The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Why You Need to “Write the Rules for Success” with Your Group
Here's a bold claim: there's a simple, powerful exercise you can run with your group that will transform the working environment for the better and provide you with the critical framework for coaching you've been lacking. Drumroll, please! Here it is: You need to work...
Leadership Caffeine™—Why You Need to “Write the Rules for Success” with Your Group
There’s a simple, powerful exercise you can run with your group that will transform the working environment for the better and provide you with the critical framework for coaching you’ve been lacking. You need to Write the Rules for Success with your group.
Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year
I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter. Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:
Best of Management Excellence: Trying Not to Fail is Not the Same as Striving for Success
When we focus on not failing, fear rents most of the space in our mind, and we see monsters in need of slaying everywhere we turn. We lose track of the original vision that propelled our actions, and the sheer act of working becomes at best a passionless exercise and at worst, drudgery. Here are some thoughts as you head into the new year on rediscovering your sense of purpose in the workplace.
Best of Management Excellence: An Effective Leader’s Resolutions are Calendar Blind
I’m as guilty as the next person of finding the impending resetting of the calendar a cathartic cleansing, where the failures of the past year are suddenly washed away and replaced by the empty and unknown space filled with promise and time stretching out in front of us. There is something remarkably powerful and alluring about the chance to start-over, right wrongs and vow to do things right the next time around. Resolutions start out as good intentions early in a new year and often end up as regrets later. As a leader, you cannot afford to fall victim to the boom and bust cycle of annual resolutions. Here are eight key questions to resolve about your own leadership practices.
The Joys of the Season
With my sincere thanks for your readership during this past year, I wish you nothing but the best during the holidays and for the new year. I’m taking some time with family and look forward to renewing our pursuit of management and leadership excellence in 2012!
A Leadership Christmas Carol-Bah Humbug to These Leaders
Given the state of things in our world, perhaps for just one season, Dickens’ ghosts can shift their attention away from Scrooge and focus on a few of those truly deserving characters hiding in positions of leadership inside our organizations and governmental institutions. Here are just a few of these characters in need of a visit from the Leadership Ghosts of Past, Present and Future:
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Don’t Be Part of the Problem
It’s all too easy for us to get caught up in the political swirl and self-limiting behaviors that characterize the culture of many of our organizations. It’s a mistake. We have to learn to fight the gravitational pull of malaise and mediocrity that pervades our teams, or we risk being part of the problem.
December 04 Leadership Development Carnival
Our intrepid Leadership Development Carnival host, Dan McCarthy of Great Leadership fame, has for this month passed the hosting/producing baton to Kevin Eikenberry and Becky Robinson at Kevin’s Learning & Leadership blog. They are adding their own unique twist by dividing up the many submissions into several different mini-Carnival postings during the week. I encourage you to check out the posts, bookmark or subscribe to Kevin’s blog and make certain to make a return trip through the Carnival Midway this week.
Leadership Caffeine™ Podcast #12: David Lapin on Lead by Greatness
David Lapin, author of: “Lead by Greatness-How Character Can Power Your Success,” is not only fascinating, he’s in a league of his own with a world-view that encompasses his life in South Africa, his Rabbinical studies and his active and present life as a successful strategy consultant. While he doesn’t necessarily trumpet that remarkable experience, in my opinion, it is part of what makes his book unique on both a personal and a professional level.
3 Key Strategy Questions to Ask Your Teams Regularly
In my experience, the management teams that lead the best performing businesses are those that incorporate at least three key strategic questions into almost every operational and status discussion. The gross majority of the dialogue in an organization is about How, and Who and When and the important What and Why issues are left for strategy meetings and other “high-level” discussions. While understandable in the hectic pace of the workday, the shortage of these important What and Why discussions reinforces a dangerous form of operational myopia, where the underlying and unspoken assumption is: If we simply get this done, we’ll be better off as a firm