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 — 60-second leadership tips: frame your day for success
Frame your day for success Who doesn't like starting and ending their day with that feeling that you accomplished something positive? In this inaugural video in my Leadership Caffeine—60 Second Leadership Tips series, I share a powerful, practical, and widely used...
Leadership Caffeine — 60-second leadership tips: frame your day for success
Who doesn’t like starting and ending their day with that feeling that you accomplished something positive? In one minute, learn a powerful, practical approach to framing your day for success!
Insights from the Latest Feedback Boot Camp
Every few months, I run a three-hour boot camp on strengthening your skills as a receiver and a giver of feedback. Here are the top ten insights from the recent cohort group.
Fresh Opportunities for Professional Growth (and a free resource)
There’s never been a better time to help yourself or your team members move from good-to-great and add the skills essential for success in what will be a still-challenging world filled with new opportunities. Here’s our Spring 2021 Professional Development Catalog:
Leadership Caffeine™—Six Steps to Help You Start Strong with Your New Team
The point in time when you step into a new leadership role is simultaneously exciting and uncomfortable. Your start-up as the new boss is the early-awkward phase for everyone involved. Here are six steps to help you start strong with your new team:
Help Aspiring Managers Explore and Experiment Before Leaping into the Role
Moving from contributor to manager is one of the most awkward transitions a person will undertake in their working life. It’s an unnatural act, where you take almost everything you know about success in your day job and push it over into the “Never Mind” column.Instead of perpetuating the “hope” approach to identifying and developing new managers, try my favorite question, “Why manage?” three times, backed by some exploration and experimentation.
Gray-Zone Leadership—A Powerful Formula for Career Success
It turns out, learning to spot and seize gray-zone opportunities is a spectacularly great way to get ahead in your career.
Ignore these Five Facts of Organizational Life at Your Peril
The “I” topic for influence comes up regularly in my emerging leader coaching calls. Individuals frustrated with their assignments or feeling as if they’re being bypassed for the best opportunities mostly share one common thread: they are under-invested in striving to grow their workplace influence. Here are five unavoidable facts of life that suggest influence development must be part of your work.
Career Reinvention Journal—Four Key Tips to Help You Start Strong with Your Career Pivot
Getting started with a career pivot is as challenging as getting started writing a book. Both seem like great ideas, and they’re the stuff of daydreams and momentary fantasies. For the aspiring book writer or career changer, these are intoxicating thoughts until reality sets in, and we realize how difficult this work is actually to start and ultimately complete.
Leadership Caffeine™—Here’s Where You Should Slow Down to Move Faster
It’s easy to swallow the dogma that has emerged around the “Cult of Speed” in our management thinking and teaching. Yet, the pursuit of speed in poorly designed systems exposes weaknesses and often precipitates project, strategy, and even organizational failure. Said simply, raw speed kills. Sometimes you have to tap the brakes and slow down to ultimately move faster.
Career Reinvention Journal—”It’s Exciting Taking Back Control of My Career”
It’s not easy to reinvent yourself in your career, and it’s not fast. However, if you don’t get started now, you’ll never get to your next adventure.