The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Leadership Lessons from a Move to the Lake
My wife and I made a big move last week. We left our 30-year suburban home where we raised our sons and moved to the lake. The process took almost a year from the decision to make the move and about a day to sell. In-between, we focused on lightening our load of...
Leadership Caffeine™—Leadership Lessons from a Move to the Lake
While an incredible number of people move every year, and everyone knows what a miserable project it is, there are a surprising number of leadership lessons in these situations. Here are a few I gleaned from our recent move efforts.
“I finished my MBA. What’s Next?” A Few Do’s and Don’ts for New MBAs
All over the U.S., there’s a fresh new crop of MBA graduates leaving behind their books and case studies, and in some cases, preparing to rediscover their families after several years of their noses buried in books and their fingers glued to their keyboards. A key question on their minds is, “What’s next?” Here are seven ideas for freshly minted MBA as they navigate the end of one career journey and the beginning of the next.
Millennial View-FWIW Keep LOL OMG & Other Texting Terms Out of the Workplace
Eric Rodriguez is the voice of The Millennial View here at Management Excellence. His latest post offers a reminder to those typically early career professionals who are accustomed to communicating in small bursts of acronym filled texts via their cellphones, to keep their unique language out of the workplace.
Hold It! Don’t Accept that Job Offer Until You Consider These 5 Points
A good friend brought me up to speed on her career challenges recently, and after listening and empathizing with the unfortunate events that led to the recent job loss, I asked her what she had learned in the process. Her response included some good nuggets of hard-earned wisdom that we can all benefit from. Here are 5 points to consider before jumping In to that cool new job:
Dispatches from Mayo: “It’s a Privilege to Work Here”
There’s no doubt one of the most significant challenges any service organization faces is how to sustain excellence in service delivery over long periods of time. After all, service organizations live or die based on the passion and commitment of the people providing the service. Once the passion goes, the service trends to the ordinary. Or worse.
Dispatches from Mayo: Are You Pushing Your Colleagues to Grow?
If you have the privilege of leading others, consider what Dr. Mayo’s 3rd condition for sustaining success means to you, your team and your organization.
Management Excellence Toolkit: Better Design for Workplace Discussions
Getting to a good decision on big issues is challenging. Navigating the discussions leading up to a decision however, often resembles something on the difficulty of slogging through the Amazonian jungles in search of a mythical lost city made of gold. If you survive the process, you are bound to come out a very different person. It doesn’t have to be so hard.
The Millennial View: Mentors Wanted
Eric Rodriguez is the voice of The Millennial View here at Management Excellence. Today, Eric shares his thoughts on the benefits early career professionals can gain from a good mentor. “A simple step that we can engage in to help our careers along is to find a mentor to guide and coach us in the workplace. A great mentor is a blessing because of the knowledge that they have accumulated through years of experience in the corporate jungle and their willingness to pass it on to their mentees.”
It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Teams to Succeed
If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable. For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.
Leadership Caffeine™-Quit Sending Mixed Signals
How consistent are you in your approaches to dealing with people and problems? Is there an early warning system in place in your office that tracks your every move from the car through the parking lot and into the office? How you respond to people and to situations (victories, losses, mistakes etc.) goes a long way to forming the working environment on your team.