The Winning Game

It’s always nice when a hobby helps out your career. For Sue Hodgkinson, a world class athlete, sports taught her how to win in the working world. Soccer was her sport, but these days she runs, bikes and swims in triathlons across the country, a weekend-warrior sort of thing, but how she prepares for, and performs in, a race overflows into her professional life as head of the executive-coaching business, the Personal Brand Company.

Practice, perfection, persistence—the qualities that drive a successful athlete inspire a successful executive. Sue uses a different set of Ps in her line of work—promotion, product, packaging, persona and permission—which are catchy marketing jargon for a simple message: how you prepare, and how you tweak your performance, can make the difference between winning and losing in the corporate world.

Sue coaches executives to become strong leaders, the idea being that a good boss will inspire employees to be excellent workers… which means the company will make a pile of dough and everyone will go home filthy rich and live happily ever after. So simple!

Okay, not so simple. As we know more than ever in an official recession, making money is far from a science. That’s where delivering a good performance comes in, says Sue. The former Team USA member learned the importance of giving your best as a high-school jock on the soccer fields in Portland, Oregon. She loved the freedom of kicking a ball with abandon after school, but she was awestruck by the connection between training hard and performing well. Run enough laps at practice and sprinting through an entire game seemed to last only a minute; lift the right amount of leg weights and the soccer ball she kicked may as well have been a feather. Gooooooal!

Scoring in the rat race is a bit more subtle. Communication, confidence and job performance all play a part, and Sue works on all of that with her clients, who run the gamut from middle-management bankers to venture-capital partners. She takes the process further by interviewing those who know the client best: how well does Joe speak? What is his water-cooler image? Is he considered an effective worker? And then Sue tells Joe like it is—the good, the bad, the painful. That’s when the work begins—the training, the sprinting, the mental weight-lifting, if you will.

Since 1994, Sue and her staff have taken the brand message to companies throughout the US and Europe, and have coached many entry-level managers into executive vice president roles. The Personal Brand Company offers workshops and individual consulting on public speaking, leadership skills and fine-tuning your personal brand In other words, strengthening your image and performance in ways that will ensure your professional growth and prosperity. And when you build one outstanding employee, you’ve also taught them how to build more like them. A team.

The Personal Brand Company
www.thepersonalbrandcompany.com
(781) 934-2240