The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—Who Are You?
You aren’t a leader until people know who you are and why they should follow you. People comply with the title. They follow the person. While many individuals deliberately keep their work personas and their personal personas separate, I checked, and each of us is one...
Leadership Caffeine™—Who Are You?
While many individuals deliberately keep their work personas and their personal personas separate, I checked, and each of us is one person. Yet, the faster you grow comfortable letting them see you as that whole person, the faster they’ll trust you. And yes, trust is the critical foundation for high performance.
March Leadership Development Carnival at Great Leadership
I’m still chuckling over Dan McCarthy’s creativity with his Special Academy Awards Edition of the Leadership Development Carnival! In addition to great content from so many Red Carpet bloggers, Dan has me doing the opening musical and dance number. He clearly forgot to consult with my wife who would have informed him that I have two feet…both left, and my best songs are truly the ones that no one can hear outside of the range of my shower!
Friday Leadership Highs and Lows
Leadership highlights and observations from the past week, including, “Where have all the humble leaders gone?” and one highly paid athlete’s belief that “Chicago” is responsible for his abysmal performance last season.
Beware Contracting “I’m Right, You’re Wrong” Disease?
It’s time to add another malady to the long list of things that bedevil the many lousy leaders walking unencumbered through our workplaces. It’s called, “I’m Right and You’re Wrong” (IRYW) disease, and while it’s not fatal, it’s clearly annoying to people and debilitating to performance.
Leadership Caffeine™-Learning to Lead in the Project-Focused World
The rise of “the project” as an important means of competing and creating value has profound implications for those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, in many cases, the evolution in leadership practices has not kept pace with the needs of project teams or the needs of organizations struggling to develop competence at executing on projects.
This Marine Fights-Life and Leadership Lessons from a Family Hero
I’ve learned much from Bob, but perhaps the most important reminder that he serves up is for us all to touch everyone that we come in contact with in a positive way. And while much of this blog focuses on dealing with the tough issues of leading and managing, even the tough issues offer opportunities for positive touches.
Leadership Caffeine™: Teach, Don’t Tell
I discovered a long time ago that I was much more effective as a leader and as a father (a much harder job to get right!) if I adopted an approach that emphasized teaching over telling. While there are circumstances where telling is appropriate…the battlefield, the operating room, perhaps the football field and a few others that I’m sure that I would think of if given enough time, most people prefer to learn, not to carry out orders.
Personal Responsibility and Success: Quit Shooting Yourself in the Foot!
I’ve been harping on personal responsibility at least once per week recently, and can’t quite get it out of my system. I’m bombarded daily with too many examples of people that fail to take responsibility for their actions and in the process, often stop one step short of success. One of my as yet unresolved points of personal inquiry (and wonder), involves those individuals in businesses and in graduate and undergraduate classes that are seemingly armed with their fair share of intellectual gifts and raw capabilities, but that still manage to metaphorically shoot themselves in one or both feet with alarming regularity.
Embrace Ambiguity and Grow With It
Many people fear ambiguity and/or they don’t trust their own ability to create or solve a problem, so they respond with a question that delegates the thinking to someone else. That’s a bad habit, and if the workplace or college classrooms were refereed events, those “you do my thinking for me so I don’t have to be creative or take a risk” questions would be infractions.
Leadership Caffeine™: It’s Vuja De All Over Again
I’m re-reading Tom Kelley’s outstanding book, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” based on his experience with design firm IDEO, and came across his wonderful use of the phrase Vuja De (the opposite of that feeling we call Déjà vu) in the chapter on acting as an anthropologist to observe people’s true behavior. With apologies to Yogi Berra for borrowing and twisting his classic phrase, “It’s Deja Vu all over again,” a little Vuja De in your daily leadership life might just be the prescription to turbocharge team and individual performance.