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

Every morning at the construction site down the street from my office, the day starts with a familiar hum. It’s the sound of the regular drone scan, when a small black quadcopter flies itself over the site in perfect lines, as if on rails. The buzz overhead is now so familiar that workers no longer look up as the aircraft does its work. It’s just part of the job, as unremarkable as the crane that shares the air above the site. In the sheer normalness of this — a flying robot turned into just another piece of construction equipment — lies the real revolution.

How should teams of experts working on knowledge-intensive projects be structured? Should they be hierarchical? Or will flexible, self-organized groups perform better? 

Teams often struggle with how to get the most value from the members’ expertise, to minimize conflict, to integrate their diverse expertise, and to leverage it during all phases of a project.

The traditional approach is to put the person with the most experience and expertise in charge — for example, a head coach or a chief programmer. The assumption is that this person has the expertise to make the best decisions about how to allocate tasks and responsibilities. Teams that adopt this model feature a rigid hierarchy, whereby final decisions are centralized through this single, formally designated individual.

Each morning from 8:30 to 9:05 AM at our company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, we serve free breakfast to every employee. And I’m not talking about stale muffins and dry bagels. Today I ate a sloppy joe, cheesy scrambled eggs, home fries, crispy bacon, and sausage links. Healthy, I know. Tomorrow, I’m definitely going to grab a yogurt and some fruit. And don’t forget all the vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options. After all, this is California.

I know what you’re thinking. Free food is the cost of admission to the Silicon Valley tech scene. Our startup, Pivotal, calls the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood home, alongside companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Adobe, Slack, Salesforce, and Uber. So, of course, Pivotal serves free, catered meals. It’s just expected.

Let's call this call this curator friend Cynthia. Cynthia wrote back, “Two other curators worked with me on this (and may join us!), so I can’t take full credit.” She asked that I instead reference her with the significantly less exciting descriptor, “one of the curators of this exhibition." She was understandably hesitant to get all the credit and wanted to make clear that there were other people involved with the exhibition. While accurate, the new version was far less descriptive and complimentary than what I’d suggested.

Feel familiar? The balancing act women navigate surrounding self promotion can be exhausting.

When I look back on my 20s, I see two different versions of myself. The first five years were dominated by feelings of insecurity and anxiety. I was living a life I did not want, and I wasn't confident enough to stop it. Then, in the second half of my 20s, I learned to embrace my purpose and began living the life I wanted -- the life of an entrepreneur. One thing is clear: The success I've experienced while launching and growing SkyBell would not have been possible with my old mindset.

Now at age 32, I can clearly see my shift from a negative mindset to a success mindset was caused by my developing more confidence. When you feel confident, the whole world seems to belong to you. You suddenly surround yourself with other successful and confident people, and both opportunities and success come your way with ease.

Here are 10 ways you can develop the mindset shared by the most confident people.

Life isn’t linear. No matter how well thought out your plans, they’ll eventually collide with a reality you didn’t plan on. Learning to "lean into the curves" when life doesn’t unfold as you’d hoped will help spare you untold stress, bounce back faster and emerge better off.  Here’s five ways to do just that.

In a national report released today, two out of three adults surveyed said they want to spend time with people who aren’t their age, while three in four wish there were more opportunities to get to know different age groups. Why, then, aren’t there more intergenerational programs and initiatives?

Geeks—the two of us might fit the profile. Yes we have tendencies to contemplate things that probably shouldn’t be contemplated. We question. We prod. We poke…at everything. And, we’ve been known to engage in long, seemingly meaningless conversations about random things like: “Is the love of curry a genetic disposition or a socially experiential acquisition?” Or, what is the real meaning of the word “of?” That’s a valid question, right? Or, is it just geeky?

Being geeky, according to research by Imgur, is actually cool in today’s world—especially among Millennials. In fact, 60% of the 83 million Millennials consider themselves geeks compared to just 38% of GenXers and Boomers. And, the study also shows that geeks are the trendsetters and influencers (84% of geeks say people look to them for advice while only 60% of non-geeks say they get asked for advice).

This is, of course, welcome news for all of us who happen to randomly know Peter Parker’s height and weight (yes, we’re referring to the fictional character who turns into Spiderman). But, more than that, it’s also welcome news for all of us who geek-out about our own work—passionately probing to innovate, improve, dissect, and lead others to the discovery of their best selves.

One side effect of working at top software companies is the constant threat of attrition. People are highly valued and highly compensated, but there are always companies that will pay more. Engineers are regularly contacted by headhunters and by recruiters at other top companies trying to lure them away. If successful, this pays the new company double-dividends: it increases the hiring company's staff while depleting their competitor.

Email is taking a lot of flak lately. And why not? We're inundated with it. It's cold and impersonal. People abuse it passive-aggressively for their own political agendas. And it can be --to be frank -- addictive.

Yet, no matter how much we gripe about it, and whatever options may be out there like Slack, email is here to stay. For now, at least.

But we can all do email better. Much better. I've been witness to --and often the victim of --a range of email offenses in my working life. And yet, even today, I see people continue to commit the same email offenses that I thought would have become forgotten or even outlawed by now.

So in the interest of raising awareness around these offenses, and with the hope that we can see them committed far less frequently, here are five difficult and uncomfortable things that you should never, ever put into your emails at work. Especially if want to build --and keep -- the relationships that matter to you most.