The self-abasing letter is the fastest way to be deleted

About a third of what arrives here opens by telling me the writer is worthless, unworthy, nothing, beneath consideration. I understand where it comes from and I am not going to be cruel about it. But I want to explain, once, why it does not work, because the men doing it think they are showing me something and what they are actually showing me is a man I would have to manage.

I want somebody competent. I want a person who is good at his job, reliable with other people, and capable of walking into a room without narrating his own inadequacy. Then I want that person to hand a defined part of his week over to me and do what he is told inside it.

That is completely different from a man who is already on the floor. A man who is already on the floor has nothing to hand over, and the arrangement becomes me propping him up, which is not leadership, it is work.

Forty one, the south east, fifteen years leading. One arrangement running six years currently and room for a second because his life has moved and mine has not.

Write to me as an adult with a life. Tell me what you are good at. Tell me the part you would like to stop deciding. If your letter would read strangely to somebody who did not know what this was, that is the signal to rewrite it.