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
A Focus on Bringing Your Purpose to Life (and work)—Insights from the Jam Session
Ideas and Energy Every Month with the Leadership Caffeine Jam Session On the second Friday of every month, I get together with a fabulous group of professionals, and for 50 or so minutes, we share ideas on the significant issues in leading, managing, and careers....
A Focus on Bringing Your Purpose to Life (and work)—Insights from the Jam Session
In the latest Leadership Caffeine Jam Session, we explored the issue of purpose in the workplace. Here are some key insights from the group:
Leadership Caffeine™: 5 Ways Leaders Can Promote an Outside-In View
Overcoming the gravitational pull of the office requires extraordinary effort. Succumb to this powerful tractor beam and your life is an endless stream of internal meetings and activities that lack any context for the realities of customers and the marketplace. Spend too much time inside your own walls, and you create your own alternate reality…one that lacks proper connectivity to the issues that should define your team’s priorities. Here are 5 ideas to help you and your team members change the view and cultivate critical marketplace context:
4 Reasons Why Questions are a Leader’s Best Friend
The best leaders I know wield questions like a surgeon wields a scalpel…carefully, precisely, respectfully and always with an objective in mind.
4 Reasons Why Questions are a Leader’s Best Friend:
New Leader Tuesday: A Mistake is a Horrible Thing to Waste
Beyond the certainty of death and taxes, one other absolute in life is that as a leader, you will make mistakes. A great number of them. From misspeaking to making a decision that turns out wrong to a million other areas to show off your humanness, mistakes are part of the learning to lead process. How you choose to deal with your mistakes will help determine people’s perception of you and speak volumes about your leadership character. Here are 6 ideas to help you leverage those moments effectively:
Best of Leadership Caffeine™-How to Deal with Positive Praise
It’s easy to start believing the praise you hear in the hallways about your leadership approach. Easy and dangerous. I’ve always been leery of the unfounded and saccharine-sweet praise that is bestowed upon leaders. While you may call me cynical, I prefer to think of myself as pragmatic. Here are 5 ideas for delicately and appropriately coping with positive praise:
August Leadership Development Carnival and Reading List
This month’s excellent edition of the Leadership Development Carnival is being hosted by Sharlyn Lauby, aka the H.R. Bartender! In addition to a great variety of posts, Sharlyn asked each contributor to share what they are reading this summer, and the results make for a great reading list for the final weeks of pre-Labor Day book consumption.
Let’s Go Curiosity! The Olympics of Human Ingenuity
Against the backdrop of the world’s greatest athletes competing in London, there is an equally exciting and very other-worldly event occurring on a red planet somewhere near earth.
Management Excellence Recap for the Week Ending August 4, 2012
An extended weekend and then some productive business travel reduced the writing and posting time to a dull roar. Nonetheless, these two posts reflect my current reading…from Drucker to neuroscience. Your thoughts and ideas are always appreciated her
Just One Thing: Learn to Fight Your Negativity Bias
We all know people who seem to thrive on the negatives in life. They can look at what is perceived by others as a beautiful picture and spot the flaws, almost taking pride in their role as watchdogs against perfection. Here are 4 ideas and several resources to help reduce your negative self-talk and improve your effectiveness and happiness as a leader and person:
Leadership Caffeine™-To Grow as a Leader, Master a Second Discipline
Of the many important themes espoused by the late and arguably pre-eminent management thinker of the latter part of the twentieth century, Peter Drucker, perhaps the most valuable to us as individuals, is his constant reminder that we are responsible for our own self-development. One of Drucker’s more provocative suggestions as described in William A. Cohen’s enjoyable read, “A Class with Drucker-The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher,” is for managers to actively work at developing expertise outside of their chosen field as a tool to preparing to become a senior or strategic leader. (Read More…)