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Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the GE stock went up by 4,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fortune named him the ‘Manager of the Century’ in 1999

Suzy Welch is a former editor of Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author of Jack Welch’s latest book Winning

You can e-mail Jack and Suzy Welch questions at winning@nytimes.com

(Please include your name, occupation, city and country)

I run a 14-person business, and we look after our people very well. We throw parties for birthdays, babies and marriages, and take a real interest in each individual, both personally and professionally. Still, people complain incessantly that there’s too much politics, not enough appreciation and so on. I am about to tear my hair out because nothing seems to make them happy.
— Cape Town, South Africa

Stop trying. With the best of intentions, you have created a classic entitlement culture, in which your people have the deal exactly backwards. They think you work for them.

This phenomenon is not uncommon, although it tends to be more prevalent in small organisations, where employees can more easily develop casual, familial relationships with their bosses, and bosses more often blur professional lines themselves.

In the end, such cozy familiarity can backfire, as is happening with you and your moaning, groaning employees. It’s irrelevant, however, how you got yourself into your predicament. It only matters now that you get out quickly, and the first person you need to get straight with is yourself. You are running a company, not a social club or a counselling service. Your number one priority is to win in the marketplace, so that you can continue to grow and provide opportunities for your people.

Of course you want your employees to be happy. But their happiness needs to come from the company’s success, not from their every need being met. When the company does well because of their performance, they will thrive, personally and professionally. Not the other way around.

Consider this way of thinking your new creed. Next, gather your people together and let them know about your conversion experience, and your plan to convert them too. Together, you and your staff will need to create a list of behaviours that will result in the company’s winning.

These behaviours will become your new company values – guidelines, if you will, to live by. For instance, one value could be “We will respond with a sense of urgency to customer requests.” Or, “We will ship only products with zero defects.” The point of this process is very simple: to help your people understand that work is about ... well, it’s about work.

Without doubt, you will hear yelps of pain as you dismantle your entitlement culture. Indeed, some employees that you like and value may leave in protest. Take the hit and wish them well. They will soon find out the grass is not greener on the other side, and you will discover how much better your company operates when your main concern is not whining, but winning.

“It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail,” is a line attributed to Genghis Khan and sometimes quoted by the moguls of our own era. In the cutthroat, hypercompetitive business world of today, what is your take on this attitude?
— David Ho, Stillwater, Oklahoma

It’s nonsense, of course, because it’s just not the way business usually works, nor should it be. Now, obviously you’re not going to sit around wishing your competitors well. All tough-minded businesspeople want to win – they want the most sales, the biggest market share, the highest profit margins and so on.

But tough-minded businesspeople also realise that competitors, for all their aggravation, serve a purpose. They sharpen your focus. They keep you fierce and hungry. And the best of them raise the bar on every aspect of performance, from inno-vation to delivery.

Without competition, companies usually get fat and lazy. Case in point: all the bureaucratic monopolies out there that have foundered, largely due to the self-satisfaction and arrogance that came with achieving the very success they were after.

So, look, you may not want your competitors to win, but unlike Mr Khan, you want them around. It’s good for customers, it’s good for you (albeit sometimes painful), and it’s good for business overall. Now, taking the quote to the individual level. Again, wrong, even for the most ambitious among us. We’re not going to deny, of course, that schadenfreude exists. It’s human nature to feel a small twinge of relief (or worse, happiness) when a colleague screws up. But the most successful people fight that instinct with everything in them. They know that someone else’s candle going out, as the old saying goes, doesn’t make their candle burn any brighter. It just makes the whole room darker. The best thing that can happen at work – and in life – is to be surrounded by people who are smart and good. As with tough competitors, you learn from them and improve because of them. When they do well, so do you, either by their example or by being part of their team. So maybe Mr Khan was on to something 750 years ago, fighting other warlords with spears and clubs on the Mongolian plain, but in today’s world, mogul or not, his advice seems ready to retire.

