The Leadership Caffeine Blog
For Strategy Work, It Pays to Learn and Use the Right Tools
Strategy Work is Mostly Messy in Our Organizations Imagine you have the opportunity to serve as the proverbial fly-on-the-wall for various organizations across different sectors to observe the process of strategy creation. When asked to share what you observed, I'm...
For Strategy Work, It Pays to Learn and Use the Right Tools
While we live and work in interesting times where traditional elongated planning processes no longer fit, leaders still have the responsibility to define a coherent strategy. Choosing the right tools for strategy work in today’s environment is critical for a successful process.
Links to Entertain, Inform and Inspire-And Time for Shopping
If holiday shopping and end of year activities have you a bit beaten down, here are a few reads to inspire and energize and at least one shameless plug for my forthcoming e-newsletter.
New Leader? Six Suggestions for Closing Your Context Gap
New leaders…either those that are first-time leaders or those that find themselves responsible for leading a new team, deal with extremely high degrees of ambiguity at start-up. They lack context for the people, the team culture, the issues, group and individual dynamics and so many important variables in the environment, that they find themselves acting on instinct or avoiding acting because of this knowledge gap. One of the critical challenges for the new leader is quickly closing this context gap.
Leadership Caffeine™: Dare to Be Different-If You Dare
It’s good to be a good leader, so don’t misconstrue the message in this post. The world needs more individuals that care enough to consistently execute the blocking and tackling required to pass for effective leadership. My issue here is that good isn’t good enough, when the potential to be great at this activity that we call leading is within reach. Often, the distance of the reach to “great” is slightly beyond the cultural norms and leadership habits of the firm.
Join the Management Excellence Newsletter List And You Might Win A Book!
Note from Art: this is shameless promotion and good clean fun. I’m working hard on extending the variety of vehicles that I publish original leadership and management content in, and the Management Excellence e-newsletter is soon to launch. I would love to have you as a subscriber and this is a fun way of stimulating some subscriptions.
First some background, and then the promotion description. I’ve long threatened to start an e-Newsletter, but have been short on execution. A good friend of mine recently referenced it as my “Unicorn” project…something frequently talked about but never seen.
A Friday Time Out to Say Thank You
I’m way overdue to provide some thanks to a number of great people and organizations that I’ve worked with or that have supported me over this past year, and the deep freeze here in Chicago is no excuse for delaying this post any longer. Nor is the fact that I’m horribly behind on holiday shopping (the economy is waiting!), not to mention that my wife and brother both have birthdays within 6 days of Christmas. (Parents, in the future, better planning please!)
I turned up the heat a bit, refilled my coffee cup and pried myself away from this week’s all consuming collaboration on my next Building Better Leaders program (mentoring plus distance education) entitled Leadership and the Technical Professional, and here are just a few of Thank You’s that I would like to extend.
How Not to Build a Better Leader!
I had a great conversation the other day with a talented twenty-something who just exudes confidence, competence and excitement about her career and her interest in professional development. Her reviews are top flight, she has been managing a major client account to great results, and she is actively pursuing her M.B.A. degree. This is one motivated young professional! It’s too bad that her biggest dilemma is, “My job is fine, but I’m starting to get bored. I want some bigger challenges and I want to lead, and they keep telling me that they are working on a program for that.”
Leadership Caffeine™: A Mostly Thoughtful Guide to Surviving Bad Leadership Days
Even the most dedicated and experienced of leaders will admit that there are more than a few days when they wonder whether it might not be a lot less stressful to hang up their leadership cleats in favor of an individual contributor role. Like marriage, not every day as a leader is filled with wine and roses. There are many days when you will drive home from work wondering whether you truly accomplished anything, and others when you will feel like you just took a few steps in the wrong direction.
December Leadership Development Carnival
There are few things that I let get in the way of a Monday Morning Leadership Caffeine post, but today’s Leadership Development Carnival, guest hosted by Mark Stelzner, author of the Inflexion Point blog and Principal at Inflexion Advisors, is one of them. Instead of your usual cup of motivation, you get the entire carafe today with many familiar and some new voices chiming in on all manner of fascinating leadership and business topics.
Learning to Project Confidence to Grow Your Career
Confidence is contagious. Arrogance will clear a room like rotting fish wrapped in newspaper and left to cure sans refrigeration. And lack of confidence is guaranteed to get you stepped on during most days. The perception by managers and executives of where you fall on the continuum of not self assure at all on one end to arrogant on the other is important. You of course, want to fall right in the sweet spot of appropriately confident. Here are 8 suggestions to help you develop and showcase your self-confidence.