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™—Commit to Helping Your New Managers Succeed from the Start
New manager development is a problem to be solved by the promoting manager. Training without ongoing observation, teaching, and coaching isn't the solution. And, the Sink-or-Swim approach for new manager development is definitely not the solution, yet it's still...
Leadership Caffeine™—Commit to Helping Your New Managers Succeed from the Start
If you are a manager responsible for promoting and developing a new manager, the hard work begins during selection and continues long after in the form of observing, teaching, and coaching. There are no shortcuts to building the next generation of effective managers.
Leadership Caffeine™: Strengthen Your Leadership Foundation
The best leaders in my opinion are guided by a strong sense of duty and responsibility. The individuals that succeed in motivating, inspiring and even changing the lives and careers of others operate with an underlying philosophical foundation that they draw upon to remain focused and steadfast in pursuing their daily activities.
Everyone else sort of wanders through the leadership woods, reacting more on instinct than acting as if they are being guided by a stronger sense of purpose and duty.
Collaboration and the Leader
Many leaders are lousy collaborators.
It doesn’t seem to matter that they spend a great deal of time encouraging, coaching and facilitating collaboration between their team members and across functional boundaries. When it comes time for Leader A to work with Leader B on something other than getting other people to do things, the dynamics get interesting and the output is often disappointing.
The Seven Critical Conversations of Great Firms and Great Leaders
You learn a great deal about an organization’s current state, near-term prospects and about the health and effectiveness of a firm’s leaders by looking for and listening to the quality of the conversations in the working environment.
There are at least Seven Critical Conversations that I observe taking place over and over again in organizations that that are either successful or improving. These same conversations are often nowhere to be found except perhaps behind the closed doors of a firm’s leaders in less successful firms or organizations that are struggling and sinking.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week: Power-Washed! Guest Post
One of the challenge that many leaders face in their seemingly endless string of days of teaching, leading, motivating, supporting, challenging and guiding their colleagues is how to refresh and recharge. It’s an important topic and one that is under-represented (in my opinion) in the leadership literature, including my own.
It’s difficult to be “on” all of the time, and for leaders, the stress fractures show through usually in the form of snapping or growling at someone. While never good form, the momentary break from behavior is indicative of the need to take a few deep breaths or to even look towards tomorrow as a chance to start over and get things right.
Sometimes what’s needed is a good Power-Washing for the leader’s attitude and soul.
Fresh Voices: Two Posts that Can Improve Your Day and Your Life
Still reeling from my losing battle with the apologetic sales rep from Big Telco, I went searching for solace and inspiration from the many great writers that I follow. Two posts from two professionals in very different fields stood out as particularly thought provoking and inspiring.
Big Telco and the Art of the Apology-driven Sales Pitch
Apologies are everywhere these days. I wrote a post on leaders and apologies last week, and this week, Letterman is in the news apologizing to Sarah Palin for a joke that went awry. Yesterday, as I prepared to get even with my evil Telco provider by dropping them like a bad habit, I ran square into an onslaught of apologies followed by a brazen sales pitch. What follows is my own recollection of events during this phone call.
The Struggles and Mental Toughness of a Leader
I’m particularly drawn to the quality of “mental toughness” in great leaders. Where most would have cut and run, the best stare at adversity and seem to draw strength from the enormity of the challenges in front of them. Failures are but mere setbacks and when conventional wisdom and all of the advisors preach capitulation, these leaders see and seize opportunity.
I look for this quality in leaders in the business environment, but often our hiring and screening processes get in the way. We tend to focus on hiring those that package themselves as flawless.
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!).