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
Seven Things to Stop Doing as a Leader This (and every) Year
The late, great management thinker Peter Drucker once offered: "We spend a lot of time teaching our leaders what to do. We don't spend enough time teaching them what to stop." As you search for new resolutions and ideas to grow and strengthen in your leadership role...
Seven Things to Stop Doing as a Leader This (and every) Year
As you search for new resolutions and ideas to grow and strengthen in your leadership role in the months ahead, here are seven things I encourage you to stop.
4 Ideas for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team
Groupthink is one of the most common and nefarious decision-making traps of otherwise well-intentioned teams. Don’t fool yourself. This trap is easy to fall into and difficult to extract yourself from once you’re caught. Learn the signs and take quick action to save the day and the decision!
It’s Time to Confront Your Fear of Public Speaking
There are few skills that will take you further and help you more than developing your speaking skills. Your writing skills are a close second. It’s time to confront your fear of speaking and make this critical skill a valuable part of who you are as a professional.
What If? Why Not? And Other Incredible Business Adventures
While we celebrate companies that pursue and succeed in radically changing the rules of the game, let’s face it, most organizations run on inertia.
For every company that redefines their little part of the world and changes our culture just a bit, there are plenty of firms that run on autopilot until the fuel runs out and the plane needs to be ditched in the ocean. The forces of globalization and digitization create storms and headwinds for some that are just too strong to overcome.
5 Actions to Improve Leadership Development in Your Firm
When it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling. Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon your achievements.
Leaders Teach
I’ve long believed that the best leaders are teachers. Not lecturers, but teachers. As teachers, they challenge us to think, to explore, to experiment, to learn and to keep trying.
Leadership Caffeine™-Effective Leaders Learn to Pivot
Like the brother-in-law that you dodge at family gatherings to avoid his pitch on the latest “can’t fail, get rich quick” business scheme, some people are involved in a constant game of that childhood classic, Chutes and Ladders. Catch one ladder and you skip over the rest of us as we wind our way along on journeys of unknown destination and duration. Occasionally, these short-cut seekers find their way into positions of business and leadership responsibility, and the results range from a preoccupation with the near-term to overt decisions to cut corners in an attempt to move faster. However, the effective leader recognizes that there are no true short-cuts.
The Words and Decisions of Questionable Leaders
The Words and Decisions of Questionable Leaders-recognize that you are measured by the impact of your decisions in the long-term and you are judged by your choice of words every time you open your mouth.
Friday Shorts from Management Excellence
Resources, great reads and sound bites for your summer weekends. This post features a great article on decision-making from Harvard Business Review, a link to a post on “What Twitter Can Teach Leaders About Effective Communication,” and links to the Leadership Tip(s) of the Day at Building Better Leaders. Enjoy your weekend!
Hug an Internal Customer Today
Tom Peters, in his excellent and inspirational collection of little things that have big impact (The Little Big Things-163 Ways to Pursue Excellence), reminds us how important our internal customers are to our success. We focus on external customers for all of the right reasons, but often forget that the people that get things done for you and everyone else are typically sitting somewhere deep inside an organization.