The 240-year-old secret for a successful career

Some people are very good at aggressively building their career, setting up meetings with the people they want to meet, networking away, and closing the deal. Not you?

If you shy away from this approach, fear not.  This is not the only way to build the relationships that will power your career.There is a truth that will serve you well in all areas of your life, and will make building your career not only easier, but maybe even enjoyable. When we do a person a favor, we tend to like them more as a result. This sage truth, comes from one of the American Founding Fathers and is called The Franklin Effect.  Applying it will allow you to build your career when you’re not explicitly working to build your career.

Amanda is a young professional who recently moved from West Coast to the East Coast. A talented college tennis player, she wanted to join a tennis club in New York City. So she asked several of her friends and mentors, including her uncle, which clubs would be best and whether they knew anyone that could act as a sponsor. She was introduced to a board member of one of the clubs and she went over to meet him for coffee. They chatted about tennis but also, naturally, about her career.

Since she wasn’t trying to “get anything” career-wise, the board member found it very natural and enjoyable to take an interest in what she was doing professionally. Together they went through the membership directory and built a list of potential endorsers for the club application process. Amanda had heard of one person, knew another very peripherally, and the others only the board member knew.

But she was able, over the next two months, to go about meeting five potential endorsers. Since the basis of the meetings was to talk about a legitimate area of mutual interest—tennis—it was easy for Amanda to schedule 15- or 20-minute coffees with a handful of high-powered executives. Some of those meetings lasted an hour. Had she sought to set up these meetings for general networking or career advice purposes, they would have surely taken much longer to set. They would also have likely been more forced conversations at best, or never would have happened.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, one proven way to spark a relationship with someone in power is to ask them for a small favor. In his book, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, psychologist Richard Wiseman includes a passage from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to illustrate a clever way Franklin managed to win over an enemy in the Pennsylvania state legislature:

Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him expressing my desire of perusing that book and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately and I returned it in about a week with another note expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility. And he ever afterward manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”

Wiseman says that when someone does something for you, they feel the need to justify it. Franklin explained his success as follows: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.” When people supported the young lawyer’s cycling fundraising ride, whether they wrote a check for $25 or $250, they felt invested in her success. So it was a much easier leap for them say, “Well I might as well ask her for legal representation.”

You may not have the ability to create a job or the demand for your services or to control events that unfold around you. The ability to build meaningful relationships is always in your control and is the most successful strategy to moving your career forward and make your work and personal life more enjoyable.

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: James Citrin is CEO Practice at Spencer Stuart.

Image: A woman passes by a reflection of a poster of a Benjamin Franklin 100 dollar bill at a money changer in Singapore. REUTERS/Edgar Su