The Leadership Caffeine Blog
FIve Big Ideas to Help Get New Manager Development Right
I'm opinionated on the challenges (and solutions) for new manager development. Here's why: Why I Care About New Manager Development so Passionately I know the potential of these individuals. As a corporate manager and then executive, I dedicated time and energy to...
FIve Big Ideas to Help Get New Manager Development Right
Managers are the individuals we need to create engagement, deliver quality results, and serve as critical enablers of change and adaptation in our world. And if Gallup. is even half right with their measures of disengagement and their pointing to managers as the cause, we’re failing at manager development. Here are five big ideas to help.
When Slowing Down Helps You Move Faster with Strategy
You’ll rarely meet a CEO or top executive suggesting, “What we need to do is slow down.” This counter-intuitive guidance in a world seemingly spinning faster-and-faster flies in the face of conventional thinking and practice, yet in matters of strategy, slowing down to move faster, is often the recipe for success
Leadership Caffeine™—Ten Essential Behaviors for Emerging Leaders
While some leadership behaviors are timeless, the context in which we lead is ever-changing. Here are ten leadership behaviors for emerging leaders in our era of volatility and uncertainty.
It’s Not Science Fiction—How an Idea Lab Might Just Create an Alternate Timeline for Your Firm
Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. Ideas are the engines of innovation, yet too often they are visible for just a flash of time. In reality, we need ways to curate and develop ideas. Try building an idea lab. All you need to get started is a few spare walls, some low-cost materials and some starter ideas! Just be careful, as you may very well change your firm’s future in the process.
How Integrative Thinking Promotes Innovative Problem-Solving
Integrative thinking is the process of using the tension from two conflicting approaches to a problem in pursuit of a new and innovative outcome. Instead of responding to competitive or strategic situations with the same approaches, try these 5 tools to identify new and superior approaches.
Career Reinvention May Save Your Health and Life
We all intuitively know a toxic workplace is bad for our health. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s latest book, Dying for a Paycheck, offers some data to back this claim. And while some may benefit from job change, others are motivated to reinvent their careers as part of saving their health and lives. This articles shares some of the insights gained in working with multiple career reinventors.
Your Open Door Policy Needs to Be Closed for Good
While the intent of the statement, “I’ve got an open door policy” is mostly positive, it’s naive and out of time and sync in a world where managers are accountable for closing the power gap between themselves and their group members. Get up and get out and narrow the power gap while doing some good.
Few Do-Overs in Leadership, Instead, Do-Different
Unfortunately, do-overs in leadership are rare. Instead, work on rebuilding your leadership foundation mid-flight by using these three big ideas with your team.
Harnessing the Benefits of Physical Transformation for Career Reinvention
There’s a well-known mind-body connection when it comes to exercise. The hard work of career reinvention is helped considerably when you commit to a parallel activity of physical transformation
It’s Manager and Leader—Developing the Whole Professional
There’s no doubt leadership development is important. However, top leaders in successful organizations understand they owe much of their success to great managers who make their firms go and grow. They also understand the connectivity between leader and manager and they focus on developing the whole professional.