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
I always want it to rain on 9/11—personal reflections on the day the world changed
I always hope for rain on 9/11. Of the images and emotions seared into my mind from this day in 2001, the backdrop of that perfectly blue sky where we saw evil up close and felt the burn of tragedy and loss is something I can't shake. Clear blue skies amplify my...
I always want it to rain on 9/11—personal reflections on the day the world changed
I always hope for rain on 9/11. Of the images and emotions seared into my mind from this day, the backdrop of that perfectly blue sky where we saw evil up close and felt the burn of tragedy and loss is something I can’t shake. Clear blue skies amplify my emotions on subsequent anniversaries of that awful day.
Be Careful with Multi-Person Feedback—It’s Easy to Get it Wrong
Multi-person feedback is a tricky issue. Don’t let it trip you up and then stress the people around you. Here are some tips for getting it right:
How to Respond When Someone Violates Your Trust
I’m an advocate of leaders practicing Swift Trust in the workplace. Given that time-to-trust is an essential driver of time-to-performance on teams, the approach makes sense, yet it is not risk-free—it will backfire from time-to-time. Here are some approaches to help you recover when someone makes you question your decision to trust them:
Thinking Differently—It’s Time to Fire Up Your Firm’s Imagination
There are more than a few reasons your firm or industry won’t make it through the next decade. While you won’t derail or defuse the power of the many disruptive market forces swirling in our world, it’s the lack of imagination for harnessing these forces that may ultimately relegate your firm to the business history books. Ironically, imagination may be the most controllable and most important of the tools you need to survive and even thrive in this world.
Leadership Caffeine Podcast #26—Dr. Nick Morgan
In this fast-moving, far-ranging conversation with communications expert, Dr. Nick Morgan, we uncover and share the verbal and non-verbal behaviors of great communicators.
Leadership Caffeine™—In Celebration of Those Who Think and Act Differently
It takes courage, self-confidence, and a high degree of risk tolerance to challenge conventional wisdom in environments fueled by the relentless pursuit of perfecting the status quo. Here are three behaviors of individuals who think and act differently and succeed:
A Checklist and Process to Create Daily Success at Work
Here’s a simple checklist process I use (and recommend to my clients) to help ensure they avoid the all activity/no vector trap.
Stepping In to Lead a New Group? Try This Process to Grow Trust and Gain Performance
If you’re an executive or top manager staring at a new group you’ve been assigned to lead and concluding you’ve got a lineup that looks destined for last place, it’s time to take action. Of course, most of those actions involve the person staring back at you in the mirror. Here’s a process that will help:
Career Reinvention Journal—Why Some Succeed Where Others Fail
A good number of people I encounter, talk about doing something different in their careers. For those individuals who cultivate the courage to pursue career reinvention, there are stark differences in the thinking and behaviors between those who succeed and those who don’t. Here are my observations based on several years working with dozens of aspiring career reinventors.
Why Trickle-Down Strategy Approaches Leave Your Employees Thirsty
Unless you’re in a start-up or small business, it’s impossible to have everyone in the firm physically “in-the-room” for strategy sessions. However, using a strategy-as-a-continuous-process approach, it is possible and desirable to involve everyone in the work of strategy from ideation to execution. But first, you’ve got to re-plumb the trickle-down strategy process approach to something significantly more inclusive.