The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Winning the Inner Game of Leading With Positive Self-Talk
Note from Art: a version of this article appeared originally at SmartBrief on Leadership. -- I've written several times about the idea of the inner game of leading. It's where success in this challenging role is won or lost. From an article a few years ago, I wrote:...
Winning the Inner Game of Leading With Positive Self-Talk
Fear, self-doubt, and the tendency to catastrophize situations are your adversaries as a leader. The essence of life is overcoming challenges. Instead of allowing your negative emotions to rule you, engage in a little self-trickery and reset and reframe the negatives to positives.
Ghosts of the Economy-Quiet Casualties of this Silent War
You’re to be forgiven if you’ve walked into a coffee shop, library or anyplace else where those “between jobs” congregate, and felt a chill run down your spine. It’s one of those feelings that we get when we sense that something is wrong but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Like the characters in Henry Miller’s The Turn of the Screw, it’s the flicker in the corner of our eye and the haunting sense that we just saw a ghost.
Leadership Caffeine™: Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me When I First Became a Leader
Note from Art: this one’s with a little help from my friends. I’ve been working a great deal with first-time leaders recently (my favorite groups!) and I posted a tweet to the extremely talented group of great people that I follow on Twitter asking what they wish someone would have told them when they started out in their leadership careers. Here are a few of their insightful thoughts with attribution, commingled with thoughts of my own.
Art Rants: The Insane and Confusing Battle for the Pipe Into Your Home
All across America, legions of streetwalkers (not that kind!) have been dispatched to your home to help you deal with the serious issue of your television service. Or is that your Internet service? Or your phones? Or your wireless phones? Or your toaster?
You’ll soon realize that you’ve become involved in some form of new, maniacal game brought to you by people that have created rules that don’ benefit anyone but them. It’s your job to figure out the catches and traps and gotcha’s! I’m not certain that you as the consumer can win this game, but you can definitely lose. The issue is, how much?
Want Different Results? Change Your Definition of Success and Don’t Forget to Align the Measurements
The old adage of “you get what you measure” is an old adage for a reason. It’s generally true.
He Looked at the Stack of Reports and said, “Excuses!” The Art of Communicating with Senior Executives
Getting called in front of the board or the senior executives of the firm can be an intimidating experience for many younger and even some experienced professionals. No amount of paper or pixels on screen will compensate or adequately explain root cause problems or satisfy someone that and your ideas to fix what’s wrong will work. The best salesmanship is to avoid attempting to cover-up blemishes and to shoot straight on issues and next steps.
Leadership Caffeine™: Dealing with Cracks in the Leader’s Smile
I chatted with a valued colleague the other day that indicated that she is finding it increasingly difficult and even awkward in the face of financial pressures and employee strain to keep a cheerleader’s positive demeanor in the workplace.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard from a leader struggling either to smile or simply maintain a positive outlook in the face of occasionally overwhelming obstacles.
Jump-Start Strategy By Jumping Straight to the Middle of the Process
Get your team talking about the right topics and get them focused on assessing and comparing based on the criteria that are the most important to your success. Skip the summer strategy offsite and start the dialogue on determining what’s truly important, and you’ll find yourself and your organization moving and working the right things faster than you might imagine.
In Negotiating is it Win-Win or Win?
There are at least two major perspectives on negotiation that I’ve encountered. One says quite clearly that in a negotiation you are duty-bound to secure the absolute best possible outcome for your firm. The implication of this approach is of course that a negotiation is a boxing match, with the bigger, stronger athlete not just winning, but also destroying the opponent.
The other emphasizes understanding the interests of the all parties and crafting something that meets those interests in an equitable manner.
Want to Improve Sales? Leave Your Reps Alone!
A neighbor was out walking the dog a few nights ago and stopped to chat, which offered a welcome break from trimming the hedges. Friendly conversation turned to business and he offered his own encouraging news about his recent sales results. It turns out that he had just completed his best month ever in an industry and an economy where those words are seldom heard.
When I asked what he attributed his “best month” to, he thought for a moment and said, “Quite honestly, I think it’s because corporate finally left us alone.