The Leadership Caffeine Blog
For Managers—Creating Clarity Via Your Coaching and Evaluation Discussions, Part 1
One of the frequent themes in my executive and emerging leader coaching and evaluation sessions and programs is confusion over how to create and sustain an effective coaching dialog with team members. This topic ranges from constructive feedback to career discussions...
For Managers—Creating Clarity Via Your Coaching and Evaluation Discussions, Part 1
One of the frequent themes in my executive and emerging leader coaching sessions and programs is confusion over how to create and sustain an effective coaching dialog with team members. My goal with this series of articles is to help managers at all levels gain clarity on the types of discussions while guiding them on a regular cadence and rhythm for engaging in these discussions.
For Managers—The Performance Potential of a Strong Feedback Culture
Imagine there was a tool at your disposal that would help reinforce in real-time the behaviors of group members that moved the performance numbers in the right direction. Or, a tool that would get people motivated to learn, grow, and leave behind less-than-ideal behaviors in favor of new approaches and continuous improvement. Wouldn’t this be helpful?
Well, there is. It’s called performance feedback. And sadly, it’s often missing-in-action, misapplied, or, applied inconsistently, and that’s just leaving money and morale on the table.
The Virtual Experiment—Guest Post by Dr. Nick Morgan
We have all become unwitting participants in a massive unregulated social experiment. For a little over a decade, we have forced ourselves to evolve from beings who communicate face-to-face, to beings who spend a significant portion of our work and personal lives communicating virtually. What’s to be done? There is no single cure. Instead, we need to learn a new language of emotion, one that begins to replace the human intent that’s left out of the virtual conversation.
Why We Hate Feedback—And How to Give and Get More of the Right Kind
Few of us relish being on the receiving end of constructive feedback. And many of us go out of our way to delay delivery of difficult feedback to colleagues or employees. To top it off, our brain is working against us on much of the processing around feedback. Yet, you can create incredible performance gains for yourself, your coworkers and your firm if you take control of your feedback universe. Here are eight ideas to help you get started:
Leadership Caffeine™—Lessons for Management Fixers
It’s a great vote of confidence when your boss picks you to lead the turnaround of a struggling team or function. You’re the management fixer, charged with figuring out what’s not working and how to fix it. And while this is a great career opportunity, there are a number of ways you can misfire in this role. This article offers 7 hard won ideas to help you make the best of a team or function turnaround opportunity.
The One Question that Might Free You to Find Your Encore Career
For many of us, the idea of an encore career is an appealing fantasy that never grows closer or more tangible. At least part of the problem for why we remain locked in place stems from our attempt to answer the wrong question. Try a simple reframe of the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” to open the floodgates of ideas essential to help us move from fantasy to reality. We have some great design thinkers to thank for this simple, powerful reframe.
Leadership Caffeine™—How Effective Leaders Use Reframing to Tackle Challenges
For individuals involved in the world of design and design thinking, reframing vexing problems is a standard part of the process. For the rest of us, a bit of design thinking focused on reframing is invaluable in our daily labors. Here are some ideas to help you jump-start your reframing activities in pursuit of better solutions in the workplace:
How to Regain Control When The Job Hits Overload
Almost every professional navigates periods of extreme busyness. However, when the workload turns into perpetual overload, motivation flies out the window and productivity and quality (not to mention enjoyment) disappear. In this article, we look at the primary causes of workplace overload and offer some ideas for you to regain control.
Leadership Caffeine™—Learn to Love Uncertainty
We spend a great deal of time in our organizations striving to reduce risk and uncertainty. For some tasks that’s possible, but for the big issues of strategies and market forces, it’s impossible to bend behaviors and responses to fit our scripts. Effective leaders understand they must build teams that recognize uncertainty as opportunity and live to excel in those moments.
I Want Your First-Time Managers (To Succeed)!
The work of developing new managers and setting them up to emerge as our future leaders is mission critical. I’ve devoted much of my career to this good work and am excited to launch First-Time Managers Academy—a new approach for this important cause.