The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Four Ideas for Leaders to Get Back-To-Learning this Fall Season
Why I Love September for the Back-to-Learning Feeling It’s funny how the cycle of our earlier lives carries through into our later years. For my entire life, I’ve loved the back-to-school time of the year. I still focus my post-Labor-Day schedule on kicking off new...
Four Ideas for Leaders to Get Back-To-Learning this Fall Season
We need more time to adjust our altitude to see the big picture in our industry or peer over the horizon in search of trigger events that might change everything. Here are four ideas to help stimulate leader learning.
Challenging Conversations—Dealing with a Micromanaging Boss
Not all micromanagers are created equal. Some are a lot more vexing than others. If you’re unfortunate enough to fall under their purview for a while, instead of letting the frustration get to you, it pays to develop coping and navigation skills. Here are some ideas to help you finesse a difficult situation:
Career Reinvention Journal—When It’s Time To Do Something Else
For some individuals navigating the mid-career blahs involves taking on added job responsibilities or even changing positions within their firms. Others seek out new experiences by shifting firms or possibly taking on like-kind roles in new industries.While there’s work involved in all of those cases, the degree of difficulty is relatively low for job changers compared to the challenges faced by those I reference as career reinventors. For this latter group, the process of determining what to do is the first big challenge.
Two Critical Conversations that Can’t Go Unspoken in Our Organizations
Not talking about the right issues at the right time closes off access to an unknown series of potentially game-changing outcomes. It’s like closing the door on your future as a firm and your career as a manager.
Great Managers Make a Hard Job Look Easy—Here’s How
My favorite part of working with good managers is their seeming superpower to make their difficult jobs guiding and engaging with team members and stakeholders look easy. Here are 8 key behaviors I’ve observed in these managers:
Who’s Your Leadership Role Model?
In case you ever wondered if you were making a difference, know that someone is paying attention. The example you set today may very well steer the lives of the people around you for decades to come. Make your example count!
Six Areas Managers Must Focus On to Level-Up
While we spend most of our time commiserating over bad managers and thinking and writing about seemingly super-human leaders, it’s most often the quiet, hard-working managers operating below the top-levels who make our organizations go and grow.
Leadership Caffeine™—Show Them You’re Not a Machine
It turns out that successful, effective leadership is much more than a focus on results. Here are some valuable leadership lessons learned the hard way.
How to Keep Communication Quality High When Things Head in the Wrong Direction at Work
It’s not-surprisingly easy to engage with coworkers and project team member when things are going great. The real question is how do you keep communication quality high when the train rolls off the tracks and the you-know-what hits the fan?
Leadership Caffeine™—How Did I Affect You?
Great leaders understand a key indicator of their effectiveness is found in the answer to the question: How did I affect you?