The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Ignore these Five Facts of Organizational Life at Your Peril
The "I" topic for influence comes up regularly in my emerging leader coaching calls. Individuals frustrated with their assignments or feeling as if they're being bypassed for the best opportunities mostly share one common thread: they are under-invested in striving to...
Ignore these Five Facts of Organizational Life at Your Peril
The “I” topic for influence comes up regularly in my emerging leader coaching calls. Individuals frustrated with their assignments or feeling as if they’re being bypassed for the best opportunities mostly share one common thread: they are under-invested in striving to grow their workplace influence. Here are five unavoidable facts of life that suggest influence development must be part of your work.
Inspiration and Hope: Encouraging Sound Bites in a Challenging World
There’s enough negative going around. Here’s a few worth reading that will leave you thinking and maybe even feeling a bit more upbeat. Students of strategy and performance excellence might want to take a closer look at how McDonald’s is using leadership, strategy, customer relations and information to successfully beat back the economic doldrums. And for an extended dose of hope and encouragement, check out the March issue of Fast Company, where the focus is on the world’s most innovative companies.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the Week of March 8, 2009
Welcome back for this week’s double-shot of leadership motivation. I’m taking my leadership cues this week from Michael Beers, a Harvard Professor with a forthcoming book: High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage.
While I’m not certain that a Harvard Professor is the first one that I seek out to help me lead my way out of a crisis, I like what he has to say. Mr. Beer’s focus is on building high performance teams and organizations on the back of what he describes as high commitment leaders.
Management Excellence Blog Named to Alltop!
OK, pardon my excitement, but I was thrilled to learn the other day that my blog, Management Excellence, was named to Alltop in the Leadership category! In case you are not familiar with Alltop, it is is a collection of “the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic.” I am honored to be among the “best” in the leadership category on this great site!
Smile, Your Mirror Neurons are Firing Everyone Up & A Homework Assignment
Intuitively, it makes sense that leaders that are more engaged and engaging tend to elicit better responses and better results from their teams. Perhaps nice people can finish first.
Now, the father of the concept of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman (What Makes A Leader), along with Richard Boyatiz are pushing the envelope by integrating new research in social neuroscience with their studies of effective leaders. Their recent Harvard Business Review article, Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership, is fascinating reading for anyone intrigued by the role that our biological makeup plays in our leadership abilities.
The Recurring Labors of a Leader or, “It’s Deja Vu All Over Again”
It seems that Yogi Berra was right (that’s the former Yankee player and manager, not the Jellystone Park character on the lookout for a quick meal).
One of the reasons that so much business writing and advice sounds familiar is that we conveniently keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, allowing new generations of pundits to dispense similar advice in new packaging.
In a short piece entitled Learning from Heroes found in the March, 2009 Harvard Business Review, Jack Covert and Todd Satterson suggest that this recurring pattern in business actually mirrors the hero’s journey found in mythology.
Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People-It’s Time to Learn to Say No!
One of the themes that I hear consistently in workshops and in discussions with the professionals in my MBA classes is frustration over the propensity of a firm’s leaders to never say “No” to a project. Lacking a viable mechanism to compare, evaluate and select and reject projects, decisions are made based on politics, gut feel and the squeaky customer wheel.
The net result of this lack of discipline is that the people doing the work end up overloaded and overwhelmed. They operate in compliance mode, focusing on surviving until the next deadline and adding little creative value or innovation to their activities.
You can end this chaos and rebuild your team’s morale and effectiveness by building in new systems and proper rigor to project evaluation and selection.
Celebrating a Leadership Milestone at the Three Star Leadership Blog
Today is an opportunity to celebrate post number 1,000 by Wally Bock at the Three Star Leadership blog. Many of you are readers and subscribers of Three Star Leadership, but on the off chance that you have not benefited from Wally’s consistently outstanding and practical content for this profession, his blog is a must on your professional development to-do list.
Click through to the Three Star Leadership blog to share in the celebration and gain some tips and resource suggestions for this most difficult of professions. I’m honored to have been invited to contribute to this great milestone in leadership content! Looking forward to the next 1,000, Wally!
Leadership Lessons from the Road
One of the great things about leading workshops with talented professionals is how much I learn about the very real challenges that people face in trying to get work done inside their organizations. After spending a day together working with a group technical professionals at The Data Warehouse Institute’s World Conference, I gained some insights into the challenges and barriers that are slowing down progress and inhibiting performance improvements inside organizations.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the Last Week of February 2009
Last week we focused on team performance and the week prior on relationships. This week’s Leadership Caffeine offers some personal development suggestions for anyone interested in growing their influence by improving their skills in dealing with executive audiences.