I am a young person, not long out of school. I’m filled with ambition, creative ideas and a burning desire to achieve a lot of things in my life, but one thing holds me back: fear of blowing it. How can I get some nerve?
— Johannesburg, South Africa

You don’t really need nerve, exactly. You need self-confidence. Without it, you’re going nowhere. But you seem to know that already. Look, only you know why and how self-confidence has eluded you so far. Perhaps you weren’t born with much, as there does indeed seem to be a genetic component to it. But by far, self-confidence is a developed trait.

Some people get it at their mother’s knee, where they first hear the happy news that their every bright comment qualifies them for the Nobel Prize, or that they’re taller, cleverer and certainly better-looking than every other child on the block. Others get it from great grades that set them apart, or sports at school, whether they score goals or get elected captain.

You need to start creating that kind of reservoir for yourself, even if it is from scratch. How? Not with grandiose plans concocted to catapult you into fame and fortune and quash your fear of failure once and for all. Too many people believe that one big, public success will solve their self-confidence problems forever. That only happens in the movies. In real life, the opposite strategy is what works. Call it the small victories approach. To begin, set a realistic goal, be it at work or home. Keep this goal attainable and contained; don’t overextend your expectations of yourself the first time out. Then achieve that goal and feel good about it.

Next, set a slightly larger goal, something a bit bolder and enough of a stretch to put you slightly out of your comfort zone. Achieve that goal and feel even better. And so forth until you’re in a slow and steady forward march, building self-confidence step by step. And it will build.

When Jack delivered his first speech more than 40 years ago, it was panic-inducing, awkward and heavily rehearsed. He practised in front of the mirror for weeks in advance in hopes of keeping his stammer in check and then read from carefully typed sheets with all the ease of a man in a straitjacket. The actual talk took just 15 minutes. But they were the longest of his life.

There’s nothing more effective than tackling a challenge incrementally, growing and learning each time. After delivering speeches for decades in front of all kinds of audiences, Jack now considers it anything but nerve-wracking to answer questions in front of thousands of people without notes. In fact, for him, it’s fun.

Now, without doubt, you will foul up along the way as you try to build your self-confidence. Not every one of Jack’s speeches was better than the one before it, and it was a long time before giving them became fully enjoyable. But when your small victory turns out to be a small defeat, do not revert to fear mode. Go deep into that reservoir, understand what went wrong, set another goal and start again. The process won’t really ever end. As time goes on, your goals will just keep getting bigger and bigger. And failure, which will also continue to occur on occasion, will come to feel like less and less of a thing to fear.

In time, you will discover that all failing really does is teach you something you needed to know. That is how you learn to regroup and stretch again, with ever more nerve.

I am a recent MBA who was just made a manager in a medium sized company. I believe in using candour, but I’m afraid to, since most of my direct reports are twice my age.
— Huntsville, Alaska.

You may feel squeamish using candour with people who look like your parents, but rest assured that old people hate jargon, ambiguity and double-talk just as much as you do. In fact, having suffered through it at work for decades, they will most likely applaud your efforts to be straight, especially after the shock wears off.

Shock – because without doubt, there will be a rough period of adjustment once you start talking directly and honestly about performance and results. No matter what their age, most people just aren’t accustomed to it.

Use it anyway. In the end, candour always works, and it always makes work better. Once you dispense with mixed messages and phony performance reviews, a team never fails to become faster, more creative and more energetic.

And, frankly, candour is your job. Once you become a manager, it’s your obligation to let everyone who works for you know exactly where they stand. That’s how you build the best team – and win.

Your question, by the way, is by no means unusual. We’ve heard every possible excuse for avoiding candour: It goes against politeness in Japan, for instance, and egalitarianism in Sweden. But by far, the age issue you raise is the most common reason for discomfort.

Let go of it. Some old folks might object at first, but the good ones have been waiting longer than you think for straight talk to arrive.