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
How To Get More Done at Work Through Positive Persuasion
Success at Work Happens One Negotiation at a Time Here's a bold claim: every conversation in the workplace that's not about the weather or sports is a negotiation. From simple process changes to the significant issues of strategy and structure, the dialog that...
How To Get More Done at Work Through Positive Persuasion
If you’re motivated to maximize your impact in the workplace, you’re dependent upon others to support your efforts. When it comes to workplace negotiations, the principles of positive persuasion are priceless!
How do Ideas Turn Into Actions in Your Firm? Hint: Check Your Leadership Culture
As a leader, you should be critically concerned about where ideas come from and how they go from insights to actions. This process of value creation is fundamental to a firm’s growth and at its core it is a very organic process.
Stress at Work, Great Leadership Practices and Ignoring Bad Advice
Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other. Today over at Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground. Wally’s guidance for the leader’s role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.
Improve Managerial Effectiveness by Broadening Span of Control?
Tomorrow’s effective leaders are better served focusing on bringing the right resources to bear at a point in time than they are being constrained by a consultant derived goal to reduce managers and costs by increasing span of control. It’s time to reengineer the old school thinking that leads to dangerous advice about leadership.
Want to Change? Manage Strategy in Bursts!
Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution. For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases.
The Meeting is Never for Decision-Making: A Product Management Lesson I Learned at Matsushita
While the technique or reaching agreement with your stakeholders one by one ahead of formal approval might seem a bit like playing politics, I prefer to view it as covering the bases. Leaders invest in people they trust and have a sense for, and the ceremony of a group meeting is the wrong place to try and build your trust and credibility.
Improving The Executive and Project Manager Relationship
As professional project management practices (and project managers) grow in importance to a firm’s success (see my post: Struggling With Strategy? Think Project Management), it is critical that top leaders learn how to support the process rather than beat it into submission. And because as the saying goes, “it takes two to tango,” Project Managers need to learn how to “manage” their executives to minimize unproductive involvement or outright interference.
Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management!
Strategy is a healthy mix of art and science. Unfortunately, too many organizations approach strategy as if were alchemy. Adding formal project management practices to the strategy program increases the “science” component and improves a firm’s chances of success for a successful initiative as well as for sustaining of an on-going, healthy program.
Grace Under Pressure: A Great Leadership Opportunity
As a leader, you are on display every day and in every exchange and how you conduct yourself is observed very closely by all around you. Lose your cool, snap at a subordinate, act like the spoiled tennis player above, and you not only fail to build your professional credibility, you damage it. Alternatively, if you recognize that the moment in time when things are heading the wrong way is a remarkable opportunity to build credibility and create powerful learning opportunities for your team members, you will conduct yourself with grace under fire.
Sales and Marketing Managers: Use the Lead Refinery Approach to Improve Results
I talk with a lot of marketing and sales managers and have spent most of my life working in these environments. In spite of the dramatic advancements in software tools available, I still find gaping holes in the way many sales and marketing organizations manage and account for the flow of leads into the sales pipeline. Although there are undoubtedly some technology constraints, I suspect that the primary issue is one of process more than anything else. Employed properly, changes in the output of the lead refinery foreshadow expansion or contraction of volume in the sales pipeline. Here are some thought-starters: