The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Career Webinar Replay and F.A.Q.s for the Career Reinvent Boot Camp
We received a great response to our recent webinar, Why a Career Pivot is Possible & Tips to Jump-Start Yours (you can view the replay here), along with some questions about our Career Reinvent Boot Camp (learn more). In this note, I’m sharing answers to the most...
Career Webinar Replay and F.A.Q.s for the Career Reinvent Boot Camp
We received a great response to our recent webinar, Why a Career Pivot is Possible & Tips to Jump-Start Yours (you can view the replay here), along with some questions about our Career Reinvent Boot Camp (learn more). In this note, I’m sharing answers to the most frequently asked questions.
A Blogging Milestone and What I Learned by Writing 100 Blog Posts
It was a tough week for blogging. A perfect storm of business and personal schedule challenges conspired to keep me from spending quality time on the blog. OK, and the fact that I have been holding steady at 99 posts for a few days, and somehow it seemed like I needed to create something truly remarkable for the milestone, 100th post. I’m over the “need for remarkable” part, but thought I would take a few minutes this Saturday morning to reflect back on what I’ve learned in this half year of blogging about all things management, leadership, strategy and project and product management.
Seven Suggestions to Consider When Creating A New Market
If you’ve ever worked in an organization or on a team that got caught up in the quest to create a new market you know that the experience is all consuming and exhilarating. I offer a number of leadership and management suggestions that might prove helpful on your own journey of market creation.
Bad Bosses, A Walk with Dante and Your Leadership Legacy
Ask a room full of mid-level managers to talk about great leaders that have supported them and you get a few nice stories. Ask them for examples of bad leaders and bad leadership practices and you may have to run for high-ground as the trickle of mildly repressed memories turns into a torrent of frightening anecdotes described by individuals with a far-away look in their eyes and a tone tinged with revenge in their voices.
In Search of the High Performance Project Team
If the informal survey results above are even remotely close to reality, many/most people have not had the experience to participate on a high performance project team. While successfully managing projects is a tough task, I do not believe that we are dealing with a degree of impossibility. If project success is critical to your organization’s advancement, everyone from the CEO on down has a vested interest in ensuring that greater than 10% of the project teams take on the characteristics of a high-performance environment.
How Healthy is Your Leadership Culture? Rate It Yourself and See or, “Rate it and Weep”
Chances are if you are like most of the business professionals that take the 10 question Leadership Culture Index below, your organization can use some improvement. A lot of improvement.
Leadership and the Winning Environment
From selecting and supporting the right people to caring enough to provide the tools, mentoring and constructive feedback, this leader, whether CEO, Shift Supervisor or High School Tennis Coach, is truly responsible for creating an environment that breeds success. Success as we know, tends to breed more success. It’s a wonderful, vicious cycle.
Your Next Boss Might Just Be a 20-something Level 5 Guild Leader
While to most it might seem implausible or even laughable that the leaders of tomorrow are applying skills developed from years of what we viewed as “wasting time” by playing on-line games, it merits some consideration. Certainly most organizations completely drop the ball on effectively identifying and developing leadership talent, and my own experience and research indicates that where most (new) leaders struggle is in the area of soft skills and feedback. You don’t learn how to lead from a book or sitting in a classroom at graduate school, so who’s to say that the on-line gaming environment is not an outstanding and risk-free way to develop leadership acumen.
Values-Based Leadership: More of What I Learned at Matsushita
I reflected on the Basic Business Principles as the values are known at Matsushita, when I co-authored the Values for a future employer, and I reflect and draw upon them regularly as I teach sections on Values-Focused Leadership in workshops and classrooms. A typical session will end with a majority of participants highlighting how they never understood until now how powerful the corporate values could be in strengthening their culture, driving performance and guiding behavior. This is a valuable lesson to learn for all of us.
Three Simple, Low Cost Ideas to Help Jump-Start Leadership Development
Jump-starting a leadership development activity does not require a tremendous investment in program development, outside consultants or big company meetings. Sometimes the best results come from simple approaches, and anything that gets people talking about the right issues can serve as a starting-point. The key point is for you to do something. Any or all of these three simple ideas can get you started.