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
The Secret to Leadership Success Isn’t So Secret
What's Your Aspirational Leadership Self? Every year I work with hundreds of individuals in my Manager Development Program(s), and one of the key activities is defining their Leadership Charter. The Charter embodies their aspirational leadership self and is developed...
The Secret to Leadership Success Isn’t So Secret
Every year, a ridiculous number of books are written on leadership, and we consume them in volume, hoping to find the secret to leadership success. It’s not that hard, and it’s not a secret. Just ask them what they need from you.
Just One Thing: Services ARE Performances
Few things evoke as much negative emotion in otherwise kind and gentle souls as a bad experience as a customer. Focus in your mind on your last really bad customer service experience and you can sense the tension in your neck growing along with the rise in blood pressure. That bad experience becomes “the company” for us. What do your team’s performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?
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.