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
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:
Three Great Hiring Habits I Learned from a Remarkable Manager
One mis-hire can poison the workplace pond, tarnish your reputation and impact your team’s/firm’s ability to execute. Do this a few times and your mistakes will likely knock you out of the hiring game and potentially into the cozy confines of today’s crowded unemployment lines. Unfortunately, the average manager isn’t very good at assessing talent and making the right call. Here are three great hiring habits I learned from a remarkable sales manager:
Why It’s Time to Ditch Your Plans for the Summer Strategy Off-Site
From the symbolism of the annual off-site strategy event to the cost to the fact that strategic thinking time is reduced to a once or twice a year event, this approach is anachronistic in a world with markets and conditions changing daily. In twenty years of these things with some great people and great businesses, I’ve yet to see anything come out of these meetings that changed our businesses. I will offer that they did allow for another layer of vetting and idea absorption. Nonetheless, the heavy lifting took place with others outside of the cozy confines of a resort or hotel meeting room. It’s time to ditch the annual strategy off-site.
“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.”