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
Here’s Why This Firm Will Lose the War for Talent and Fail
I received a call recently from a former colleague who was excited about an interview with a large company for a big-sounding job. The role was to build out a new facility and bring it online, and the job requirements suggested an experienced senior leader and...
Here’s Why This Firm Will Lose the War for Talent and Fail
Here are at least five ways a major organization misfired with the search for talent. Are your firm’s screening practices getting in the way of survival and success?
Summer Shorts for June 25, 2010 from Management Excellence
With a father and sons weekend in the offing, I’ll keep the shorts short (bad combination of words!) and offer you encouragement to get out and enjoy the all too fast-moving weekends of summer. Here in the Midwest, we feel good about cracking 2-digits on the number of weekends that make up our available summer, so, there is no time to waste. Some quick-thoughts and fast links:
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! #2 of 7
The Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders are presented in Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation. Question number one challenged you to ask and answer, “Why do you want to lead?” While the first question focused on motivation, the second question goes squarely to understanding.
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! Number 1 of 7
The Seven Key Questions are presented in Practical Lessons in Leadership (Amazon) by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation. The first question: why do you want to lead other people?
Hyper-Reality, Slimy Weasels and the Biting Words of a General
I rarely follow a post with a related post, but the current stir created by General McChrystal, the senior military leader in Afghanistan, with his poor word choices and poor judgment in communicating with a reporter, begs a follow-on to Monday’s Leadership Caffeine post, The Word Selection of Journeyman Leaders.
Innovation is for Everyone
Innovation isn’t just the domain of engineers, designers and other creative product types and functions inside organizations. Everyone and every function has the opportunity to innovate in pursuit of serving internal or external customers, improving business processes and helping the firm achieve strategic objectives.
7 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working
The best leaders are critically aware of their role and power in shaping the environment on their teams and inside their organizations. They are also aware that almost no one will ever provide the boss honest, actionable feedback on performance. I encourage leaders to develop an extreme awareness of what is going on around them as the best indicator of their effectiveness.
Leadership Caffeine™: The Word Selection of Journeyman Leaders
For too many leaders, word selection is a hurried and blind groping in the toolbox for something that will do the job. In the absence of careful selection, a quick barking of orders, an unfiltered criticism or an out of context pronouncement will all create collateral damage.
Tripping Points and the Leader
Firms and teams run into natural Tripping Points in the form of infrastructure and know-how as they work to grow a firm from start-up to $10 million or from $10 million to $25 million and so on. Often, the only viable solution to get beyond a Tripping Point is to retool the management team with people that have experience creating the infrastructure and programs/teams/processes needed to reach the next few levels. I can easily apply Tripping Point thinking to the challenges that we as professionals face in advancing our careers and in particular, in developing as leaders. Awareness of your prospective Tripping Points is an important first step in creating your personal and professional development plan.
Summer Shorts for June 18 from Management Excellence
Resources, great reads and sound bites for your summer weekends. Blink and the week is gone. I’m still not clear how Friday happened so quickly again, but here we are, and here I am with a few suggestions for your weekend professional development time.