The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership and Management Lessons from Losing Dad
In the past four months, I spent most of my time and energy advocating for my elderly father across a variety of healthcare facilities. He passed away during August, and while it was merciful for him, we're left with a gigantic hole in our family and hearts. There's...
Leadership and Management Lessons from Losing Dad
In the past four months, I spent most of my time and energy advocating for my elderly father across a variety of healthcare facilities. He passed away during August, and while it was merciful for him, we’re left with a gigantic hole in our family and hearts.
There’s also a mix of guilt, frustration, and anger at much of the healthcare management, leadership, and delivery we encountered along the way.
Six Big Insights from the Global Challenging Conversations Workshops
In a recent global workshop series, two groups of individuals added their international flavor to the challenging conversations, topics, and guidance. I share the highlights below.
Treat Your Career Pivot as an Agile Project to Make Progress Faster
Using a disciplined, agile project management approach might be the most important thing you can do to succeed in identifying the right “next” in your career. Here are ideas to help.
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:
March 2023 Leadership Development Carnival
For many years, I've had the pleasure and honor of submitting my Leadership Caffeine articles to the monthly Leadership Development Carnival coordinated by the great team at Weaving Influence. This monthly collection of ideas, inspiration, and guidance for all of us...
Finding Purpose at Work—Ideas to Help
In my experience, those professionals driven by a sense of purpose enjoy what they are doing, are more resilient in the face of organizational and personal challenges, and, frankly, excel. So, what’s your professional purpose at this stage of your career? Ideas to help.
If “Next” for Your Career is On Your Mind, This is a Great Place to Start
For many individuals, figuring out what’s next in their careers is a vexing problem. That’s why I’ve created a new workshop program to help. Introducing the Six-Hour Career Energize Saturday Series.
Designing A Bug-Free Operating System for Great Managers
Rethinking the Operating System Needed for Manager Success Late last year, I shared an article at SmartBrief on Leadership, introducing the idea of the Manager's Operating System—a set of core programs or instructions that must be present to create a healthy working...
We’re Evaluating Professional Development Investments the Wrong Way
The search for the return on investment from professional development activities has been a long, unresolved quest for many HR and Learning and Development professionals. It turns out we’re looking at it all wrong. The real challenge is for an organization’s managers and leaders to CREATE the return on investment from professional development.
Hope Proved to Be a Bad Strategy for LUV—Lessons from the Southwest Airlines Debacle
There are some painful and painfully obvious leadership and management lessons from the recent Southwest Airlines debacle. Deming is spinning in his grave over this one.