The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Seven Things to Stop Doing as a Leader This (and every) Year
The late, great management thinker Peter Drucker once offered: "We spend a lot of time teaching our leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching them what to stop." As you search for new resolutions and ideas to grow and strengthen in your leadership role...
Seven Things to Stop Doing as a Leader This (and every) Year
As you search for new resolutions and ideas to grow and strengthen in your leadership role in the months ahead, here are seven things I encourage you to stop.
Leadership Caffeine™-7 Suggestions to Strengthen Your Group’s Performance
Performance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results. Here are 7 ideas to promote high performance with your team:
Leadership Caffeine™ Podcast-Getting Ahead with Joel Garfinkle
Unfortunately, good work alone is not always enough to stand-out from the crowd. In a noisy, competitive workplace, where others choose us for big projects and new opportunities, finding a way to stand-out…while not becoming one of those aforementioned obnoxious characters, is a fact of life. Joel Garfinkle, a leading executive coach, speaker and author, offers some excellent and practical guidance on this important but awkward topic in his latest book, Getting Ahead-Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level.
6 Ideas to Help You Move Forward on What Matters
Whether professional or personal, it seems that most of us carry around ideas and dreams that inspire us and give us hope for our future. Unfortunately, many of us don’t do much more than think about those dreams as they age and then spoil in our mental cellars. Here are 6 slightly different ideas to help you get going on pursuing yours:
Don’t Get Blindsided by Organizational Politics
For all of us, ignoring this very real human behavior that manifests itself as organizational politics, is a sure-fire way to end up at best on the fringe of irrelevance, and at worst, to end up outside, wondering what happened. Here are 7 ideas you can apply to “play politics” and maintain your integrity:
Leadership Caffeine™ Podcast: Brook Manville on Judgment Calls
Run a literature search on decision-making, and you’ll find a broad range of content, much of it focused on the cognitive issues and traps surrounding the process, and the balance focused on the disasters so widely dissected in our culture. For a fresh and refreshing view, enter Tom Davenport and Brook Manville with their book, Judgment Calls-12 Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams that Got Them Right.
Leadership Caffeine™: Listen with Intent
Yesterday, a valued colleague described a fascinating professional interaction and used the phrase, “listening with intent.”While I imagine it is something on the level of “seek first to understand,” the phrasing works for me. It connotes a significant and deep personal investment in focusing on another human…something lacking from most of our interchanges in life and in the workplace.
Bringing Back Professional Courtesy
The issue of professional courtesy (or seeming lack thereof) came up at a recent networking group meeting. With permission, I’m sharing the spontaneous suggestion list we generated, including ideas for live and social media settings. Please add to the list and let’s all strive to put these into practice in real-time. At Least 15 Ideas to Help Bring Professional Courtesy Back:
The Cruel, Bitter and Crushing Taste of Dump-Truck Feedback
Right after avoiding it, the most commonly employed managerial strategy for dealing with feedback is, delaying it. The first approach is poor form… the latter approach is cruel.
Leading in the Matrix-7 Ideas to Cultivate the Right Skills
If speed, adaptability, learning…and the need to innovate are more than buzzwords and corporate clichés, but in fact are the requirements for success in this fast-moving world, then building cultures, teams and people capable of succeeding in the matrix must be a priority.