The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Free Mini-Course/Webinar: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career
If a career pivot is on your mind and you want some hard-earned guidance for jump-starting the process, join me on 7/21 at noon central for: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career! I'll share guidance gained from years of coaching career reinventors...
Free Mini-Course/Webinar: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career
If a career pivot is on your mind and you want some hard-earned guidance for jump-starting the process, join me on 7/21 at noon central for: How to Get Unstuck & Take Control of Your Career!
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week: Leadership Lessons from Twitter
It takes a certain amount of curiosity and yes, even courage for forty-something corporate types to even admit that there might just be something to a social networking tool like Twitter. Many of my contemporaries scoff and mock the tool and anyone participating.
As leaders, we often lose our intellectual curiosity and courage as we move through our careers. We’ve seen it all before and we’re well aware in our own minds that when you take risks and do something a bit edgy, most of the time, bad things happen. We’ve seen fads come and go, and to many of us, this is just one more fad.
To those involved, it is part of the fundamental rewriting of the rules…
A Fresh Voice and Leadership and the Art of Apology
There’s an excellent post entitled, “Sorry is not the final word, just the beginning,” by guest author and Product/Project Management Consultant, Lisa Winter at one of my favorite blogs: The Art of Project Management. hosted by the UCSC-Extension in Silicon Valley.
Ms. Winter describes a situation where she inadvertently upset a valuable but delicate team member on a conference call, and then went to significant lengths to apologize and regain his support. In addition to the happy ending, this fine post prompted some thoughts on a topic that I confess I’ve not spent a lot of time thinking about: the role of the apology as a leadership tool.
I can’t help but feel a little guilty that I’ve not raised this topic in the past, and for that, I apologize…(OK, I had to work it in somewhere!).
Executive Behaviors, Your Boss Has No Clothes and Revolution from the Bottom
Gary Hamel offers a post well worth reading on “Why Success Often Sows the Seeds of Failure,” in his Management 2.0 blog at the Wall Street Journal. He takes some tough and well-earned shots at the narrow-minded thinking of executives that foments the eventual demise of formerly good organizations.
In my opinion, the habits and traps that bedevil formerly successful companies also exist in those less-than successful organizations. Regardless of starting point, the tendencies and habits of ineffective executive leadership are not hard to see. In theory, they shouldn’t be hard to call out and change. However, we don’t. Why not?
Leadership Caffeine™ for the Week: Coffee, Your Health and 8 Suggestions to Improve Your Team’s Problem Solving Skills
The best learning opportunities in the workplace occur when individuals or teams come face to face with a vexing problem. These situations provide outstanding growth opportunities and a great chance to generate and implement innovative and creative solutions. Of course, the manager has to play by the rules.
Unfortunately, there are still a few managers and leaders out there that insist on spoiling these ripe learning opportunities by requiring you to follow a specific approach or steps in solving a problem.
A Follow-Up to My “Evil Leaders” post: Your Firm’s Values Have No Teeth
My recent post, “Why Do Evil Leaders Flourish in Some Organizations” struck a chord or at least a nerve for many, as the many insightful comments quickly outstripped the value of the original post. Thanks to all that jumped in and shared on this topic.
On the heels of what turned out to be a deluge of good thoughts on why some leaders and some people get away with less than agreeable (to the rest of us) behaviors in the workplace, I keep coming back to the topic of Values as a core issue.
The results of my informal polling as well as my formal surveying (as part of culture assessments) indicates that for many organizations, values exist as nice statements in a frame with little meaning or use in day-to-day business dealings.
Why Do Evil Leaders Flourish Inside Some Organizations?
It’s always been a mystery to me why so many arguably evil managers and leaders not only last but seem to thrive inside certain organizations.
You know the type. Hey, maybe you are one. If so, chime in. I’ve never actually heard from an evil leader that was willing to talk openly about why he is the way he is.
Evil leaders tend to fit one or more of these profiles…
Fresh Voices in Management Excellence: Greg Strouse and His Stories, Advice and Opinions on Working, Managing and Surviving the Corporate World
Searching through the sea of business and leadership blogs has become a bit like a treasure hunt. I enjoy searching for great voices that have not yet jumped out of the search engines and on to everyone’s screen. ne of those that deserves to be front and center is Greg Strouse’s Tales from an XOD, Stories, Advice and Opinions on Working, Managing and Surviving the Corporate World.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week: The Words You Heard At Graduation Still Apply
Followers of this blog know that we celebrated a milestone in our home this past week as our youngest son graduated from high school. It’s an exciting and frightening experience for the child as he reaches the end of a long road with good friends and looks forward to a new and uncharted path through college.
What he doesn’t perhaps know is that is only the first of many likely experiences of becoming part of something and then moving on and leaving good colleagues behind.
21 Do’s and Don’ts to Optimize the Annual Strategy Offsite
As predictable as the change of seasons and the swooning of the Cubs in the Chicago-area, I’m starting to hear whisperings about plans for upcoming strategic planning offsites.
And while I spend a lot of time preaching to anyone that will listen that STRATEGY IS A PROCESS NOT AN EVENT, I’ve come to grips with the fact that many organizations and leaders relegate their strategic thinking time to these annual events.
If your organization treats strategic planning this way, I’ll offer a few of my hard-learned lessons in the form of 21 Do’s and Don’ts on how to optimize results and possibly even catalyze a more robust process that sustains beyond the once-a-year event.