The Leadership Caffeine Blog
How Effective Leaders Help Their Teams Turn Ideas Into Actions
Think about it: "Ideas are easy; doing stuff is hard." –Seth Godin In my article How leaders can teach their teams to become more creative, I proposed a tune-up of the approaches used in many workplaces to generate ideas. After all, ideas are oxygen for...
How Effective Leaders Help Their Teams Turn Ideas Into Actions
Ideas are oxygen for problem-solving. Yet, all the ideas in the world won’t help you solve the challenges in front of you if you don’t have solid ideas-to-actions flow. As leaders, we need to complete the process and make sure there’s a robust Ideas-to-Actions machine operating on our teams and in our organizations. Here are approaches to help strengthen the flow of ideas into actions in your workplace:
Leadership Caffeine™—10 Situations to Throttle Back on Speed
Somewhere on the way to this world we now live and work in, “speed” became a proxy for success. Speed is undoubtedly important, but beware relying on it as the sole indicator of effectiveness. It’s a cruel tyrant, demanding fealty from followers, while discouraging critical and deep thinking and focusing solely on time-to-response as a metric of success. Here are at least 10 situations where you should resist the need for speed and call a timeout:
Great Ideas: Management & Leadership Week in Review
Every week (ok, that’s not a promise, but an aspiration), I’ll offer a few articles/posts and an occasional book suggestion, that I believe are worth sharing and worth thinking about and even acting on in our lives. This week’s selections offer inspiration for those striving to achieve, ideas on diagnosing and curing team performance problems, a resource on creating and sustaining organizational performance and some provocative thoughts on what the world needs from leaders.
Three Books to Give Away-Share Your “Best Leader” Story
I allocated a few copies of, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, for faithful readers and contributors here, and I would like nothing more than to give a few away in return for something we can all enjoy…a “Best Leader” story.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: It’s All in Your Attitude
Of the many things we can’t control in life and business, attitude is the one we have 100 percent power over, every single day. The best leaders know this, and they work to prepare theirs before walking through the door or engaging in the workplace.
Steve Jobs-Walking With Giants
Twentieth Century Industrialist and the founder of Panasonic, Konosuke Matsushita, established a garden outside of the firm's modest headquarters in Osaka, Japan. In this garden, he commissioned and placed statues of his heroes. Fittingly, a giant statue of Thomas...
Escaping the Gravitational Pull of the Past
If you work in a firm struggling to redefine itself and maintain its relevance in this changing world, you’re not alone. You’re also involved in a battle for your firm’s life.
Book Launch and an Offer: Let’s Get the Conversations Started!
The rolling launch of Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development continues, and I’m interested in talking to readers and their teams about all things leadership. I’ve got an offer for you to help jump-start the right conversations with your team:
Leadership Caffeine™ Podcast #9: Business Improv with Val Gee and Sarah Gee
Creativity is at a premium in our world, and subjecting our teams and audiences to mind and rear-numbing marches through an endless stream of slides is the best way I know to stifle creativity. There’s got to be a better way!
Val Gee and Sarah Gee in their recent book, Business Improv, offer both hope and some practical solutions to the aforementioned painful march through training sessions and internal meetings. Blending experiential learning and the improvisation activities practiced in the world of theater, Val and Sarah have created a wonderful collection of activities designed to both get people engaged and help them overcome the many obstacles and barriers that get in the way of creative and problem-solving discussions.
Art’s Weekly Leadership Message-9 Credibility Builders to Lead By
If you’re responsible for getting work done through others, you will be as effective as you are credible. Of course, those of us working for you take our time in assessing your words, actions and motives before we deem you credible as our leader. While a leader’s credibility is a qualitative assessment of the individual’s character, there are a number of good habits that anyone in a supervisory or management position can apply daily on their road to building credibility and growing as a leader. Here are 9 Credibility Builders that will serve you well: