The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Cultivating the Self-Confidence to Take Chances on You
"What I needed in my youth was the confidence to trust myself. The challenge of life is to foster confidence in one’s own judgment. What creates success isn’t merely being offered the chance to lead but having the courage to accept a challenge when it is presented."...
Cultivating the Self-Confidence to Take Chances on You
Part of deciding to lead is determining whether you care enough to want to create, build, or fix more than you fear criticism or failure.
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?
Free Mini-Course: How to Deal with 5 Difficult Characters
We all know these challenging characters. They’re present in every workplace. The question is, how do you deal with them and get your job done? In my free mini-course, I share 5 videos with ideas and approaches you can put to work immediately with your versions of these challenging characters.
Solving for Unproductive Workplace Conversations
How many conversations at work have you participated in or observed that went nowhere? Chances are, you can think of more than a few. The best workplace communicators understand these situations offer ripe opportunities to level-up discussion quality and improve outcomes. Here are ideas to help you do the same in your workplace:
Where Leaders Misfire on Culture and Strategy
There’s a loud ring of truth to the old saw: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” However, sometimes, the culture needs to evolve, or everyone is at risk of ending up hungry at lunchtime.