The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Free Mini-Course/Webinar: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career
If a career pivot is on your mind and you want some hard-earned guidance for jump-starting the process, join me on 7/21 at noon central for: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career! I'll share guidance gained from years of coaching career reinventors...
Free Mini-Course/Webinar: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career
If a career pivot is on your mind and you want some hard-earned guidance for jump-starting the process, join me on 7/21 at noon central for: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career!
Don’t Be Naive When It Comes to Driving Change
There are ample reasons for organizations to change business processes and business practices in this fast moving and complex environment. The market drivers are strong, the business justification is clear and often, ideas on how and where to change are clearly visible to some inside organizations. It’s too bad that most change management initiatives fail, in spite of the best of intentions. With a bit of advance warning and some darned hard work however, you may be able to avoid the fate of so many that have come before you. Learn to ask yourself some core questions and keep asking these questions and you might just put one in the win column.
Never Rake Leaves Uphill and Other Management Lessons Learned in the Northwoods
Spend enough time writing, speaking and thinking about management and performance, and you’re likely to find yourself looking for lessons in all of your dealings. This certainly held true for me this past weekend, as I engaged in the annual fall ritual of cleaning up the leaves at the northwoods home. While the management guidance here might not make the next issue of HBR, if you ever face several hilly acres of ankle deep leaves, this might just save your back from breaking and your relationships from crumbling!
Leadership Caffeine™: Learning to Ask for Help
I’ve not met a person yet that doesn’t need help from time to time, and this goes double for anyone in a leadership role. Leadership is frequently lonely and those that take their role seriously truly fret over decisions surrounded by ambiguity. The pressure to “figure it out” is tremendous, partially imposed by our fast moving and politically charged working environments, and partially imposed by our own misguided sense that to show that we need help is to show weakness. Here are seven ideas for properly and professionally asking for help.
“And He Kicks Children in the Face,” and Other Insane Approaches to Competing
As business leaders, we make decisions every day about how our firms and our people compete. Most of us choose to focus on creating value and solving problems. A few resort to “win at all” costs type behaviors. This latter group poses some vexing problems for those of us that prefer the high-road style of competing for business, but the problems are not insurmountable. Here are six ideas for forming and framing a positive and effective competitive culture.
Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need
The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone. The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need. Here are four ideas to avoid being victimized by “The Felt Need.”
Leadership Caffeine™-Stuck in a Rut? Try These Ideas On for Size
There’s an awful bad case of the “serious” malady running through our society right now, and for just a moment, we all deserve to unclench our jaws, breathe and even form that rare but powerful facial expression, the smile.
Consider this my attempt (albeit a weak one, I’m certain) to take a little of the seriousness out of your day while offering ideas that might just have something to them. Or, they might not, but, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
In Pursuit of Management Innovation in Marketing
The practice of management has evolved at a snail’s pace over the past 50 years, and one of the core tools of management and a key issue for any organization, marketing, has lagged just slightly behind.
Senior Leaders, It’s Time to Share Your Lessons Learned
I’ve had the great privilege this past year to work with a Fortune 50 company that is methodically conquering the retail world. Specifically, I’m working with a group of high-potential mid-level professionals all focused on increasing their contributions and growing their careers. During our recent time together, the program sponsors arranged for a good number of the senior executives of the corporation to sit down and share insights on how to develop as senior contributors; how to develop executive presence and in general, how to seize the opportunities being presented by the firm’s great growth. Over the course of 3 development days, we invested approximately 5 hours engaging with executives. The impact was priceless.
Leadership Caffeine™: Strengthen as a Leader by Developing as a Follower
I grew up to the refrain of “be a leader, not a follower,” and the drive to lead is part of who I am. Part and parcel of that has been a natural resistance through much of my early career to the notion that, “to be a good leader, you need to be a good follower.” For me, and I know for many others, our ambition is to drive change, right wrongs and challenge the status quo and to advance. Mentally, it’s hard to connect those core professional drives with the passive and even weak sounding notion of “following.”