The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders
Avoiding Your Firm's Top Leaders Isn't a Great Strategy A few years ago, I worked with an individual who was afraid to get caught in an elevator with an executive. His fear: "I have no idea what to say to them, and whatever comes out of my mouth makes me sound like an...
Think Differently About Engaging with Your Organization’s Top Leaders
Your assumption that they’re busy doing top-leader things and don’t want to hear from you is partially flawed. Most senior leaders I’ve worked with and around love to hear from individuals at all levels. Here are five ideas to help you think differently about engaging with your organization’s top leaders:
Is Your Organization Strategy-Fueled or Strategy-Starved? Part One
While some organizations are consistently high performing, the gross majority of firms operate in phases ranging from excitement and growth to malaise and meandering. If you are growing and changing, that is good, but the trick is how to sustain and even improve. If you are meandering or worse, declining, the challenge is how to break out of a challenging slide.
Over the course of the next few weeks or months, I am going to develop the concept and benefits of what I describe as Strategy-Fueled Leadership. Step one in the introduction of this externally aware, results-focused approach to leading, winning in the market and developing others, is recognizing whether your own leadership style and culture are adversely impacting your organization’s performance.
Seven Key Questions for the Ambitious Aspiring Leader
The Seven Key Questions for the Ambitious Aspiring Leader are powerful conversation starters to support a manager’s leadership development activities. They are not intended to be delivered in machine-gun style, but rather to be used in concert with an approach to helping individuals discover and explore the profession of leadership. Not everyone should lead, yet someone motivated by advancement might believe that leadership is the best or only way to achieve this goal. An effective mutual discovery process is the leader’s best friend in helping identify leadership talent and in helping individuals come to their own conclusion on whether leading is a good choice for their own careers.
Is it time to expect more from your Marketing function?
Too many top executives in B2B organizations still equate the function and value of marketing with marketing communications. While the field of marketing has advanced considerably in the last two decades, the view that marketing equals leads, tradeshows, press releases and a web site is still fairly commonplace in the B2B world. This narrow view of marketing leaves money on the table in terms of what organizations should be deriving from a properly conceived approach to marketing. It all starts with setting the right expectations.
Our future leaders are at your kitchen table.
We all probably remember our teachers telling us at some point early in grade school that we are the future leaders of our country. I remember hearing those words and thinking of what it would be like to hold national office or serve as a judge on a high court. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the teachers held a broad view of leadership, knowing full well that most of their students may never hold national office, but that they will almost all have a leadership role to play in their communities, churches, charitable organizations, and of course with their families.
Great leadership habits are formed in youth through observation and participation. The next time you sit down to dinner with your family, take the time to offer encouragement to your future leaders. You might just have a prospective President or Supreme Court Justice asking you to pass the mashed potatoes.
Leading the Generations-An Example of What Not to Do!
I attended the family holiday party this weekend and while munching on too many cheesy ryes and catching up on the lives of the out-of-town relatives, I was stopped in my tracks by the story of the job change that my Gen X second cousin described. It was a stark description of the gross mismanagement of the generations at a unique time in history when we have four very distinct generations in the work force.
Leadership in Marketing Communications-In Search of the Relentless Promoter
There are many good B2B Marketing Communications professionals and teams, but a few individuals and teams stand-apart from the crowd as great. The truly great communications professionals are what I describe as Relentless Promoters. These rare and gifted professionals are the lifeblood a strong marketing communications team, and are visible by their singular focus on developing and refining programs and strategies that drive action or create visibility with their target audience. Here are a few suggestions for marketing leaders on finding and developing these valuable professionals.
Leader, are you the problem with your team’s performance?
As a leader looking for ways to improve the performance of your team, it is important to spend some time examining the impact that you have on the working environment and productivity of your associates. Effective self-examination might just help identify some opportunities for your own development that will spur the performance of those around you.
Sales and Marketing-It’s time to improve your performance on the trade show floor
Hey, sales and marketing manager(s), have you evaluated your team’s trade show performance recently? If not, it’s time to get out and walk the floor, work the booth and listen and learn. In my own B2B experience, trade shows were important components of an overall program to build thought-leadership, strengthen industry and influencer relations, and […]
Is it time to rethink your strategy chessboard through lateral thinking?
"You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper." Edward De Bono I was preparing for a strategy program with a client recently and came across some notes on one of the more invigorating topics on creativity: lateral thinking. The term and concept of "lateral thinking" was coined and […]