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
Ten Life Lessons Learned & Reinforced From A Year Well Lived
Some years are more noteworthy than others. As 2022 winds down, my wife and I took the opportunity to pause and reflect on what was a watershed year in our lives. We started 2022 with our oldest son's marriage to a remarkable woman. We decided to sell our 30-year home...
Ten Life Lessons Learned & Reinforced From A Year Well Lived
Some years in our lives are more noteworthy than others. 2022 was one of those for us. Here are ten life lessons learned (or reinforced) from a year well-lived.
New Leader Tuesday: Trust Feeds Respect and Builds Performance
Respect. It’s a complex concept filled, filled with nuance and subtlety and gesture, all buried in a simple word. Most of us are wired to appreciate respect and to reciprocate in kind. And vice-versa. One of the most powerful and effective ways to show respect is to extend our trust. Of course, for all of us, particularly new leaders, that feels risky and almost counter-intuitive. It’s not.
Leadership Caffeine™-Look to Workplace Partnerships to Support Growth
Many of the most accomplished professionals and leaders I’ve encountered point not to mentors as sources of guidance and inspiration, but rather to a particular workplace peer-level partnership as having been critical to their success. Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts when seeking to cultivate powerful workplace partnerships:
Just One Thing: Always Add Clarity to Challenge
Too many strategies and corporate plans (and even our personal improvement plans) outline lofty challenges in heady words, but they fail to provide the clarity necessary for us and for our teams to move forward in an integrated fashion.
New Leader Tuesday-4 Ideas for Avoiding Hearsay Traps
I always admire the exuberance of conscientious first-time leaders to jump into situations that might detract from their new team’s performance. This conscientiousness about doing things right and getting things done is likely part of what earned them a promotion to supervisor, team lead or some title that places them in a role responsible for others. However, the desire to do right and keep things moving and keep people happy, opens up a few potential leadership tripping points, including getting actively involved in “he said/she-said” or “he did/he didn’t” type discussions and reacting too quickly to hearsay without checking out the facts. Here are 4 suggestions for avoiding Hearsay traps:
Leadership Caffeine™-Why You Should Cultivate Your Inner Leadership Anthropologist
While there’s no substitute for live-fire action in learning to develop as a leader, well-honed skills of observation can provide useful perspectives on the actions and reactions of people to various leadership styles and approaches. Here are eight sets of questions/topics that will hone your leadership anthropology skills and support your own professional development program:
Just One Thing: Now is the Time to Tackle that Tough Issue
Just about all of us are guilty of delaying dealing with a tough topic in our professional lives. These tend to be the gut churning, stare at the ceiling at night type issues that if addressed, will force us to confront our fears, admit our mistakes, move away from the known towards the unknown and generally unsettle ourselves and potentially those around us. Here are 10 issues we love to delay and my hearty encouragement to pick yours and get going!
New Leader Tuesday-Showcasing Your Authentic Self
It’s typically good advice to “be yourself” and “be authentic” when it comes to leading others. Unfortunately, for many starting out as leaders, it takes time and experience to develop the confidence necessary to let the world see us as in our leadership skins au naturel. Here are 5 ideas to help you cultivate the confidence necessary to show yourself as you are:
Leadership Caffeine™-Coping with a Personal Leadership Confidence Deficit
Lack of self-confidence is a limiting factor in the leadership careers of many good professionals. This is a difficult and extremely personal topic. Here’s some added context to help you recognize that we all struggle with many of the same issues, however, with deliberate daily actions on the right issues, we can strengthen our confidence and improve our performance.
Customer Service Hell and Lousy Leaders
I confess to not understanding the management and leadership thinking that leads to the many unpleasant or at best, sterile experiences with retailers, healthcare providers and so many others types of organizations. It’s almost as if someone is in charge of ensuring a level of engagement with employees that is somewhere just north of rude and way south of pleasant. Here’s a glimpse at a few of those policies and my suggestions for some well-deserved quality time for the executives behind these policies: