The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine Jam Session 4 —Rethinking Employee Career Development for This Era
I'm excited to have a great friend and fabulous expert on career development, Julie Winkle Giulioni, join the upcoming Leadership Caffeine Jam Session: Rethinking Employee Career Development for This Era on Friday, February 11 at noon central. You can register here....
Leadership Caffeine Jam Session 4 —Rethinking Employee Career Development for This Era
I’m excited to have a great friend and fabulous expert on career development, Julie Winkle Giulioni, join the upcoming Leadership Caffeine Jam Session: Rethinking Employee Career Development for This Era on Friday, February 11 at noon central. You can register here. (This will be recorded and the video, chat stream, and mind map distributed to all registrants.)
Leadership Lessons from Sherlock Holmes: Watch and Learn
Most great leaders that I’ve encountered are astute observers of their environment. They are good at reading people and situations, and they apply the insights gained through observing to improving their performance as leaders and to navigating the ever-present corporate politics. We spend a great deal of time helping individuals develop their skills as speakers, but when was the last time that you attended a workshop on improving your observation skills?
At Least 3 Reasons We’re Still Raving About Lousy Leaders
I’ll wager a month’s worth of coffee that if you asked everyone that you know to generate a list on what makes an effective leader, the output would be nearly identical. So if this construct of an effective leader is so readily apparent, why is there a nearly endless supply of disgruntled workers capable of describing lousy leader horror stories to anyone that will listen?
Leadership Caffeine™: The “I’s” Have It
The short, important and seemingly harmless word, “I,” is a potentially lethal weapon of morale and credibility destruction when used for evil or ego instead of for good. It’s so powerful in fact, that I envision a future world where leaders wear the equivalent of a dosimeter badge to warn leader and followers when the use of “I” is in danger of creating a toxic event…most likely a spillover of b.s. into the workplace.
The Leader’s Role in Promoting Innovation
If the role of a leader wasn’t challenging enough, let’s pile on one more abstract but critical challenge to the heavy lifting already required by leaders in this fast-changing world: promoting a culture of innovation.
“Hey, What if One of Our Ships Gets Stranded?”
By now, most of us have seen or heard news footage of the Carnival Splendor stranded at sea after suffering an engine room fire and a subsequent loss of core systems including most power and importantly, the plumbing. Thankfully, no one was reported injured, but that’s about as good as the news gets in this situation. The fact that something went wrong at sea on one of those floating Mall of Americas is not surprising to me. What is surprising and disconcerting about the situation, is the apparent complete and utter lack of a risk response plan.
Leadership Caffeine™: Managing Risk Without Stifling Experimentation
The art and science of management is much about coping with risk. There are few certain outcomes in business, and that’s particularly true when we factor in the reality that people are darned complex and don’t always act rationally. More often than not, I see managers and leaders looking at their world through the eyes of “what can go wrong?” and basing their decisions solely on attempting to minimize those identified adverse outcomes. Here are 5 ideas that leaders can use to help experimentation flourish on their teams.
November Leadership Development Carnival: Early Bird Edition
Thanks to the hard work of all-around great guy and great blogger, Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership (that’s a lot of great!), you once again have an opportunity to peruse 40 great posts from people passionate about all things leadership and professional development. Dan graciously has assembled content from far and wide to educate, entertain and stimulate ideas. Check out the line-up at the latest edition of the Leadership Development Carnival (Early Bird Edition).
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!