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
Treat Your Career Pivot as an Agile Project to Make Progress Faster
Finding "Next" in Your Career is an Agile Project If you know exactly what you want to do for the next stage of your career, consider yourself fortunate. For many, the drive to do something new and different is blunted by the inability to answer the "What?" or...
Treat Your Career Pivot as an Agile Project to Make Progress Faster
Using a disciplined, agile project management approach might be the most important thing you can do to succeed in identifying the right “next” in your career. Here are ideas to help.
It’s Your Career! Now is the Time to Start Reinventing Yourself
When it comes to your career, the best defense is a good offense. The odds are fairly good that at some point, you will face an unexpected interruption in your employment. The issue isn’t that it happened, it’s what you do once you’re faced with this problem that is critical to your career. Here are 5 ideas to help you jump start your career reinvention now, before the old one disappears:
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.