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 tips: raise your questions-to-comments ratio
Questions are an effective leader's best friend. Tips to strengthen your questions-to-comments ratio.
Leadership Caffeine — 60-second tips: raise your questions-to-comments ratio
The weekly 60-second leadership tip from leadership caffeine. This episode’s focus is on strengthening your questions-to-comments ratio to strengthen your effectiveness.
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.
For Positive Change, Focus on Displaying Gratitude
There’s a growing body of research evidence—and a lot of commonsense—that suggests we benefit on many levels when we regularly display gratitude to the people who help us on our journeys. I checked, and the world can use the positive impact of more gratitude right about now.
Career Reinvention Journal—You Have More Options Than You Think
One of my favorite parts of helping experienced professionals identify their “next” in their careers is helping them open their minds to the many alternative paths available to them. Typically, we hold narrow views of our options and close our minds to paths that will challenge and change us.
Love the Role of Manager: Six Big Reasons
There’s a reason I devote on average one-day per working week to supporting the development of new managers in my practice. It’s important. And while I spend a good deal of time highlighting the challenges of the role, there are at least six big reasons why you might love this role.
Give Yourself Permission to Explore a Career Change
Whether you classify making a career shift as a fun fantasy or it just feels overwhelming, there’s a strong gravitational pull that keeps too many people in place, miserable in jobs and roles they’ve long since lost interest in or outgrown. However, this doesn’t have to be your fate.
4 Ideas to Help Improve First Time Manager Selection and Success
If you are either considering the move from contributor to a manager or you are responsible for developing new managers on your team, here are four actions you can take to improve your odds of success.
Our Early 2021 Professional and Career Development Programs
We create programs to help people achieve things they never thought possible in their careers. From first-time managers to senior executives, career reinventors, people navigating challenging conversations, or individuals working to level up, we strive to bring this purpose to life in everything we do.