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™— Success Demands Unity of Purpose
In too many of our organizations and on our teams, people are engaged at the transaction level. They work, meet, and deliver because it’s expected. They stop short of committing because something is missing from the environment. There’s a lack of unity of purpose. In...
Leadership Caffeine™— Success Demands Unity of Purpose
What we want as leaders is deep immersion from our team members. Yet, our systems, numbers, and approaches mainly generate transactional involvement. They lack unity of purpose.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week: Lead with Passion!
The passion that a leader brings to his or her work is the secret sauce in a winning recipe for creating an effective working environment and developing a high performance team.
Good leaders understand their role, work hard on developing credibility, listen and ask questions and provide coaching and mentoring. Great leaders do all of that and they infuse everyone around them with a sense of excitement for the adventure.
What Are You Doing to Reinvent Your Professional Self?
A fact of life in our world is that you will inevitably face the prospect of having to reinvent your professional self. For many this is a daunting task that gets put off along with getting in shape, painting the house and writing a book. The dream is nice, but the lack of action keeps it firmly out there somewhere in a hoped-for future.
A Rant on Social Networking Etiquette or, When did Rude Become Acceptable OnLine?
Call me old-fashioned, but just because so many of us are interacting from behind a screen doesn’t mean that the rules of etiquette and common courtesy have been suspended. In case you didn’t get the meme on the importance of professional courtesy in an on-line world, this is it.
I am increasingly fascinated and horrified by the way people conduct themselves through sites like Linkedin and for networking introductions provided via e-mail.
Improving Your Odds of Success in Driving Change
There is a fascinating article on Change Management in a recent issue (Issue 2/2009) of the McKinsey Quarterly (subscription required) by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, entitled: “The Irrational Side of Change Management.”
And while much has been written over the years on this important and vexing topic, the authors offer some insights and ideas that they describe as counter-intuitive, but potentially helpful in improving your odds of success with these initiatives. This article alone was for me worth the hefty annual subscription price.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week: Are You Mentor Potential?
This week’s topic focuses on the plight of the first time leader and a call to action for experienced leaders everywhere to step up and do a better job mentoring and coaching.
Nine Power Techniques for Building Your Leadership Credibility
Whether you are a first-time leader, an experienced manager taking over a new team or an informal leader such as a project or product manager, you will be as successful as you are credible. Your credibility is your professional bedrock. Build on it carefully and constantly.
The Potentially Profound Implications of Kindle
Amazon’s remarkable second version of their Kindle book reader has some profound implications for all of us. Here’s a “glowing” review and some speculative thoughts on what this device might just mean for a number of industries.
Know Your Mission-More Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle
For this second installment of the business rules that my friend Paul Byrne and I derived from watching the movie the Memphis Belle (see my first installment: Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle-Rule #1), I am departing from the order in which we originally wrote the rules.
Instead, because it is a concept so fundamental to our success in anything we do, I am jumping to Rules 11, 16 and 19, all of which underscore the importance of being totally “mission aware”. Without a sense of our mission, the rest of the rules are meaningless.
Leadership Caffeine™ for the New Week-Expect the Extraordinary
This week’s boost of leadership energy comes straight from one of my early career mentors. This truly exceptional individual practiced leadership according to 5 simple handwritten rules that he kept posted on the wall in his office for everyone to see.
These rules pointed to his True North as a leader, and were the first words that he would read every morning, right after securing his first of many cups of coffee for the day. They read…