The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Revisiting the Connection Between Physical Transformation and Career Reinvention
There’s no separating the cascading benefits from working on both your fitness and your career at the same time. As I was talking with a member of the current Career Reinvent Boot Camp cohort the other evening, he remarked how during the month or so he’s been working...
Revisiting the Connection Between Physical Transformation and Career Reinvention
There’s no separating the cascading benefits from working on both your fitness and your career at the same time. The physical transformation feeds the career reinvention and vice-versa.
The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping
Critical and challenging communication situations demand crystal clarity. The discipline of message mapping is a powerful, simple-to-learn approach to helping you and your teams achieve clarity and consistency with your most difficult and strategic communication situations.
Don’t Spend Too Much Time with the Wrong People
The major “people mistakes” of my career have occurred as a result of investing too much time and effort in trying to change people. As leaders, we can enable change. We can help people that want to change. But trying to change people on our own is ultimately a fool’s errand.
Take Responsibility for Your Own Development
In my not inconsiderable experience, too many people in business are in search of the proverbial Silver Bullet. Unfortunately, there are no true silver bullets.
Leadership Caffeine™: 4 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working
Most leaders struggle to understand whether they are helping or hindering the cause. Except of course for those leaders/narcissists who believe that their every utterance is sheer genius wrapped in pure motivational gold. The feedback from your manager, while important, tends to be based on either numbers or fairly casual observation. And feedback from your team members is welcomed, but you never really know for sure whether it’s the unvarnished type. The “Am I Helping?” issue is particularly important when a troubled team or organization gains a fresh leader. Here are 4 measures that will help you gauge whether you are truly helping or hindering:
August, 2010 Leadership Development Carnival
Many thanks to Jason Seiden for hosting the August Leadership Development Carnival. The Carnivals are outstanding opportunities to sample the favorite posts of some of your favorite leadership and business bloggers and to discover some great new talent. I’m grateful to Jason for running my recent post on Decision-Making along with so many outstanding contributions from other bloggers. Have fun, enjoy the blog and stay for Jason’s great content!
Want to Lead? Consider These Questions: #7 of 7
The first six questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical. If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-6, it’s time for you to consider what your daily work life will be like as a leader.
Innovation is Everyone’s Business
Take a poll in your firm on whether people feel responsible for innovation in their jobs or in their departments, and I’ll offer an educated guess on the outcome. Those involved in engineering, design, marketing and product management will feel a strong sense of responsibility to innovate. For others in supporting or operations-focused roles, the need or ability to innovate will be rated towards the low end of perceived priorities or even capabilities. That’s a shame. A good innovator and good innovations are terrible things to waste, regardless of functional role.
Starting Fast as a Leader With Your New Team
The “start-up” phase with a new team is challenging for even the most experienced of leaders. If you’re an “all new” leader…someone hired from outside or at least outside of the team, there’s an inherent degree of uncertainty and apprehension about you. No one knows your style or your agenda, and frankly, while you have authority and respect conferred by title, you have not earned credibility or trust. One of the fastest ways to ramp up and help people develop some early comfort with you is to sit down and listen to them.
Leadership Inspiration from the Howard Schultz HBR Interview
If you’re looking for a breath of fresh leadership air and some hope in this world after watching CEOs doing the Perp Walk or the Resignation Shuffle, read the interview, “We Had to Own the Mistakes” with Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman and CEO, in the July-August, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. While Schultz is no stranger to our world as an iconic founder of one of the world’s most successful and formerly fastest growing firms, one might argue that he didn’t earn his leadership stripes until faced with the unexpected challenging of turning the firm around.