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
Want to Make a Career Change? Expect to Do Some Heavy Lifting
There are no quick fixes, magic beans, or silver bullets to get the work out of your career pivot project. While everyone's journey is different, there's a common thread: you have to think, think deeply, be creative, be willing to explore, and ultimately, be ready to...
Want to Make a Career Change? Expect to Do Some Heavy Lifting
There are no quick fixes, magic beans, or silver bullets to get the work out of your career pivot project. While everyone’s journey is different, there’s a common thread: you have to think, think deeply, be creative, be willing to explore, and ultimately, be ready to experiment before identifying the right “next” in your career. In other words, you need to do the heavy lifting required for a successful career pivot.
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.
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.