The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™—How Managers Can Turbocharge One-on-Ones to Promote Growth
One-on-Ones are the Most Valuable Real Estate on Your Calendar I'm consistently surprised by how few managers and executives have a game plan for their one-on-one sessions with team members. Just ask those team members, as too many describe these sessions with the...
Leadership Caffeine™—How Managers Can Turbocharge One-on-Ones to Promote Growth
I’m consistently surprised by how few managers and executives have a game plan for their one-on-one sessions with team members. Just ask those team members, as too many describe these sessions with the boss as infrequent or inconsistent, ineffective, and in some cases, intolerable. Here are 7 ideas to help you increase the effectiveness of your one-on-one sessions for all parties:
Leadership Caffeine™ for the Week of March 16, 2009
Your weekly dose of Leadership Caffeine offers reminders and tips for improving communications, engaging your team members and helping knock down obstacles. Oh, and take a second sip of the iced coffee and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might leverage your firm’s values as powerful leadership tools.
Mind Your Knowledge Gap: Why Social Media is Essential to Your Career
This is a wake-up call to my mid to late 30 to 40 something (and older) contemporaries. It’s time to figure out what all the noise is about social media and how to leverage it for yourself, your career and your organization.
What’s Your High Performance Team Experience?
I love to talk with people that have led or been part of a high performance team (HPT). Their enthusiasm is palpable. These individuals have been to the promised land of corporate collaboration and achievement for a brief period in time and they are interested in going back.
Unfortunately, my own formal and informal research indicates that only 30% of professionals surveyed would agree that they have been part of a high performance team. If you’ve been a part of this 30%, the other 70% of your peers would love to hear your story!
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.