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
Leadership Caffeine™—Why You Need to “Write the Rules for Success” with Your Group
Here's a bold claim: there's a simple, powerful exercise you can run with your group that will transform the working environment for the better and provide you with the critical framework for coaching you've been lacking. Drumroll, please! Here it is: You need to work...
Leadership Caffeine™—Why You Need to “Write the Rules for Success” with Your Group
There’s a simple, powerful exercise you can run with your group that will transform the working environment for the better and provide you with the critical framework for coaching you’ve been lacking. You need to Write the Rules for Success with your group.
Team Stuck in the Creativity Deep Freeze? Try “Why Not?” to Start the Thaw
Without exception, the healthiest businesses that I work with are those that offer a workplace environment and atmosphere that encourages a free-flow of ideas ranging from outlandish to “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before.” It is the part of the natural culture of the firm to think in terms of “What if?” and “Why not?” Alternatively, the less than healthy firms that I encounter share many failure attributes, including a complete dearth of creativity and visible creativity-inducing practices and processes. What should you do if you are called upon to help jump-start the creativity culture where the creative processes have gone into deep-freeze?
Leadership Caffeine™-Create Success by Managing Your Response to Failure
No one wants to fail. It’s not something that we typically seek out as part of our personal and organizational character building experience. However, from a distance, we tend to mythologize failure, especially in the context of achieving future success. Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment.
Just a Little Tongue In Cheek-In Search of a New Model for Leader Selection
I cannot claim this as an original idea. I was re-reading Tom Kelly’s outstanding book, The Art of Innovation, based on his experience with design and innovation firm, IDEO, and I was particularly enamored by the part where Kelly describes the process of IDEO’s project teams picking their own leaders. The leaders serve at the discretion of the team. Hmmm. Maybe, just maybe, the rest of us have been going about this all wrong for all of these years.
Avoiding Another Dumb Management Mania-The Disposable Worker
I wrote last week on “Thoughts on Leading and Managing in the Era of the Disposable Worker.” The post was prompted by an article in BusinessWeek, outlining this latest gem of management wisdom that has organizations of all types rethinking the need for employees and shifting to contract workers. Positions from the CEO suite to those types of roles that we’ve become accustomed to outsourcing, and everything in-between, are fair game. I’m traditionally leery of fads of all sorts, as they tend to be driven by hysteria, causing normally sane and rational people to act in a manner that defies explanation. I’m fearful that we are on the brink of another horrendous, value-destroying mania as we embrace the short-term cost convenient fad of creating disposable workers.
Mid-Career Professional-It's Time to Push Out of Your Technology Comfort Zone
It’s easy to step out of sync with the modern world and find yourself lost in a sea of terms, tools and technologies that are foreign and even intimidating. I’m working with more and more mid-life individuals interested in reinventing themselves in new careers, and...
Leadership Caffeine™-Improving Your Leadership Effectiveness on the Fly
It probably comes as no surprise that the primary excuse that many leaders cite for not focusing on important priorities like coaching, feedback and development is, “ lack of time.”
I’ve heard this “excuse” over and over again in workshops and mentoring sessions. And while there’s little argument over the importance of engaging in these and other positive leadership behaviors, many individuals shrug their shoulders, admit guilt, express frustration over their inability to carve out time and cite administrative, transactional and span of control issues as impediments. What’s a harried, over-worked, time-stressed leader to do?
Leading the Driven Individual
A great deal of popular leadership writing (mine included) focuses on the common issues and challenges with “typical employees.” Now before you grab a pitchfork and light the torches and start marching on this blog for my use of the term “typical,” don’t misconstrue my meaning. Yes, I know that no one is “typical” and that we all have strengths and weaknesses and that it is grossly unfair to provide such a crass label to the masses of good quality employees laboring away and earning “strongly exceeds” on our grade-inflated performance evaluations. (I can hear the pitchforks clanking again on that last shot!) Nonetheless, it was the best label I could come up with on short notice and only a few sips into my first cup of coffee, to differentiate from the subject of today’s post: The Driven Individual (DI).
What the Boss Hears When You’re Talking and Why It Might Hinder Your Career
I’m not quite certain if this post is a violation of the “Boss Code,” much like that masked man on television who blatantly betrays the Magician’s Code (and ruins our fun in the process) by showing us how magic tricks work. Nonetheless, here goes. Every time you open your mouth around the boss, she learns something about you that may determine your fate, or at least your fate while you are working for her.
Thoughts on Leading and Managing in the Era of Disposable Workers
Note from Art: this topic has me deep in thought. While the issue is generally a negative one, I do wonder whether it contains the seeds of significant management and leadership revolution. I would love your thoughts here. –In case you missed it, the article, “The Disposable Worker” in the January 7, 2010 issue of BusinessWeek offers a sobering look at the increasing trend for employers “to create just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot.” And guess what folks, this trend is not just for those near the bottom rungs of the ladder, this current fashion extends all the way up into the CEO Suite.