The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Rethinking New Manager Training and Development
What If You Were Asked to Train First-Time Managers? Imagine you are tapped on the shoulder to lead an upcoming training program for a new cohort of soon-to-be first-time managers in your organization. You're probably flattered, excited, and just a bit nervous. While...
Leadership Caffeine™—Rethinking New Manager Training and Development
If you consider the myriad activities that form the role of manager, including the novel and often vexing situations presented by humans in the workplace, it’s easy to see where attempts at classroom training inevitably fall short. Use the time initially to teach them to think differently about their roles and their work at start-up using these five sets of operating instructions
Apply Distance and Anonymity to Improve Idea Generation
The default approach in most organizations and on most teams for idea generation is to conduct a brainstorming meeting. You know the drill. A meeting notice is sent out, and everyone assembles at the appointed time, prepared to “ideate.” The moderator reminds...
Creativity and the Leader
A Fast Company article entitled, “The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity” (referenced by SmartBrief on Leadership), indicates, “For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM.” As you might imagine, creativity as a quality supplanting integrity and honesty is generating a fair amount of controversy.
The Wonderful and Vexing Quality of Sticktoitiveness
Woody Allen famously offered that, “80% of success is showing up.” In my opinion, about 99% of success is Sticktoitiveness, which is much about being doggedly persistent in the face of overwhelming obstacles. That awkward non-word is one of the attributes that I look for in hiring talent and one that I’ve observed over and over again in the most successful professionals that I’ve encountered.
Leadership Caffeine™: Are You Capable of Putting It All On the Line?
Are you capable of putting it all on the line for the right issues? Your career isn’t worth a budget or a product feature or a resource squabble. Those disagreements are part of the normal process of working together, and developing effective negotiating skills and learning to give and take are what we do to help propel movement inside organizations. Putting it on the line is however worth it when the conflict involves a legal issue, or, any issues that potentially impact life or environmental safety. It’s time for all of us to build courage into our roles as leaders and to teach and reward courage on our teams.
Art to Help Kick-Off Project Leadership Forum at Harrisburg University
As a long-time, self-described zealot for the importance of project managers developing as leaders, imagine how excited I was to learn about a conference devoted to just this topic! I’ve written at length in this blog (Learning to Lead in the Project Focused World and others) and even offered up my e-book, Leadership and the Project Manager, in support of this concept. I’m even more excited to be a part of the conference as a guest keynote as Project Leadership Forum kicks-off on Thursday in Harrisburg, PA.
Leadership Caffeine™: 7 Ideas to Help Leverage Different Perspectives on Your Team
One of the most common tripping points of both early-career and experienced leaders is assuming that people are looking at issues and drawing similar conclusions. Your goal as a leader must be to help create a common picture and to facilitate the development of creative solutions. This starts with recognizing that differences in perspective are the building blocks for creative solutions.
Want Growth? You Might Try Slowing Down to Speed Up
Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson offer some compelling thoughts on strategy in their article, “Need Speed? Slow Down,” in the May, 2010 Harvard Business Review. They describe the concept of strategic speed as one of reducing the time it takes to create value. While “reducing time” might sound like speeding up, their research results suggest the opposite.
Leadership Caffeine™: 3 Ideas for Sharpening Your Skills
Fresh from a weekend of rediscovering the lawn and gardening muscles that clearly took the winter off, I found myself happy that I was able to quickly access freshly sharpened, well-oiled tools. As any good tradesman or craftsman (or weekend gardener) will tell you, there is no substitute for the right tool, properly maintained, when you need it. The same goes for leaders.
Your Search for Leadership Wisdom Starts and Ends at the Carnival!
One of the best leadership public services you will find is Dan McCarthy’s hard work to produce the monthly Leadership Development Carnivals.
Dan scours the world far and wide for compelling content designed to inspire, energize and challenge you to step up your leadership game.