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
Five big mistakes to avoid when changing careers
Over the years, I’ve helped many experienced professionals successfully navigate to the next stage of their careers. These weren’t people making a job change; they wanted something different—something that leveraged their accumulated wisdom while aligning with their...
Five big mistakes to avoid when changing careers
An important part of any career shift process is minimizing risk. Here are some lessons learned about key traps, including one big one that I encountered on my own career re-mix project.
It Takes Leadership Courage to Kick Conventional Wisdom to the Curb
Resilience, according to one dictionary definition, is the capacity to absorb a shock or a punch and return quickly to original form.
Life and business are filled with shocks and punches. We’ve lived this story for the past few years. And the shocks and punches keep coming, just in different forms and from unexpected places. It takes resilience and leadership courage to absorb the hits and come out stronger.
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.