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
How to Create a Quality Feedback Culture that Supports Learning and Growth
Is Feedback Transactional or Transformational in Your Environment? When I ask managers about the feedback environment on their teams, I get a lot of questions, starting with, "What do you mean?" While many managers work hard to construct and deliver timely behavioral...
How to Create a Quality Feedback Culture that Supports Learning and Growth
While many managers work hard to construct and deliver timely behavioral feedback, few spend time working on their feedback culture. As a result, performance feedback is transactional—given on a one-off basis, but it doesn’t propel growth and learning across the entire group. Here are some tips to strengthen your team’s feedback culture.
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:
It’s Your Career—4 Key Self Development Questions
In the course of my work coaching, managing and hiring, I encounter far too many individuals who have nothing to point to when it comes to skills development and continuing education. How you answer these 4 questions speaks volumes about you as a professional:
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: