The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Feeling Invisible at Work? It’s Time for Action
Bottom Line Up Front If you've been passed over for promotion opportunities or you find yourself relegated to less-than-strategic initiatives in your organization, that creeping sense of irrelevance you are feeling might be real. As the late Andy Grove offered, "Only...
Feeling Invisible at Work? It’s Time for Action
If you’ve been passed over for promotion opportunities or you find yourself relegated to less-than-strategic initiatives in your organization, that creeping sense of irrelevance you are feeling might be real. As the late Andy Grove offered, “Only the paranoid survive.” Let’s channel this paranoia into some focused actions to regain your relevance.
Career Reinvention is Never a Straight Line
There’s a process to reinventing your career. Unfortunately, for those who like things nice and tidy and linear, the process regularly involves pivoting and back-tracking plus the occasional unanticipated course correction. And while there’s no straight line or stage-gate process, the general flow of your career reinvention work eventually passes through these six steps.
The High Cost of Feedback Left Unspoken
I fret over feedback poorly provided. I also recognize that not all feedback is worth listening to—a great deal depends upon the source and the motivations of the feedback giver. However, I worry a great deal about the incredible and immeasurable cost of important feedback never given. As Deming suggests, this value is unknown and unknowable. And that worries me.
Effective Leaders Understand the Need to Create an Emotional Connection to Strategy
It’s no secret that top leaders and their management teams struggle with strategy. After all, choosing a direction, saying “no” to other opportunities and then creating a blueprint for organization-wide involvement is one of the most difficult challenges of organizational life. This challenge is made easier however, when leadership ensures all employees have the opportunity to internalize and develop an emotional connection to the strategy.
The Curious Case of Translating Curiosity into Action in Your Organization
I love curious managers, teams, and individuals. Curiosity is the stardust of creation in our organizations. And while the questions and the explorations and the discoveries are all fascinating, what we as organizational leaders have our sights set on, is realizing ideas that turn into changes that promote positive outcomes. Here are three ideas to help improve your ideas-to-outcomes results:
Proper Care and Feeding of Your First-Time Managers
There are few activities in your management career that offer the high return-on-time-invested (ROTI) than actively engaging and supporting your newly promoted first-time managers. Here are four essential activities to help guide your efforts
When Proposing Change, Try Reducing the Threat Level First
Good managers work hard at pushing fear out of the workplace. Yet, even in the healthiest of organizations, fear’s close cousin, anxiety, worms its way into our consciousness and governs how we process and react to the idea of change and each other. Skilled change leaders in the workplace understand this human reaction to new and different ideas and work hard to reduce the threat level when proposing something new.
Art of Managing—The Never Ending Fight for Your Firm’s Future
Great management teams are hungry to win in the moment and relentless at building for the future. It takes discipline and deliberate efforts to separate the here and now from an imagined but uncertain future—yet success over time demands this effort and discipline. Here are four big behaviors of management teams succeeding today while fighting hard for a great future:
The Communication Advice that Made My Career
We all receive advice during our career journeys. In my case, one piece of advice I received early in my career stuck with me and served as a constant reminder to the key to success. Here’s that advice along with my add-on based on over three decades of putting the guidance to great use.
Stop Talking and Start Drawing to Create Communication Clarity at Work
When you’re struggling to create clarity on an important topic or navigating a heated group discussion, it pays to stop talking and start drawing. This sudden shift in medium takes the negative energy out of discussion and focuses your audience on designing a way forward. Here are 7 tips to help you get to the whiteboard in pursuit of communication clarity: