The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Ten Lessons from Experienced Managers Hungry to Learn and Grow
Last week I wrapped up two different cohorts of my Experienced Manager Program. In twelve hours of program time spread over multiple sessions, the ideas and insights flowed, and I left impressed with the passion so many have for their work leading and managing. Here...
Ten Lessons from Experienced Managers Hungry to Learn and Grow
Last week I wrapped up two different cohorts of my Experienced Manager Program. In twelve hours of program time spread over multiple sessions, the ideas and insights flowed, and I left impressed with the passion so many have for their work leading and managing. Here are some of my favorite insights from the program:
New Leader Tuesday-7 Ideas to Strengthen Accountability on Your Team
Accountability. Tattoo it on your forearm. Imprint it on your brain. Repeat it three times every morning. And then assert it all day long. Here are 7 ideas to help you strengthen the culture of accountability on your team:
Art of Managing: The Power of a Well-Placed “No”
“No” is one of the most powerful and under-utilized terms in your management vocabulary. Here are ten situations where “No” might be the absolute right call.
New Leader Tuesday: Start Leading Before the Promotion
In Monday’s Leadership Caffeine post, I strongly encouraged senior managers to accelerate the pace of their leadership development activities for their high potentials. Today, it’s your turn. Quit waiting for the boss to bestow the mantle of leadership responsibility on you. Here are 5 ideas to help you gain leadership experience before the title:
Leadership Caffeine™: Accelerate New Leader Development
In my experience, many senior managers move too slowly to expose their developing leaders to new and more challenging situations. This is a mistake that artificially inhibits professional growth and potentially risks losing the interest of your best and brightest emerging leaders. Here are 5 ideas to help you move opportunities along at a faster pace, and a polite reminder that nothing is free. You’re on the hook for coaching every step of the way.
Art of Managing: Beware the Pursuit of False Precision in Planning
Chance are, you’ve seen this movie before. It’s the one where you or your team are on the hook for distilling the chaos and complexity of the market and the ambiguities and risks surrounding emerging opportunities, competitors and disruptive technologies, into a nice, neat multi-year forecast. As Eisenhower offered, In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Leadership Caffeine™: 4 Common Project Leadership Mistakes to Avoid
The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different to come together and perform. Here are four key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.
Art of Managing: Work is Where the Brain Is
In the past two weeks there’s been a buzz in the world of business generated by two firms changing longstanding working arrangements. Not incidentally, both firms are fighting for corporate survival. I suspect that the fundamental problems of two firms who no longer exist for completely obvious reasons, have as their root causes, something much deeper than whether butts are in seats behind the same walls every single day.
Just One Thing: Leading is Lonely Work
Leading is lonely work. The higher you climb on the ladder, the tougher and lonelier the decisions become. Get used to it. No one ever signed on as a senior leader because of the potential for camaraderie.
Leadership Caffeine™: Jump-start Your Team’s “Ideas to Actions” Machine
Ideas in the workplace that are voiced but never vetted or pursued are the corporate equivalent of those brilliant insights we have in the middle of the night that we don’t bother to write down. “I’ll remember it in the morning,” we think at the time. We rarely do. Here are 7 ideas to help you jumpstart your firm’s “ideas to Actions” machine: