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
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.
Examples in Effective Top Leadership-The Ambassador
In contrast to last week’s Effective Top Leadership feature where I focused on an example inside a multi-national firm, this one is squarely in the small business category, topping out at about $20 million in annual revenues. While it was not a large firm, this organization and its founder left an indelible impression on customers, employees, suppliers and the southeastern U.S. communities that the firm served.
The Dreaded Ice-Breaker-In Search of Something Better than Name, Rank and Serial Number
As a first-day seminar or workshop participant, don’t you just hate the opening few minutes where you’re thrown together with a group of strangers for the first time? You know it’s coming…everyone knows it’s coming, you just don’t know what form it’s going to show up as for this session. I’m talking about the ubiquitous and often dreaded Ice-Breaker.
This is the part where the instructor has spent hundreds of seconds rifling through books that have titles that sound like, “Session-Opening Games that Will Make Your Audience Cringe and Ensure that theirs Standards are Low Enough for Your Lame Content.” (OK, that was a bit harsh. Sorry to the authors of bad Ice-Breakers and purveyors of lame content!)
Well, I’ve finally found one that I like and that works…
Leading in the Trenches-So You’ve Always Wanted to Teach a Class!
As regular readers know, I’m kind of an education junkie, both as a receiver and as a giver. I spend my days developing and delivering leadership and marketing training programs and coaching individuals and groups, and I spend as many evenings as possible in front of a class somewhere, working hard to learn what it means to become an effective educator. I have not found the magic formula yet, but as I embark this evening on teaching an 8-week course on Global Business to a group of motivated professionals, it helps to review my basic approach to developing a great class. Additional advice welcomed and encouraged!
Leadership Caffeine™: Surviving as a Leader When Things Go Horribly Wrong
When faced with unexpected challenges, a good friend of mine intones what I believe is a fitting old Yiddish quote, “Man Plans and God Laughs.” Our modern incarnation of that is a less reverent but eminently understandable, “Stuff Happens.” My word choice here is the less frequently referenced “S-word” from this common phrase.
Learning to cope with the unexpected deviation from your most carefully laid plans is an important part of growing up as a leader. Here are 7 suggestions for developing your crisis leadership skills.
New Saturday Feature-Examples in Effective Top Leadership
One of the thoughts that jumped to mind as I followed the discussion on top leader quality was the fact that I’ve truly enjoyed the opportunity to learn from some remarkable executives during my corporate career. While the lousy leaders make great blog copy, the great leaders are the ones that shape our own perspectives and practices. As part of my small token of gratitude to these fantastic individuals, I’ll spend what I hope is a long string of Saturdays sharing the lessons learned one leader at a time.
A Friday Case Study: Welcome to Rick’s World-Where the Rules Exist for Just One Reason
Note from Art: this is my first stab at what I intend to be an on-going leadership case study serial chronicling the lives and times of some rather interesting characters. Any resemblance to individuals living, dead or otherwise (?) is most likely not accidental. Welcome to Rick’s world, where the sole mission of every manager in this production facility (one of many around the country for Mega Inc.), is to minimize the crap storms from corporate and keep the colorful and all-powerful Rick safe for yet another year.
Leading in the Trenches-What Do You Do? And No One Buys Gobbeldy Gook
OK, this might seem like an odd one, but ask most people what they do and what do you get? “I’m an accountant,” or, “I work in marketing/customer service/support” etc. Attend a business-networking event and listen to the introductions. “We’re a leader in…” or, “We make…” or, “We’re a software company… .” Boring. Hard to stimulate interest with an answer that makes someone want to reach for the bacon-wrapped water chestnut and shout, “Next!”
Leadership Caffeine™-Be the Example
I recently found myself as a guest speaker in a good-natured discussion with my audience about the challenges that mid-level managers face in trying to facilitate positive culture change while working in a toxic or at least a less than ideal work environment. I opt for the affirmative in this debate, and often find myself arguing the minority opinion. I absolutely have strong convictions about the ability of one individual or a small group of individuals to catalyze positive environmental change in the most challenging of environments.
Two-Dimensional Leader Disease
Just when you think you can’t take on one more concern, you’ve heard about two new illnesses from the Center for Leadership Disease Control here at Management Excellence. A few weeks ago, you were shocked to learn of the longstanding but freshly named malady, Tired Leader Syndrome. Adding fuel to the fire was the recent announcement here at the Center for Leadership Disease and Control at Management Excellence, that researchers have finally isolated the causes of a long-standing leadership wasting disease. This heretofore unnamed but common set of symptoms is now called Two-Dimensional Leadership Disease or TDLD for short.