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
When Your “Ask” Runs Into a Brick Wall— Find the Loose Brick
Shameless flattery: the brick wall/loose brick statement in the title is paraphrased from Keith Ferrazzi's foreword to Just Listen by Mark Goulston. -- Imagine you invested a great deal of time doing the background research, compiling the data, and building your...
When Your “Ask” Runs Into a Brick Wall— Find the Loose Brick
People resist anything that threatens their autonomy and safety. Quit leading with what you need and start focusing on what’s important to them, and you’ll watch resistance melt.
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.
Leading to the Values
Are your firm’s values worth the price of the frames that they presently occupy while hanging in your lobby, the main conference room and your CEO’s office? What should be potent guides to behavior and frequent reference points for talent and business decisions are often nothing more than artwork.
Help Your Team Pass the “Walk in the Door” Test
As you and your team members start your days by walking through the office doors or for remote associates, logging on, can everyone connect the top priorities on their “To Do” lists to the strategic priorities of your firm?
Develop Your Talent Scouting Skills
The best leaders that I know are also the best talent scouts. They are acute observers of people and extraordinarily quick to identify individuals with potential.
Leadership Caffeine™: “How Can I Help?”
“How can I help?” These four simple words are powerful leadership tools when framed into a question and applied with genuine intent.
It’s Summer on My Calendar-Friday Shorts are Back!
I don’t care that my calendar marks a day later in June as the official start of Summer. Memorial Day has passed, the temperature and humidity in Chicago are rising and tennis with my sons is a regular evening activity. Oh, and the list of outside chores is now long enough to choke the proverbial horse. (Note: no horses were choked in the writing of this post.) Given the shift in seasons, I’m excited to bring back my Shorts feature here every Friday from June until the end of August. I’ll offer up suggested business beach reads, a resource of the week and I’ll point you to some Leadership Tips that you might have missed. Enjoy!