about in my book Starting from Scrap.

After my book came out, I visited several U.S. business schools and met with MBA students to talk about my experiences launching a company in emerging markets. Many of the students who came to hear me speak were aspiring entrepreneurs in the process of getting MBAs. Many of them asked similar questions: “You didn’t get an MBA, nor did many other successful entrepreneurs, so if I want to start my own company, is business school a worthwhile experience? Is it worth paying all this tuition — or will my degree just be a resume-builder?”

I once had a conversation about this topic with Dr. John Yang, the dean of the Beijing International MBA program at Beijing University. Here’s what he had to say: “In my opinion, entrepreneurship is a matter of the heart, and education is a matter of the brain. It is difficult to teach a heart.”

I share his perspective. By definition, an entrepreneur is one who takes risk. It’s an attitude and an appetite, one which may be hardwired into one’s personality. Education can influence one’s attitude toward risk: for instance, understanding the principle of diversification or the long-term returns of equities versus bonds may make an investor more willing to create a “riskier” stock portfolio. But ultimately, can you teach someone to really enjoy taking risks? I don’t think you can.

When I think about the value of an MBA for aspiring entrepreneurs, I see a parallel with the military. Countries spend billions of dollars training soldiers so they’ll be ready for combat — they’re taught to fire rifles and operate in simulated high-pressure situations. But that training only goes so far. A Marine colonel once told me that he never knows how a soldier will respond — whether he’ll hide in his foxhole, run in the other direction, or stand and fight as he’s been trained #8212; until the bullets start flying. How someone reacts in times of great stress relies largely in instincts and the makeup of his or her personality — and training only takes you so far.

The same is true with entrepreneurship. Understanding strategy, finance and marketing can be very helpful. But it’s also important to possess self-confidence, a need for independence, energy and passion, curiosity, and an ability to communicate ideas. If you don’t have these natural assets, you’ll struggle as an entrepreneur.

I’m lucky, because those are personal attributes that I have. I don’t have an MBA, but I’ve picked up many of the business skills I needed during more than 15 years running a company. (My grandfather referred to me as having an MBA from the School of Hard Knocks, whose official colors are black and blue — an expensive education that makes Harvard Business School appear inexpensive by comparison). Many of the lessons I learned from those tough and painful experiences I might have learned in an MBA program — and if I’d learned them earlier, my company might have been even more successful.

If I’d understood the use and importance of financial and inventory controls, I could have prevented millions of dollars in fraud. Perhaps studying cases about companies that had grown too fast and lost control of both their finances and the quality of their products would have encouraged me to expand at a more sober pace. We wasted years trying to re-organize after over-expanding and perhaps missed countless opportunities in the process. I could have saved or made a lot more money had I taken some courses in business law or venture capital financing. (We ended up getting strong armed by our investors, and they got away with it due to our early-stage naiveté.) I also would have benefited if I’d known more about human resources and the need for well-designed compensation and incentive systems. These are just a few of the tools you can get in business school — and they’re all tools I wished I’d had.

So I believe MBA programs do give future entrepreneurs valuable tools to help them mitigate risk and increase the probabilities of success. But even with those tools, only you know whether or not you have the heart to execute on the opportunities we all recognize to launch a compelling new business. That is when the real bullets start flying.

About the Author

Stephen Greer is a senior advisor at Oaktree Capital and author of Starting from Scrap.

[Via HBR]

by John Baldoni

There isn’t much good that has come out of the Great Recession to date except the humbling of some big egos on Wall Street. However, there might be one small benefit that I’ve noticed after doing some coaching with executives pondering next steps in their careers.

Being out of work has forced highly capable men and women professionals to consider what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Some, due to financial pressures, need to get back to work immediately — and so are ready, willing and able to take a job, any job that comes their way. But a good many others, particularly those with more than two decades in the workforce, have an opportunity that has not occurred to them since college: The chance to ask themselves, again, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

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by Tammy Erickson

It’s counterproductive to discuss whether we have a talent shortage or high unemployment. We have both. Even as the economy recovers, the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisors earlier this year projected that the unemployment rate would stay well above 6% until 2015.

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by Peter Bregman

Two weeks ago, with the sun shining and little buds emerging from tree branches, I got frostbite while skiing. Not just a little frostbite; several of my toes were snow white. Thankfully I didn’t lose the toes but it took ten minutes in a hot shower for them to slowly and painfully return to their normal color.

Here’s what’s crazy: I ski practically every weekend in the winter without getting frostbite, usually in temperatures well below freezing. So what happened?

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by Peter Bregman

This weekend I went back to Princeton University, where I was a student over twenty years ago, to give a speech. As I traveled to the campus I remembered a single question that haunted my last few months of schooling: now what?

I had no good answer. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a plan.

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I recently met a coach who specialised in helping women executives get the pay rises they wanted. Even though they held senior roles, he said, many of them were unable to find the right words — or the right moment — to pitch for a raise. They still laboured under the assumption that if they did a great job, a great salary would automatically follow. His job was to help them understand their worth, build the case for a raise and find the confidence to go in to their boss and negotiate.

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