The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—”This Is the Way It Should Be”
Working With Others Can Be Painful. It Shouldn't Be! Teaming and collaboration experiences happen in all walks of our professional and personal lives. Some experiences working with others are draining, others passable, and just a few are energizing and even fun....
Leadership Caffeine™—”This Is the Way It Should Be”
Teaming and collaboration experiences happen in all walks of our professional and personal lives. Some experiences working with others are draining, others passable, and just a few are energizing and even fun and successful. You can hope these fun, productive experiences emerge by chance. Or you can be deliberate about creating the conditions that improve the possibility of a great collaboration experience. I opt for improving our odds of bringing one of these productive, fun experiences to life. Here are four ideas to help:
Leadership Caffeine™ Podcast-Executive Coach Mary Jo Asmus
There’s a secret to why I have so much fun producing this podcast. I only interview people who fascinate and inspire with their ideas. The subject of this interview, , Executive Coach, business owner at Aspire CS and popular leadership blogger, Mary Jo Asmus, hits the bullseye on all criteria.
New Leader Tuesday-Gaining Critical Context for Your Team’s Mission
Many first-time leaders are given the equivalent of “battlefield” promotions with no more context than, “You’ve done a great job, you’re in charge.” If you end up on the receiving side of this “Go get ‘em Tiger,” philosophy of leadership development, it’s important for you to quickly gain context for your team’s role and accountabilities.
Just One Thing-Vary Your Routine For A Change
Routines are comfortable..and at the risk of being redundant, habit forming. Eventually, routines become mind numbing. Here are five ideas to help jump-start your thoughts on breaking the routine:
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.