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
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
Do These Describe Your Environment? In my programs, consulting work, and coaching, I regularly encounter these situations: Managers struggling with an employee's performance, yet they've provided little to no feedback, or their feedback was watered down to the point...
The Culture, Strategy, and Performance Killing Spiral of Poor or No Feedback
While we regularly focus on feedback as an individual performance tool, it’s also a critical communication tool for driving improvement across groups and for processes and initiatives. Yet, this important, honest communication is in short supply in too many organizations.
Art of Managing—Is Your Success Placing You on a Glide Path to Oblivion?
Good to great near-term numbers have lured many a management team into focusing on the near-term at the expense of their firm’s long-term health. Assuming that prior and current success will continue uninterrupted is a sure-fire way to place your company on a glide path to oblivion.While it’s counter-intuitive to think that good results are potentially unhealthy, consider using these 6 questions with your management team to jump-start a discussion about your organization’s future health:
Leadership Caffeine™—Helping Your Team Find and Keep Focus
We all know and live with the distractions that pull us from our true priorities. From the personal issues that tug at us while we’re striving to work and live, to the endless number of workplace distractions, focus often seems like an abstract concept. Here are 5 ideas you can apply today to help your teams and team members find focus:
Just One Thing—Quit Playing the Role of the Office Overbearing Smarty Pants
Most of us have very little real understanding of how our behaviors impact others. We cruise through our days secure in our view of our importance and convinced that our presence lights up every room, enlightens our colleagues and brings joy and prosperity to our teams and organization. Just in case you happen to be the Office Overbearing Smarty Pants, here are 5 tips to help you reform your ways:
New Leader Tuesday—Beware These 6 Time and Agenda Killers
For too many new to the role of leading, we allow the urgent-unimportant to monopolize our time and dictate our priorities. Detailing the focus means ensuring that your eyes and efforts are locked on to the real issues in your new role. Here are 6 nefarious agenda killers of new (and experienced leaders) to avoid at all costs:
Leadership Caffeine™—Curing the Leader’s Communication Conundrum
People are complicated, vexing and remarkable all at the same time, and the only way to tame these forces and harness the hearts and minds of the people around you, is to strengthen your effectiveness as a communicator. Every day. Here are 3 ideas to help you get started:
Art of Managing—The Questions Come First
My first manager routinely asked a question that turned out to be a powerful teaching tool and a life-long reminder to pause before leaping. The question was, “Have you thought of everything?” While “thinking of everything” in a literal sense is impossible, her intent wasn’t to push us down to ground level in an endless field of details (as interpreted by my colleagues), but rather, it was to push us to think through and around a situation in as thorough manner as possible. Here are 5 situations where the questions absolutely must come first:
New Leader Tuesday—4 Ideas to Improve Front-Line Management and Team Performance
When it comes to sub-par performance on teams and between a supervisor and his or her department members, communication is almost always an issue, but rarely the root cause of the problem. Here are 4 ideas to help front-line leaders strengthen performance and improve communication with their teams:
Management Inanities, Annoyances and Other Observations
Here are a few observations and annoyances from the world of management. Enjoy your week wherever your travels take you. May the airport lines run flawlessly and may you be spared the time sink of having to fight for the right to consume cell, satellite and digital services at the promotion price!
It’s Your Career- 6 Ideas to Help You Define Your Professional Value Proposition
Part of the process of moving up or moving on involves a hefty amount of self-marketing, and it’s at this point where we attempt to share who we are and what we bring to the table that we often fall short. Here are 6 ideas to help you jump-start the process of creating an effective professional value proposition: