#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

I always like hearing from readers – you often learn more from them than from management textbooks.  Yesterday was no exception.

I’d recently written a piece, “The Surest Way To Spot A Good Manager,” and an old colleague and friend Thomas Henry had sent me a note quite rightly taking me to task on it.

My point in the article was that three attributes – integrity, a positive optimistic approach, and low turnover – were vital in helping prospective job seekers find high-quality management. Well, though these three definitely are solid managerial qualities, they’re also not close to being an optimal or comprehensive list. Which was exactly Thomas’s point.

How do companies create value and achieve competitive advantage in an age of great complexity? This is a question we constantly ask ourselves as we go about our work of helping chief executives and their leadership teams build successful businesses.

When we reflect on our work with the companies we have helped over the years—five hundred or more in all kinds of industries in more than forty countries—what we remember most vividly is rarely the specific problem that caused a business leader to call us in.

The problem with self-doubt is that the fear it creates stops us from living the lives we most want and changing the things we don’t.  How?  Fear keeps us living small and stuck in jobs that don’t fulfill us but feel safe.  But is there really anything safe about living a life where you feel disengaged, disillusioned or desperate to be doing something else? of course not. The truth is that who you are is not your doubts. The key to banishing them isn’t to wish them away, but to take action in their presence.

It’s easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that if we just had the success we wanted, then we’d never doubt ourselves again and ooze the confidence we see in others.  But it actually works in reverse.