Wake-Up Calls for Managers
For the hard parts no one prepares you for
When the path isn’t clear, the stakes are high, and the answers aren’t obvious—this is where managers struggle most.
Wake-Up Calls for Managers delivers practical, real-world guidance for navigating:
- Tough conversations
- Leading through uncertainty
- Building influence without authority
- Driving results through others
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Six Big Insights from the Six-Hour Career Energize Program Beta Sessions
Great Things Happen When You Get A Dozen Professionals Together to Talk about Career Change For two Saturday sessions (3 hours each) in April, I had the pleasure of facilitating a dozen great professionals through the beta version of my Six-Hour Career Energize...
Six Big Insights from the Six-Hour Career Energize Program Beta Sessions
Six big insights from the recent beta version of the Six-Hour Career Energize Program. It turns out there is a process for turning daydreams into reality without jumping off a cliff.
It’s Your Career—8 Sure-Fire Ways to Annoy Your Boss
If your objective is to annoy your boss and ensure that you earn your way on to his or her Short List (OK, the name of the list starts with sh and ends with t, but this is a family blog), try these eight actions on for size:
Art of Managing—Always Be Building
Of the eight valuable leadership lessons shared in the HBR article, “Ferguson’s Forumla” (subscription or $), number 2, “Dare to Rebuild Your Team” is critically important and often bypassed in the workplace due to friction, tentativeness on the part of managers and HR groups and lack of vision and courage on the part of managers. Sadly, in too many cases, we allow a number of challenging but controllable impediments to get in our way of doing the right thing. These 4 are…
Leadership Caffeine™—It’s Time to Put More Context in Your Conversations
Looking for a boost in morale and team or departmental performance? Try spending some time helping your colleagues connect their work efforts and goals to the bigger picture of your firm’s strategy. Here are 6 practices that effective leaders apply in pursuit of creating clear context for individual and team challenges:
Art of Managing—You Can’t Scale Bad People
There’s no formula, no strategy, no approach to building a great business that allows you to short circuit the need for great people. If you’re facing this issue, here are a few thoughts to help you get this equation for success right:
New Leader Tuesday—Effective Leaders Earn Their Stripes Every Day
Leading is a privilege and you serve at the discretion of the people on your team. While you might have hire, promote or fire authority, the people around you make the choice to go through the motions or invest their hearts and minds in pursuit of their tasks.
Leadership Caffeine™—Surviving and Thriving Under Uncertainty
There are few attributes more valuable to leaders than the ability to stare uncertainty in the face and recognize it as a golden opportunity to shape and form the situation to their own and to their firm’s advantage. Here are 5 ideas to help you flip fear and uncertainty in the workplace upside down:
New Leader Tuesday—Focus on the Fundamentals
The fundamentals of leadership never go out of style. Whether you are a first-time leader, an experienced professional taking over a new team or a senior leader who can use a little leadership pick-me-up, focusing on these five fundamentals will serve you and your teams well:
Art of Managing—Balancing the Need for Speed AND Performance
With few exceptions that I’ve encountered, most senior leaders lose sleep over how fast their organizations and employees are moving. Their minds and mantras are: faster to change, faster to improve, faster to add new capabilities, faster to explore and develop competence in new markets and with new customer groups. However, at the same time senior leaders are looking for ways for their firms and teams to move faster, most employee groups and their managers are bogged down slogging through the reality of getting stuff done. Here are 3 ideas to help you and your team strengthen the balance between the need for speed and the need for performance:
Leadership Caffeine™—Coping When a Valued Protégé Says Goodbye
Part of growing up as a leader involves letting the people you’ve supported and coached, sometimes from day one of their careers, move on to new opportunities inside and outside the organization. Here are 5 thoughts to help you keep things in context when faced with losing a valued team member: